Agenda item

Mr R Gill, Economic Strategy and Policy Manager, and Ms C Mckenzie, Greener Kent Manager,  were in attendance for this item.

1)         Mr Gill introduced a series of slides which set out the need for the KCC to assess the economic opportunities which could arise when addressing climate change issues.  He emphasised that the issue was being addressed by councils across the UK and Europe, and was fast changing.  He presented a drat report – Low Carbon Opportunities for Growth – which sets out a menu of potential actions that KCC could take, and invited further comments.

2)         Ms Mckenzie set out work which was progressing in the meantime, including:- measures to improve the take-up rate of grants available to improve the environmental performance of individual homes, working with partners such as district councils, the fire authority and supporting people; work to increase the use of renewable energy sources and the resource efficiency and competitiveness programme.

3)         Mr Gill and Ms Mckenzie responded to questions and comments raised by Members in discussion of the issue, as follows:-

a)         Members congratulated Mr Gill and his team on the work they had done, and on the clarity of the report; 

b)         timber which would otherwise go to landfill should be used as a renewable energy source, whenever and as far as was possible.  Kent was the second largest wooded county in the UK but did not make optimum use of this resource. Coppicing of woodland was not widely carried out as the resulting product was not considered economically viable.  Coppicing skills could be taught to a new generation, perhaps in an apprenticeship scheme;

c)         KCC was aiming to reduce the total annual energy bill of £20mill across its whole estate, and had invested £1mill in measures to improve energy efficiency. This investment had already yielded £1.1mill of savings so was already generating an encouraging return;

d)         Kent was the only local authority in the UK to have installed LED lights across its entire traffic light network;

e)         Regeneration and Economic Development should join with Environment, Highways and Waste in working on the Renewable Energy Select Committee topic review, as this would strengthen the KCC’s role on renewable energy and get optimum value from the Select Committee’s work.  The terms of reference of the review would need to be very clear and precise; 

f)          Kent had a large number of listed residential properties which would be difficult and expensive to convert to more efficient forms of fuel, but most free support to convert homes was geared to helping the most vulnerable homeowners rather than the oldest properties.  However, a bid for European funding sought to address the issue of updating historic properties;

g)         the committee should add questions about environmental sustainability measures to the questions it asks when visiting districts to look at their regeneration  priorities;

h)         Kent could gain much from looking at the examples of renewable energy sources employed by other authorities.  Canterbury City Council, for example, had an environmental policy which was applied across all their directorates; and

i)          Similarly, the UK could learn much from the experiences of other European countries (eg Austria, where there would be no question of what heating mechanism to install in a building, as the use of biomass was very well established).

4)          RESOLVED that the information in the report be noted, with thanks,  and that Members’ ideas and views on environmental opportunities for Kent, set out in paragraph 3) above, be taken into consideration.