Swindon Labour leader Jim Robbins considers environmental crisis

By Swindon Link - 1 December 2022

CommunityPolitics
  • Swindon Labour leader Jim Robbins

    Swindon Labour leader Jim Robbins

A column from Swindon Labour leader Jim Robbins.

Most councillors have spent time this month doing Carbon Literacy training.

It has been really interesting and pretty scary making sure that we understand the latest climate change science and its impact and trying to identify the ways that we can move to being a Net Zero Council, which we have committed to doing by 2030, and then making sure the whole town hits Net Zero targets as soon as possible after that.

Those of you following COP27 will have seen that countries across the world aren’t doing enough yet to stop the rise in average temperature that if unchecked will be catastrophic.

We are determined that Swindon will play its part and want to get ideas and advice from members of the public to make sure we move to a net zero environment in a measured and sensible way, creating jobs and making sure that we are not disadvantaging people on the journey.

We need to ensure that the town has the infrastructure in place to support people to make the change to electric cars.

We need to set ambitious targets for home builders to deliver solar panels, ground source heat pumps and electric car charging points for new developments, as well as expecting them to deliver safe cycle-to-school routes.

It will be trickier to try to retrofit the existing housing in the town, but we need to look at ways to do this to ensure we hit the target and some residents aren’t left behind.

The Labour group will be following the lead of ambitious Labour councils to find new ways to do this, such as following Manchester’s lead on using their procurement processes to prioritise carbon-efficient businesses and Lewisham’s lead of working with residents to invest in projects that have a steady payback over time.

When we take control, we’ll be working on ways to have residents feed in their ideas and plans for greening the town and we’ll work with residents to make them happen.

The powers of local authorities are limited so together with other LAs we will put pressure on central government to move much more quickly towards a sustainable economy.

We know that the town needs to have a more sustainable and reliable public transport network to encourage people onto buses, and it seems pointless to spend millions of pounds on a Bus Boulevard if we don’t have the efficient bus network to use it.

I hope that interested residents will use the Labour councillors’ social media accounts to make their views and ideas known to us or email me at [email protected] to let me know what you think!

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