Panel 2 | Leading Placed-Based Approaches to Realising Net Zero
Speakers: Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London | Kirsty MaCauley, Senior Clinical Programme Manager, Anchors & Sustainability Network, NHS England – London | Michelle Reeves, Senior Manager, Policy and Programmes, GLA & London Research & Policy Partnership | Liz Shutt, Programme Director, Insights North-East | Jecel Censoro, Net Zero Lead, Insights North-East
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We’re going to kick off with our next panel session and it’s all about partnership. It was interesting what one of our earlier speakers said that sometimes people think about what works in London, and actually what works everywhere else. The purpose of this is that we’re all coming together as a partnership in South London to look at the Net Zero challenge. There are other places not just around the country but around the capital that are thinking exactly the same things, just from slightly different perspectives, slightly different configurations of partnerships, and it’s all about how we learn from what other areas are doing. How we go on those journeys together. We are delighted to have the first all-female panel of this Summit. This is quite clearly not just going to be the best panel; it’s going to be the most productive in terms of outcome. If our panellists could introduce themselves starting with Michelle?
Michelle Reeves, Senior Manager, Policy and Programmes, Greater London Authority & London Research & Policy Partnership
Thanks Paul. I head up the GLA. For those of you don’t know, we lead on policy areas of strategic importance to London. We’ve been leading on levelling up, devolution, we help set up the London Recovery Board, which has now transitioned to the London Partnership. But we also engage in thought leadership and collaboration. That’s really what I want to talk most about today. I’m also co-founder of something called the London Research and Policy Partnership, or LRAPP for short which we founded two years ago. I’m co-founder alongside Professor Ben Rogers at the University of London. Really the impetus for it is to bring academic researchers together with policymakers in London Government, so GLA, London Councils’ and the Boroughs’ sub-regional partnerships, to really try and address London’s medium to long-term strategic challenges. We have a vision to develop an equitable, sustainable partnership, and a multi-sectoral partnership which involves not just researchers and policymakers but also the business community and civil society. We think that there are many opportunities where we can work together to have that real 360-degree holistic approach to a range of problems that the capital faces. In terms of Net Zero, we have recently submitted a proposal from a call from UKRI to establish a Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP), and we focused our bid on a three-year programme of work around just transition to Net Zero through retrofitting London’s homes.
Kirsty MaCauley, Senior Clinical Programme Manager, Anchors & Sustainability Network, NHS England – London
Afternoon, I’m the Senior Clinical Programme Manager for Sustainability and Net Zero at NHS England, London. I lead the greener NHS function for London, which is how we are going to get to a Net Zero healthcare system by 2040. And there’s quite a significant amount of transformation that needs to happen. We’re never going to do it on our own. So, a core function of what our team does is about convening and bringing together different networks, different partnerships, and different people, so that we can achieve this together.
Liz Shutt, Programme Director, Insights North-East
I’m Programme Director for Insights North-East, based up in the North East of England, in Newcastle, but also working with councils around the region. We’re a collaboration between Newcastle University and Northumbria University, North of Tyne Combined Authority, and Newcastle City Council, but also Newcastle and Northumbria NHS Trust. So, we’re working across quite a broad space. We won £2.8 million of Research England funding over a year ago, and we’ve got three years of funding assessed as a demonstrator. Our core purpose is about connecting policymakers to the huge amount of evidence that exists within our universities, but it’s not often readily used at a local level for a range of different reasons, which I’m sure you would all recognise.
We have two core objectives at Insights North East. The first one is to connect the policymaker to that evidence base, but specifically, to pull out from the evidence base actionable insights. We know our local policymakers don’t want to hear more about how bad the problem is, how long it’s been around, how it would only be better if Westminster would get their act together, we’re really focusing on where we have local drivers in the northeast to make a difference here. That’s especially interesting, given devolution and the expansion of devolution in our area, currently happening.
