Suffolk County Council's Reform leader plans to axe climate emergency declaration
Cllr Michael Hadwen is expected to formally undo the declaration as early as next month
A council plans to axe its climate emergency declaration to save money – a move that has been criticised as ‘reverse virtue-signalling’.
Cllr Michael Hadwen, Suffolk County Council’s new Reform UK leader, is expected to formally undo the declaration as early as next month.
Meanwhile, a council-wide audit of all environmental projects will take place to cut waste, unnecessary costs and ‘superficial gesture schemes’.
He said: “What we’ve inherited is a catalogue of expensive, headline-grabbing environmental schemes that need to stand up to proper and rigorous scrutiny if they’re going to continue.
“Suffolk has fantastic landscapes, strong farming roots and outstanding local food – that’s our real environment, and I want to make sure we look after it properly and improve it where we can.”
The council’s projects will be expected to demonstrate clear benefits, practical outcomes and savings.
Any failing this test would be stopped with money reinvested elsewhere.
The leader said his administration had already found a way to save £175,000 by switching the council’s electricity tariff to a cheaper alternative without a ‘100 per cent premium’.
Cllr Richard Rout, whose Conservative Group declared the climate emergency when it was in power, said the tariff had already been due for review before Reform took over the authority.
According to him, the previous administration had already instructed officers to save money by going for an alternative with nuclear energy.
Do environmental projects save money?
According to the authority, a total of £14.7 million has been invested in decarbonisation programmes since the declaration in 2019.
Of this, the vast majority has come from Government grants and interest-free loans, with £3.8 million coming from the authority’s cash reserves.
The money has only ever been used on an ‘invest-to-save’ basis, meaning projects were already expected to deliver savings.
Data from the authority shows if energy prices had stayed constant since 2019, bills would now be £4.8 million higher without the projects, with the council shaving off nearly 8,000 tonnes of its CO2 emissions.
Cllr Rout said the move was an ’empty gesture that achieves nothing’ and ‘reverse virtue-signalling’.
He added: “There is no waste here for Reform to cut; the programme makes money for the taxpayer – removing the label doesn’t remove that fact; it just throws away the credit.”
More than 150 projects have been launched since declaring the climate emergency, including a street lighting replacement programme delivering an estimated £2.5 million in yearly savings.
Solar panels installed across the authority’s buildings and car parks are also estimated to save about £600,000 a year in energy costs.
Cllr Andrew Stringer, the leader of the Greens, said his group was ‘appalled’ at the decision and stressed the council’s finances would have been in trouble if not for the projects it launched.
“To simply announce there is no need for climate resilience to be on an emergency footing is anti-science and against experience,” he said.
“The council was making progress towards carbon neutrality and saving money doing it. This is a massive step backwards.”
The wider context
The announcement comes at the tail end of a heatwave that gave many in Suffolk a taste of what the summer months could bring.
But the hot weather has reignited conversations around water scarcity in the region, with Met Office data showing the county among several to have only seen a third of their average seasonal rainfall.
Helen Wakeham, the Environment Agency’s director of water, said the recent heatwave had seen significant peaks in demand for water, while river flows and reservoir levels fell.
She added: “No parts of England are currently in drought, but the risk increases the longer it remains hot and dry.”
The National Drought Group, of which Ms Wakeham is the chairwoman, is set to meet in the next few weeks to assess the impact of the recent heatwave.