Guest Post: Local people lead the way to a Green New Deal

Local people lead the way to a Green New Deal

Guest post by Caroline Lucas*

It is 15 years since the ‘Green New Deal’ report, which I co-authored back in 2008, emerged from the rubble of the global financial crisis. It was clear to us back then that our ‘business as usual’ economic system – run from an unregulated and fossil fuel-powered City of London – was making us poorer and less safe, as well as driving ecological breakdown.

As the climate emergency has accelerated in the years since, the problems with this system are even clearer now. In just this past year, the Conservative government has overseen an underfunded and understaffed NHS, chronic food shortages, desperately failing bus services, and a swathe of climate policy rollbacks jeopardising our already weak net zero progress. More of the same centralised Whitehall thinking simply is not working.

A Green New Deal can free us from this doom loop. Many of its policies – a mass programme of home insulation to guarantee warm and comfortable homes; a rapid scaling up of affordable renewable energy; the provision of healthy and low-carbon food, and cheap and clean transport – not only provide long-term, socially-just solutions to the problems embedded in our system. They crucially command widespread popular support too.

The question is: how can we put those Green New Deal solutions into practice when central government will not? Perhaps this is where the long-time Green Party slogan, and guiding principle for many environmentalists, comes in: “think global, act local”.

Earlier this year, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Green New Deal, which I co-chair alongside the Labour MP Clive Lewis, sought to find best-practice local solutions – and understand the obstacles at a national level preventing us from scaling them up across the country. Our Report, Local Edge: An Enquiry into Climate Politics and the Economics of Recovery was published in February 2023.

Fortunately, I did not have to look far from home to find some of those solutions.

Food

Vic Borrill from the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, a local small-scale non-profit organisation, explained how partnerships between local food communities and local authorities can unlock access to land needed for urban growing. Town centres across the country could be repurposed in this way – but it will not always happen of its own accord. Central Government could turbo-charge the process nationwide by making urban growing a condition of development planning; offering business rate reductions to shops specialising in local food production; or extending grant eligibility to small scale, community agriculture.

Energy

Community renewable energy schemes like the Brighton & Hove Energy Services Co-operative show the Green New Deal at its most effective – not only providing lower-cost and lower-emission energy, but also keeping jobs throughout the supply chain within the local area. But the UK’s over-centralised approach to energy generation, storage and distribution – and prioritising of big generators over local ones – means these schemes are not being replicated across the country in the way that they should be.

Transport

No-one knows how to improve local transport better than local people. Since the 1980s, Bricycles in Brighton & Hove have been creating neighbourhoods that prioritise walking, wheeling and cycling via fully integrated cycling infrastructure. Their interactive map of the current cycling network of Brighton & Hove  highlights gaps in the city, and what routes would be needed in local plans to fully join up active travel in the city. But integration like this is the exception rather than the norm. The duty to deliver integrated and low-carbon public transport lies in the hands of local government across much of Europe, but it is stuck with national government here in the UK – allowing Porto in Portugal to build a full city-wide tram network in the time it took the same contractor in Nottingham to build one line.

Finance, Resources, Regulation . . .

Instead of locally-led, joined-up and socially just solutions being rolled out across the UK, they are being stifled. All the witnesses to our Green New Deal inquiry stressed that a lack of finance, resources, regulatory frameworks from national government were severely limiting their ability to drive change.

If national government does not get this right, it is not just the planet that will suffer – people will too. The IPPR Environmental Justice Report – which I co-authored in 2021 alongside Labour MP Hilary Benn and former Tory MP Laura Sandys – concluded that fairness and social justice need to be rooted in every element of the zero-carbon transition. That means bringing the public into joined-up decision-making through citizens’ assemblies, for example, rather than top-down government imposition. And it means ensuring policies cut energy bills, transport fares and food costs. A Green New Deal will involve people in the decisions, and help people to share the dividends – but only if national government sufficiently powers up communities to allow them to do so.

If we are going to meet our immediate climate targets and secure a fair and liveable future – with warm and comfortable homes, renewable and affordable local energy, healthy and low-carbon food, and cheap and clean transport – we urgently need to put Green New Deal policies into practice, with local people and communities at the forefront.

Brighton & Hove is already blazing a trail by harnessing skills and expertise across the city. But we desperately need national Government to provide communities with the finance and powers to help them scale up and thrive. Local people can lead the way – now it is time to let them.

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Caroline Lucas is MP for Brighton Pavilion

Perspective pieces are the responsibility of the authors, and do not commit Climate:Change in any way. Guest posts are published to explore issues or stimulate debate. Comments are welcome.