We have a second objective, which is about building capability and that’s really thinking about skills on both the policymaker and the researcher side to connect across the system, and that’s a core focus for our work. We are working across three themes, we’ve got Net Zero, my colleague, she’s our lead on Net Zero, but we’re also looking at inclusive growth, and health and well-being and we think where we can add most value is where there’s a cross cutting look across all of those. And we also have a cross cutting focus on data to support policymakers in that space.
Devolution is adding a new view to how we’re doing this work. We’re in start-up mode, but we’re also thinking ahead about how we work within that new environment, how we work with the seven local authorities coming together, but also how we work with policymakers more broadly, not just in local government and also within the NHS, within the integrated care boards, within community groups, within third sector bosses, because if you go back to what I was saying about where the local leaders are who make a difference, we’re attuned to that cross-system approach, and trying to make the opportunities across all of those organisations.
It is critical because a lot of the outcomes in the North East are not good. They’re not going in the right direction and they’ve been that way for decades. Whenever you look at this, we’ve got one of the worst levels of childhood poverty in the country, significant inequality around health and well-being and all of the other issues that many other regions around the country look at. We’re thinking about how we can use the headspace that we’re creating by bringing together a space for the evidence base to shift some of those trends. The last thing I’ll mention before we get into more detail about Net Zero is that we’ve built a model which is attuned to policymakers. All that we’re doing is trying to think about how you can create a space that can sit aside the common drivers in universities, which often means there’s a huge focus on research excellence, and research outputs, rather than stuff that’s accessible for policymakers.
We think that to be able to do something differently, you have to sit a bit aside from those drivers. You have to create a space between policy pragmatism and academic rigour, and we’re trying to hold that space in the middle. To make a clear offer for policymakers within that space, we’re thinking about rapid response, how we can help policymakers in short-term bidding opportunities, to tap into the existing evidence base, not always just going off and doing another project and producing more and more outputs that nobody’s got time to read. But I’m thinking about how we can cleverly play into that space. We are also doing deeper dive projects, and Jecel will speak to you about one that we’re doing on Net Zero. But then we’re also thinking about how we can use all of these insights we’re gathering to build a long-term cumulative understanding of what will really make a change in the North East for the long term. So that, in a nutshell, is what we’re up to in the North East.
Jecel Censoro, Net Zero Lead, Insights North-East
I’m the Lead for Net Zero.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
First question, Chair privilege. We’ve talked a lot today about the scale of Net Zero challenge, and it does come across as daunting, particularly when it’s backed up with some of the numbers that research that both South London and indeed pan London and UK-wide are talking in terms of skills gaps in terms of definitely energy infrastructure. I suppose just a few reflections on how your partnerships are leading on these issues on net zero. What have you done? What are you doing? What are you thinking of doing in the future? And what are the Net Zero challenges facing your particular regions? Or in Michelle’s case, to fix London?
Michelle Reeves, Senior Manager, Policy and Programmes, GLA & London Research & Policy Partnership
Most of our work in LRAPP has been focused around this local policy innovation partnership and I can’t say too much about it because we still have to be interviewed. I can talk about what we are aiming to do as a multi-sectoral sort of partnership. I think one of the sub-questions in the summit was about the role of anchor institutions, and I think we very much see ourselves as London’s strategic government as an anchor institution. And we have a role both as procurers, as an employer, and as a convener. Obviously, working closely with universities, they have a role as an educator. So, there are a number of different roles that we can play as an anchor. And obviously, when combined with the levers and the resources of other partners, we believe that we provide a really powerful force. And I think the biggest challenge that we have found in exploring this, retrofitted was not my policy specialism is just the scale of activity on the ground. But also, dare I say, the fragmentation of the ecosystem. There are so many people working, but it’s not amounting to a critical mass.
