Why the current Conservative West Berks Council administration is failing us on Energy and more

The latest budget is now set for 2022-2023 the press release is out.

The administration, as usual, rejected all suggested amendments. Justified by saying we don’t understand, or we are looking at that already. Anyone watching (and I’m not suggesting people should because they have lives ) will simply see pre-prepared positions as to why they are voting against rather than listening and thinking about what is presented. In other words, it’s done simply for political positioning. Not invented here thinking

My shadow portfolio is Environment and Public protection so I’m going to focus on just that.

I thought we had a cross-party agreement when we set the climate emergency declaration just after the 2019 election. The administration has made just 1.3% progress so far and offered nothing new this year that makes any real difference in terms of progress towards our target. The money is being set aside for the 10MW solar facility near grazely, an old idea that was given to them as a budget amendment in 2020, is by far their largest investment that makes an impact on CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, it deals with just 1/3 of the council’s emissions, not the districts.

Further suggestions have been made by myself to increase this Solar to 60MW and add storage (the original suggestion in 2020 FYI). Fingers crossed this happens. We also suggested last year, 2021, that we set up a management company so the council could control the costs of energy supplied from these generation facilities to the public rejected of course).

This year we brought forward an enhancement of that company idea to allow west Berkshire to begin to secure and control its energy at an even larger scale. We were specifically aiming at the non-council CO2 problem which when combined with transport forms the vast majority of what needs to be tackled.

We suggested an investigation only at this time to ensure we could do this without huge risk and to establish how the various solutions needed could be managed.

The vision that the Lib Dems have here is a company or joint venture partnership that would have a remit of managing many complex evolving parts that gives us a way out of the cost of fuel and environmental crisis we are now in. We often refer to SMATE (Save Money And The Environment) because to start with we can invest to save whilst dealing with our climate emergency. For reference the remit we suggested was. 1) To manage all generation capacity created and owned by West Berkshire. 2) To work with communities and individuals who have their own generation capacity (also to seed new projects via grants to further accelerate West Berkshire wide adoption). 3) To work with the National Grid and maybe larger energy providers to install energy storage capacity at the consumer side of transformers. This can flatten out demand peaks from the grid which ensures we are using clean energy as often as possible but also protects against excessive loads on the transformers and so secures supply locally. 4) To again work with communities and individuals who have installed smaller scale storage.

The net effect of this all is that we can share generation capacity where needed whilst storing excess clean energy and redistributing that when things like solar or wind are not there. It is complex, yes, but the good news is that the UK infrastructure Bank is looking for projects like this to lend money to (they have 22Billion to spend here). Cllr McKinnon (Finance Portfolio) complained he did not understand, but much of this year's amendment is simply an enhancement of previous proposals and we had shared all this information with officers before the budget meeting. Many of the ideas are shared with West Berkshire's Environmental Advisory Group (Chaired by Steve Ardagh-Walter) to promote cross-party collaboration on environmental matters. A Group that is only allowed to meet in secret for no obvious reason given what I've seen presented there. Odd that as members of the exec they don't talk to each other.

The other part of my portfolio is Public Protection and for several years now I have been fighting for the council to look at de-fibs as a project across the area. Some work has been successful here in that we have managed to kick off the investigation of this. My amendment this year was simply to set aside a small amount of capital to buy some units rather than just talk about it. To my surprise, Cllr Bridgeman spoke against this siting that we were already looking at this project. My amendment simply asked to fund units). He also said that we had well over 100 already (when I had said another 100 would go a long way to ensuring near-universal cover). Maybe he misheard me, but I created a map some time ago in conjunction with the NHS that not only showed where they were but the area they covered and when they were available. I’ve shared that link many times and it clearly shows the gaps I know exist. So why vote it down when lives are at stake and when it was a trivial amount in the overall budget?