Broadly speaking, there are two great environmental challenges of our time – the global climate emergency caused by carbon emissions, and the need to reduce nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter emissions that contribute to poor health such as respiratory illness and heart disease. These challenges are interlinked and must be addressed with equal vigour.
Labour in Leicester set carbon and energy targets in the 1990s ahead of national government and is on track to meet or exceed these existing targets. However, new information led to Labour in Leicester recently declaring a climate emergency, because we recognise that without rapid and effective action by cities, the planet is in peril and billions of lives will be adversely impacted.
We pledge to be a carbon neutral city as soon as possible – as early as 2025 with the right support from government.
Labour in Leicester also recognises that emissions from transport, homes and workplaces can adversely impact the health of people in the city and shorten lives, disproportionately affecting poorer communities.
This chapter concentrates on how Labour in Leicester will lead on these two great environmental challenges through management of our buildings, homes, transport network, waste services, natural habitats and energy provision.
WHAT WE’VE ACHIEVED
In 2015, Labour in Leicester commited to:
- Improve air quality
- Establish an energy company
- Improve local energy infrastructure
- Explore local energy generation opportunities
- Provide comprehensive waste collection.
We have:
Reduced carbon
- Declared a climate emergency and in so doing resolved to respond positively to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest findings
- Reduced the city council’s carbon footprint, which is on target to be halved from 1990 levels by 2025
- Reduced the city-wide carbon footprint, which is on target to be halved by from 2008/9 levels by 2025.
Improved air quality
- Met, five years ahead of schedule, Leicester’s national target to achieve NO2 compliance
- Fitted 40% of the bus fleet with cleaner engines
- Four out of five of our air quality monitoring stations show improvement.
Managed waste
- Maintained bin collections as a weekly service
- Opened a new household waste and trade waste recycling facility, with re-use shop, at Gypsum Close
- Provided 35,000 bulky waste collections
- Diverted more than 220 tonnes of waste through our trade waste service
- Diverted more than 1,200 tonnes of waste a year into compost through our garden waste scheme
- Generated enough green energy to power 1,500 homes at our anaerobic digestion plant.
Natural habitats and trees
- Planted 57,000 trees since the 1980s
- Established woodland developments right across the city so that we now have more than 107 hectares of woodland – compared to 40 hectares in the 1980s
- Put in place more than 500 tree preservation orders
- Made Leicester City Council a signatory of the Woodland Trust’s Tree Charter
- Ensured that 16% of the city is covered by tree canopy – bettered only by Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol.
Energy
- Established a district heating scheme which cuts carbon by 15,400 co2 tonnes per year every year and provides low-cost, low-carbon energy to 3,000 council tenancies and major civic buildings
- Overseen major energy efficiency works across our housing estates, council buildings and street lighting, where our white lights project converted 15,000 streetlights to LED, cutting energy consumption by more than half
- Established our own energy company, Fosse Energy, which focuses on tackling fuel poverty with entirely renewable energy.
WHAT WE’LL DO
Labour in Leicester will:
- Deliver an action plan ensuring that Leicester quickly becomes a
carbon neutral city - Fight to maintain our weekly bin collection and increase green waste collections
- Work towards a circular economy for waste and resources in the city, encouraging re-use, recycling and waste minimisation
- Provide free drinking water in public spaces across the city to reduce
single use plastic usage - Extend Leicester’s tree canopy coverage, planting more than one tree for any lost
- Continue to convert council fleet vehicles to clean energy/low emissions
- Support the take up of low-emission/clean energy taxis
- Install solar panels on Haymarket and Newark St car parks and establish residential electric car charging points.
A Labour government would
- Introduce a new Clean Air Act
- Take energy back into public ownership to deliver renewable energy, affordability for consumers, and democratic control
- Offer homeowners interest-free loans to improve their properties
- Ban fracking and back emerging technologies such as carbon capture and storage
- Commit to renewable energy projects, including tidal lagoons, which can help create manufacturing and energy jobs as well as contributing to climate-change commitments.