We feel that by bringing together the different sectors; universities, researchers, policymakers, civil society and businesses, we can do that knitting together and joining up and trying to reduce the opportunity costs we face because, as we’ve heard today, there are so many people doing so many initiatives and it’s really about trying to protect our power and our levers to maximise the impact we can make. And that was reflected in. So in terms of developing our bid, we held a number of sort of multi-stakeholder workshops, and then challenge workshops to really engage with the stakeholders, to co-design the programme work-streams that we were going to take forward. And I think that the overwhelming response from the stakeholders was that they really, really valued the opportunity to talk to other people in other sectors around the shared endeavour. Obviously, this is a really pressing endeavour, and the fact that they didn’t feel they had that many opportunities to do that, both to hear from other sector partners, private sector to the public sector, civil society have been brought around the table as an equal. And we think that that’s a really, powerful driver. But I think, at the same time, at the bottom of LRAPP is looking at the breadth and depth of expertise that resides in London’s higher education institutions that we’re just not tapping into. We’ve got 40 institutions, many of them world-leading, we’ve got very complex problems in London, and it’s a win win opportunity to bring those two sectors together, but also to really listen to the lived experiences of communities.
Our model of development is about equitability. It’s about bringing all those sectors together around the table with an equal voice at the table, it’s also about co-creation and really understanding the specificity of the particular challenges that have happened at the local level, but at the same time as strategic London Government, we have a role and a responsibility to look at solutions across the whole, across a range. London is a series of villages and localities, so we’ve got that bigger picture perspective, but we also need to hone in on the local specific problems and it’s about holding those two things in balance.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
Thanks for that, I’d just like to come to Kirsty, I think everybody will notice that perhaps over the last three to five years, the NHS and the health sector have significantly ramped up its engagement in terms of place. And obviously, one of the biggest challenges in place is Net Zero, so it’s great that we’ve got you on the panel because you can put across exactly what a hell of a challenge it is because you put in an awful lot of stuff and effort into this. I think perhaps it’s not as visible as it needs to be.
Kirsty MaCauley, Senior Clinical Programme Manager, Anchors & Sustainability Network, NHS England – London
I think we are putting a lot of effort into that. And I think we do that because we are responsible for quite a big chunk of the carbon footprint in this country. Our NHS carbon footprint is equivalent to that of Denmark. So, it’s pretty substantial. We do need to make a really big effort on that. It’s also incredibly difficult when there are a lot of competing priorities happening in the healthcare system at the moment, which I’m sure everyone in this room will have heard of over the last kind of couple of years.
There are some things that we are doing and working on. So, thinking about how we decarbonise our estate, how do we think about decarbonising and electrifying our fleet, buying better and taking on those principles of being an anchor institution, and supporting our workforce to make the right decisions? And I think we really, really need to move into a space where we’re working with our patients and our communities because a lot of the things that we can do to be a Net Zero organisation have co-benefits to health. We can be a more sustainable organisation and we can have a healthier population. And that is identifying those win-wins. How do we work with people so that they understand why we want to do this and how we can do it together? That’s really important. And I think we haven’t struck that right yet, about how we work together effectively and consistently. Where it does happen well, it happens at place, it happens out in the communities, it happens out in local GP practices, where people are working with local authorities. In the last year or so, we’ve been trying to work with teams in ICB’s to build stronger relationships with local authorities, specifically around travel and transport. We convene a London-wide network to develop sustainable travel, a big chunk of which is electrifying our fleet EV infrastructure. But the other part of that is how can we build healthy neighbourhoods, healthy places? How can we promote active travel cycle schemes and things like that? And so there are some really strong examples of Trusts pairing up with councils, so I can think of North Middlesex Hospital and Enfield really coming together to think about how they support staff to travel to work safely and actively because that is a concern for some of our staff when they’re travelling to and from. I think we recognise those barriers and try to overcome them, learning from others on the way I think.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
It’s great to see the health sector take that leadership role on this. I should have said in my introduction, by the way, we do have apologies from a COVID-stricken Dr. Peter O’Brien, who’s the Director of Yorkshire Universities. He sends his apologies and speaking as a proud Lancastrian, the Yorkshire’s cannot apologise enough. We will get Peter down for a future BIG South London event to talk about what they’re doing with Wypern and Yorkshire universities. Maybe I could turn to Jecel, your leading Insights North East Net Zero, so tell us what you’re up to.
