It's bold to claim that one's county can be the greenest, but that is the status towards which Suffolk County Council is working. Mark Smulian investigates.
Suffolk's Greenest County initiative is one without specific targets, savings, milestones or even in the strict sense objectives. Rather it is an attempt to change the thinking of residents and the public, private and voluntary sectors so they take environmentally friendly actions appropriate to their situations, backed by the county council's expertise and resources but not directed by it.
The county is using its back office services joint venture Customer Services Direct with BT - which also includes Mid Suffolk District Council - as part of its green drive. BT is both a partner and a major local employer and the whole county can now tap into expertise that has seen it cut its carbon footprint by 60%.
Council leader Jeremy Pembroke says that when the current Conservative administration took over in 2005 "it struck me that geographically Suffolk was in a wonderful situation and I wondered if we were making the most of it. "Young people in particular are very keen on lower carbon and want their lives to be more green. I needed to respond to that, and I also happened to believe it myself."
He stresses the county council alone cannot make Suffolk green, and nor does it seek to control others' environmental action. "We aim to give encouragement to get more people involved, so our job is to enable but not to deliver," he says. "It would kill it stone dead if we did that."
Suffolk's geographical situation is a flat coastal county swept by winds that can be harnessed by the growing wind power industry. Scottish and Southern Energy is building Greater Gabbard, which it claims will be the world's largest offshore wind farm at 140 turbines, off Lowestoft, where the council has provided the 3,300sqm Orbis Energy building as a centre for renewable technology industries.
"I am very keen that Lowestoft, not Aberdeen, becomes the centre of the UK alternative energy industry," Councillor Pembroke says. "We are also looking at the whole question of use of tides and currents for power. That though is the big strategic picture, but we need to bring it much more down to homes and communities."
This is Greenest County's role. The county council is, for example, working with schools to install non-fossil fuel boilers, and Councillor Pembroke points proudly to the Beaumont School in Hadleigh, which generates its own power from a wind turbine. Suffolk also offers a £100,000 fund to which parish councils and communities groups can pitch carbon reduction ideas and receive grants to kick start local action. It is this approach of encouraging and supporting local initiatives, but not dictating them, that Councillor Pembroke thinks lies behind the substantial public enthusiasm stirred by Greenest County. This was shown by some 300 people attending this year's Greenest County conference addressed by solo round-the-world sailor Dame Ellen MacArthur, who is BT's sustainability champion.
Councillor Pembroke says: "That gives you an idea of how popular this is, and the great thing is although the county council sparked it off it's now been taken over by the wider community, which is exactly what I wanted." He points to Radio Suffolk 'Don't Be A Tosser' campaign - against the throwing of litter from cars
- as a contribution to Greenest County that owed nothing directly to the council but was inspired by its environmentalist ethos.
But the main thrust of the Greenest County is not specific campaigns but attempts to win young hearts and minds and so make future adults more environmentally conscious. "The whole process takes time and I don't think you're going to see suddenly the whole population give up their cars and jump on bicycles," Councillor Pembroke says. "But I'm noticing slowly at schools a tendency for children to walk or cycle. It's not huge but I detect this change, which would not have happened 10 years ago. You will not deliver overnight, but the culture starts to change if you get children thinking."
Andrew Bacon, BT's strategic development director for UK local government, says another example of this approach is a detectable change in children's eating habits. "Schools now encourage children to grow their own vegetables and salads and you can see the transformation in behaviour at lunchtime, when they will, miraculously, choose the salad they have grown whereas they would have ignored any other salad," he says. "Exposing young people to issues, and changing their state of mind, is not as difficult as it is with older generations, and if school activities convince one child you then convince a whole family. It's a very effective way of doing it."
BT's involvement in Greenest County came through the joint venture, and Mr Bacon says this means the company gives priority to Suffolk in developing and implementing its new ideas and concepts. "We are leveraging our own experience in reducing our carbon footprint by 60%, and we are now targeting 80%, so that experience is invaluable to other organisations."
The Suffolk public sector can, for example, have the benefit of BT's experience in reducing employee commuting. Mr Bacon explains: "There is a constant dialogue around travel substitution, with a focus on utilising physical property assets more efficiently, and to make that happen you need to enable people to work more flexibly, either locally or collaboratively.
"Very few people can work solely from home, so it requires a level of mobility, and often the IT infrastructure enables people to work in other public buildings the same as if they were in their own office. "We also encourage people to use video and audio conferencing rather than getting together for a meeting. The technology is not complicated, it is changing behaviours and working practices but that takes time."
Suffolk's modern Ipswich headquarters reflects this approach, Councillor Pembroke says: "This building has a large percentage of hot desks that are not permanently occupied." Across Customer Services Direct there is a ratio of around two staff to every desk.
The open nature of Greenest County has allowed other partners to become involved. Councillor Pembroke gives the example of highways maintenance contractor Carillion, which "dug up a road in Aldeburgh and normally would have gone to quarry in north midlands for new materials but instead recycled the stuff from the original road. "That saved 30,000 lorry miles and shows what can be done if you think differently. You could never come up with that by setting a target, but the guys on the project decided on it, which is exactly the culture we want to encourage with partners." Mr Bacon notes that Carillion and another partner, construction firm Balfour Beatty, have a better understanding of the green aspects of facilities management and buildings use than either BT or Suffolk, "and so we introduced them to Greenest County because we are broadly stuck with the buildings we have to for next 30 years and they represent 50% of carbon emissions, so obviously we want to get better use out of them".
One environmental issue under Suffolk's direct control is waste disposal, where it plans a switch from landfilling to an energy-from-waste plant. Despite the controversies that have dogged incineration elsewhere, Councillor Pembroke says there have been no objections from the 18 parishes in his division, and few from environmental organisations. "There is a realisation that we cannot go on sticking stuff in the ground," he says.
Being greener is not merely virtuous but can also create jobs. Mr Bacon explains: "We decided that investment in social enterprises to create jobs in environmental work stood a good chance of success. Because of Greenest County we have been able to rally round organisations and get a momentum to it across all three sectors, but no one ever sat down and said 'this is the budget, this is the project plan and this is the person leading the project'. "If you asked any one person they probably would not say they are managing it because it is moving faster than they could control anyway. It's a great example of what you can stimulate."
Greenest County shows what a world without conventional targets might be like. "You get to a stage where it goes beyond targets and it goes viral and organisations create their own," Mr Bacon says.
Councillor Pembroke concludes that any council emulating Suffolk must be prepared for a long haul and content not to try to control progress. "There is no quick fix and you will not discover something of Earth-shattering importance, it's a question of slowly changing culture starting with the children," he says. "Then people say 'yes, there has to be some sense in this, let's see what we could do'."
Suffolk's green revolution
C'llr – November2009