Jecel Censoro, Net Zero Lead, Insights North-East
So the Net Zero theme of insights North East, as Liz mentioned, is really cross-cutting with other themes. But right now, the biggest thing that we’re really developing is the pathway to net zero. If you can imagine Paris Agreement or sustainable development goals, but regional level, what we’re trying to do here is really try to bring together different sectors. One is academia then also we have the business sector, the community groups, and some others were identified. So far, we had several consultations, we also had workshops about it. And really, what’s interesting is there’s more of like a call to collaborate more and to cooperate more because what happens is that everyone is working in silos. So right now, we’re working with seven local authorities in the northeast, but all of them have their own plans, have their own targets, same way with the businesses, everyone is doing things on their own. What’s emerging from this path to net zero is how we can collaborate and how we can actually, as you know we have limited resources. How do we pull all those resources together to help us achieve the Net Zero target? That’s one of the biggest things that we’re up to right now. And it’s still evolving. Stay tuned for what’s going to happen from there.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
Yeah, we’re all on a journey. And I think we’ll touch on various ways. It’s quite interesting, because particularly sometimes when we organise summits like this, events like this, we always have the criticism label that of where’s the voice of business in the room. We have strong representation from academia, we have strong representation from local and regional government, but where’s the voice of business? And obviously, collaborative partnerships with business and industry are critical to Net Zero transition, it doesn’t happen without them. From accelerating innovation and the uptake of perhaps more mature technologies to finding the new breakthrough discoveries that will make those leaps forward. I suppose if I stay with you Jecel, how is Insights North East approaching that kind of engagement with business? And what’s worked? What can we learn from what you’ve done? And how is it evolving over the forthcoming period,
Jecel Censoro, Net Zero Lead, Insights North-East
There’s a lot of promising things here because what INE is doing is really more bridging the evidence, to be able to influence policy. So, as it is, the universities within which INE collaborate with, mainly Newcastle, Northumbria and also Durham, we have a lot of collaborations with businesses. So, for example, we have a lot of academics who are sharing their research on how they’re actually, for example, support EV. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but one of the biggest battery factories is going to be in Blyth, which is in the northeast. So that’s a 95-hectare area where they’re going to develop full-scale battery manufacturing. The universities are highly involved. Then there’s also the Port of Tyne. There are a lot of researchers who are also involved in that, so there’s a decarbonisation strategy to make sure that all the fleet will hopefully be decarbonised totally by 2030. And then there’s Nissan, the factory of Nissan is in Sunderland, which is also getting in the northeast. So, there’s an additional investment of £9 billion to be able to add more EV manufacturing. So again, the universities are very involved in that as well as other stakeholders. And many, many more actually of this kind of innovations, which INE is also supporting as well, in the form of bringing together that expertise from the academics, learning from what is the need of the policymakers or right now we’re in the path to net zero. In the summit that we had last Monday, there’s more questions from businesses, how do we actually tap that expertise or the existing evidence from the universities to help us in the transition to Net Zero? The other bit local authorities now require all businesses to do a scope one, two, and some of the three, so that’s quite a hard requirement for the businesses. So, they are actually complaining about it, but also asking the universities, can you train us? Can you provide us with some support about it? So that’s emerging support that businesses are wanting from this university.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
I’m going to take Chair Privilege and take a straw poll, put your hand up if you’ve heard of or are aware of and understand Scopes 1, 2 and 3? Engaged audience. Michelle, bear in mind you can’t talk about the thing that you can’t talk about, because you don’t know whether it’s happening. Maybe just how is it the kind of help involved in developing an engaging business and engaging industry in joining and working with that partnership?
Michelle Reeves, Senior Manager, Policy and Programmes, GLA & London Research & Policy Partnership
I think one of the key tenants of setting up LRAPP was that we deliver very much an active partnership, and we take our work forward through demonstration projects rather than through writing reports. Obviously, as London Government, we are part of a big cross-national and cross-regional initiatives, which have been mentioned earlier today. So the Cities Commission for climate impacts, which essentially involves London council’s core cities, is working with the private sector to put investable propositions or retrofit propositions to that community. And I think what we see is, if we are successful with our Olympic bid, we are really looking at how we can add value to that. Certainly, what we’re trying to do is to identify, with partners, the key gaps in the ecosystems, whether that’s research or data or whether that’s actually just about brokerage and acting as a convenient platform. And so again, some of the things that we’re thinking about with the LPIP bit is that we will have a commissioning fund, so we can support discovery research and insight work. Also, in terms of more mature projects, we can support the scaling up of existing programmes. Obviously, there’s quite a bit of money if we were successful, but given the scale of the challenges mentioned, our project could only be a drop in the ocean. So, we feel that the most effective solution is actually to build on what’s already on the ground. And I think some of that is around, providing capacity to local authorities, obviously, they’ve suffered many years of austerity. It’s about capacity building, the local authorities. But again, when we’re looking at skills, one of the approaches that was fed back to us around how we develop the skills piece is around capacity building the education sector, because one of the big challenges in London is the lack of green skills, tutors, assessors, retrofit coordinators.
On the one hand, there was a sense that local authority officers who are working in this field, actually need the CPD to understand this emerging market, but at the same time, we need to build capacity in the education sector, because as many commentators have said already today, technologies are very fast evolving. One of the big challenges we face is that we don’t have a stable retrofit market and so businesses are reluctant to invest in it, because both their staff time, because they don’t know whether they’re going to get a return. And so some of the things we’re looking to do is, work with the FE colleges. We’ve got an educational budget, for things like boot camp funding and other funding to develop short courses for businesses because again, the big message from businesses is; that we haven’t got time to take time out of our day-to-day work. If we had short, sharp courses to bring us up to speed, then that’s going to be valuable, but also incentivising.
I was really interested in the business rates discount, but we do need to find ways of incentivising businesses and owner occupiers and landlords because it’s unfamiliar technology. And there isn’t the confidence in the market.
One last thing that’s actually really, really important, and again, comes from the borrower experience and we haven’t really talked about much; one of the overarching messages that we’ve got from the scope of work we’ve done with partners, is about the importance of community and citizen engagement. And that’s not just for, neighbourhoods or community retrofit initiatives. I think there’s a realisation that whatever retrofit initiatives that are developed will never scale. If you don’t actually engage directly with communities and develop those principles, develop frameworks and develop the infrastructure to engage them in deciding, how they want their net zero futures to look like, then we’re actually going to fail and that’s quite important. So we are going to be looking at that, alongside the business challenges as well, looking at different models that are going to be viable.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
Colleagues in the room will be pleased to know two things; one, SLP supported Michelle’s submission into the funder for the second stage, so we are in discussions with supporting colleagues from the GLA and UCL on that. The other thing is the announcement was made this morning that SLP has secured, on behalf of the boroughs, money from the Department for Energy Security, and Net Zero to look at Retrofit skills in South London. This is for investment into not just developing curriculum, but also looking at the demand side of this; the retrofit challenge, not just the supply side. If you go to the average plumber and try to get them to change their business model, they’re booked up for six months, they’ve got a backlog of cases. Transitioning to being a ground source engineer is not something that’s on their agenda, that’s a problem for the next owner of the business. So we have a lot of work and a lot of research to be done with universities, colleges and our partner boroughs on how we can simulate changes in consumer behaviour within that supply and demand balance.
The word you used there, Michelle was barriers and I think I’ll come to Kirsty on challenges and barriers to Net Zero transition within such a large, multi-layered organisation before I ask our North East colleagues to chip in on barrier identification. But what are the barriers that our NHS colleagues are facing in terms of working in this space?
Kirsty MaCauley, Senior Clinical Programme Manager, Anchors & Sustainability Network, NHS England – London
I think, like so many, there’s a long list. I’ll try and stick to a couple that feel most relevant for us right now. I think our organisations are working in an incredibly complex landscape and I think what we’ve noticed over the last few months is that there are constantly competing priorities. There’s a real need for us to align what we’re doing with what the local authorities are doing around the area for that hospital, and what their primary care team is doing in that area.
What are the wider things that we can do to simplify or synthesise the information that we’re bringing out to people, and where we can align our goals and our targets to be working together. That’s a really big piece of work, because there’s a lot of competing targets and different priorities. How we can bring that together to be working in Union towards something? There are skills that need to be developed and we don’t know necessarily what those skills are right away. But I think we are starting off with a really big capability-building programme moving into next year, where we hope to get lots of healthcare professionals trained up in identifying where carbon-intense hotspots might be in those clinical pathways. How can we start to think and do things differently there, so really up-skilling and enabling that community to take ownership?
We also really need leadership buy-in. We are also prioritising how we work with boards, and how we support boards to know what their role is in this agenda. How can we help them be responsible and sustainable leaders for what we’re doing? I think they’re the two things that we are really trying to work towards in London at the moment.
Facilitator: Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
Liz, and the Newcastle northeast experience?
Liz Shutt, Programme Director, Insights North-East
We’re working with the range of stakeholder dimensions to surface project ideas and Jecel has been working on developing that pipeline. I just wanted to come in on the point you made about senior management buy-in, because actually, what’s quite interesting is that a lot of the questions we’re getting across the themes are really based on that point. Based on the kind of questions around how can we demonstrate this as an investable proposition? How can we demonstrate, even though we all think this is a good thing to do that it makes good management sense, and actually one of our NHS partners has asked if we could look into the health and wellbeing benefits of investment in decarbonisation of healthcare. So we’re being asked to use the evidence to support those discussions at senior strategic level, which is quite interesting.
Jecel you might want to add some of the barriers you’ve come up against, in the discussions you’ve been having.
Jecel Censoro, Net Zero Lead, Insights North-East
We have actual research to identify the barriers that we have in the North East, some of them somehow resonate with what you have here in London. The finance, money is always a problem somehow. The resources, that is human resources, the retrofit, the skills, the people available to do the retrofitting, as well as the actual knowledge of doing the green jobs. The other bit is the money itself, the investment is there. When I was listening this morning about the investments being done on Net Zero and the opportunity here in London, I thought, wow, they have a lot of money because so far, we have £18 million for our Net Zero investments, or £2.6 million for the skills gap investments, so the contrast is quite obvious.
So that’s the struggle that we have in the North East and then there’s also that bit of the awareness. So a lot of the things that we’re seeing in that research is that people, at least in the Northeast, are not yet fully on board. What is Net Zero? Why do we have this? There’s a lot of behavioural change that needs to be done. And there’s a lot of resistance, for example, like this retrofitting, why do they have to retrofit their houses and invest in that when they could spend that money for their food. There’s that very basic thing that they need to prioritise before doing Net Zero.
This morning, we had a discussion that Net Zero seems a very elitist or exclusive word. Some people don’t really understand what that is. So it might need to go with the basic level of right, let’s go to the communities and also the businesses and the other sectors and really sell the idea of why we have to do Net Zero, then I think the other big part is more on the governance. Hopefully, with the upcoming combined authority for the North East, that will be solved like the silos, lack of coordination. As I mentioned, there are seven plans for the region. If there’s one coherent plan for the whole region that might solve that; barriers of coordination and linking, for example, an active transport route from north to south of the Northeast would be very helpful or just a transport route.
Facilitator: Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
I’m going to bring Michelle in on that as to whether we can combine authority on that.
Michelle Reeves, Senior Manager, Policy and Programmes, GLA & London Research & Policy Partnership
I think that the Mayor can,, they’ve got incredible convenient powers, soft powers really, in a way, and that ability to coordinate and join up disparate activity in a range of stakeholders. And I think that, certainly, our experience has been, because as a result of COVID, we developed the London recovery programme, and one of the huge successes of that has been a real genuine partnership, a model working with London councils and boroughs. If you had said maybe a few years ago, that there would be that sort of governance, that partnership approach, I think that would have been unheard of. But now it’s taken for granted. And I think, so that is a really important lever that a mayor or, you know, or a command authority, they can command that power. And that shouldn’t be on the estimated. One of the other things that we want to do as part of our work is about looking at data and how data can help us in terms of the scale. But also in terms of targeting retrofit, I think one of the uniquely London problems is that most of the retrofit that’s happened has been around social housing, but social housing only makes up 20% of the households in London, so we’re never going to crack the retrofit problem if we just focus on social housing. Also London’s got a much older stock than most other regions, and also a mixture of typologies of buildings and homes, and tenures and all of those differences create challenges. And we haven’t cracked it, there’s certainly some big initiatives now, there’s some joint work that’s been taken forward by the London council’s and the GLA to look at doing appraisals, investment in delivery models to identify what’s going to work well, where, and the idea of LRAPP and the LPIP is that we’re going to use examples from our international networks, also, across the regions to develop a community of practice so that we actually share information about which different types of models would work well. And then I think once we’ve got the experience of those models, we know that some of the boroughs in London, they have Vanguard projects, they have implemented retrofit, and they’re looking to some scale that we can then look at. And we’ve got some very, very, very clever, innovative, academics working with us to identify a basic deliverable model, what do we need to do now to make sure that it’s relevant and appropriate to the private rented sector, to owner-occupiers, but that also has to go hand in hand with the winning the hearts and minds piece. Retrofitting is going to be incredibly disruptive and costly and we need to be able to convince homeowners and landlords to make that investment or find ways in which we can incentivise that.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
I think we raise this response and literally single five minutes of the next session to go on this question and invite thoughts from the floor as well, the prize of net zero in my mind is not just a cleaner and greener society, but it’s also a more modern, more productive, more efficient and more prosperous economy. And that’s why we’re doing it. But how can we ensure that the benefits of Net Zero transition are shared equally across that society, and we deliver not just a sustainable outcome, but also a just and equitable one as well? Who fancies that one?
Liz Shutt, Programme Director, Insights North-East
We were thinking about this, because it’s really interesting, we’re a new organisation, we’re coming to a very crowded space. And each of the themes that we’re working on, and where we’re finding we can add value in that space is the fact that we’re working across health and well-being, we’re working across increasing growth, and we’re working across Net Zero. And so we are getting lots of questions that are looking at some of these things from different angles. Like for example, how do we support behavioural change in relation to active transport, recognition that there’s a strong crossover between the energy poverty issues on the one hand and the cross over to green economy that we’ve been discussing. And then there’s also that question that we’ve discussed in the previous session around just transitioning and access to green jobs. And I think one point I would add to the discussion that’s already taken place around that is that even within universities, this discussion is so disjointed, there’s a bunch of people that focus on research and innovation and getting funding, and there’s a bunch of people that focus on skills and education, and that isn’t joined up. And even beyond that, if we can join that up with the FE, if we can join up the research and innovation and with FE that’s how you’re really going to get that flow through with the future focus on what’s coming downstream. And I think that’s a huge missed opportunity within universities and beyond. I think that cost system work in that space is really important. I think the other point I would make in relation to the whole discussion we’ve been having is, the place based approach is clearly incredibly important and an understanding about the specifics of different types of housing and all the different specific challenges there are. But I do think there’s a danger with the whole race to net zero and this becoming a competitive space, you’ve heard from this panel, we’re from different parts of the country and different parts of London, there’s a lot of similar issues that we’re all facing, and then there’s a huge danger that we’ll be replicating efforts across the country and I think it’s really interesting with initiatives like Insights North East and the LPIP’s, these are really new organisations that are just getting going, but as we become more established, I think there needs to be an emphasis on how we share that learning across the country.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
If I can bring in Kirsty. If the benefits of Net Zero transition in terms of health and wellbeing are only reserved for white middle-aged men, how do we make sure that this isn’t just an equitable? When we look at, not just the process of tackling Climate Change but actually the benefits of having a greener, more prosperous, healthier society, how is that shared across all sections of society that will have to deal with our service providers if we don’t?
Kirsty MaCauley, Senior Clinical Programme Manager, Anchors & Sustainability Network, NHS England – London
Well, I think first and foremost, IF we get there, then we have a healthier population, everyone is healthier. And if everyone is healthier, and our organisation at the same time is also running more likely to be more effective, it’s going to be more sustainable. That will be helpful for everyone. Okay, so if we can get there, then it will be beneficial. It will be an equitable health service and it will be easier to access for all people.
There are other barriers in accessing health care that go beyond this panel discussion. But I think that’s what is driving us mostly in healthcare. And we have experience of introducing initiatives, only last year, I can think about salary sacrifice schemes as one of these, we really wanted to incentivize people to have electric cars and what we ended up doing was putting our poorest paid workforce in a position where they could afford no car, because they could only afford a car that wasn’t electric because of that price difference. And I think we are learning and I think how we go down the journey, we’re going to keep having to learn, I think sharing that across the country, is a really important point, because we needed to be able to share that with other people, once we discovered that and we do need to ensure that things that we are doing aren’t going to be having a disproportionate effect on those, especially in London, where we have such a diverse mix of people living there. It needs to be relevant for everyone, but I cannot stress enough that if we get there, it will be more equitable, it will be easier to access, it will be more sustainable.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
I’ll bring in Michelle because obviously, that’s the London challenge in a nutshell. Turn left deprivation, turn right millionaires. That is the London challenge of Net Zero.
Michelle Reeves, Senior Manager, Policy and Programmes, GLA & London Research & Policy Partnership
Absolutely and I think that’s why we’ve put just transition at the heart of our programme of work. As Kirsty says, it’s not just about health inequalities, but it is the deprived and vulnerable communities who are facing the housing crisis, unfit living conditions, the cost of living crisis. What we want to do through this programme is to look at addressing energy efficiency and sustainability of homes. There’s a real opportunity to create new, good jobs that pay decent wages. To upskill and reskill London is one of the focuses that we want to take in our bid as well as to look, in particular, at disabled and BAME entrepreneurs and how we can support them and their supporting organisations to enable them to access retrofit supply chains. It’s about understanding the specific barriers of those different communities or those different users and then developing tailored retrofit responses. It’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all.
Paul Kirkbright, Head of Partnerships, SLP & BIG South London
Thank you. The facilitator in me wants to open this up to the floor and talk about this for another 45 minutes; the convener in me is looking at my watch going, I’ve nicked five minutes off myself, I don’t think I can open it to the floor. I think if I understood correctly, all of our panellists are sticking around for at least some of the reception that follows the closure of the summit, and I’m sure you’d be more than happy to pick up discussions.
Michelle, best of luck with what we cannot talk about, I hope it works out. We’re here to support and be part of that.
Kirsty, I think it’s great that we’ve made those links into the health sector and we hope with your colleagues will do that as well. And we look forward to hearing more about the Insights North East journey, about how your work programme develops and what we can learn from the experience of partners in Newcastle and the northeast.
Ladies and Gentlemen on your behalf can I thank all the panellists for their time. It really shows that we are not alone in this journey. All the places and other people are thinking about this stuff. And let’s not never fall into the trap of saying the London solution is THE solution. I think we can learn, I think we can engage and I think it’s beholden on all of us, to really make those networks work.
If you could show your appreciation in the usual way.
We’re just going to take a very brief two minute comfort break while we reset into our second keynote with Dr.Joe Marshall, chief executive at NCUP.
Thank you panellists.
