To receive any announcements from the chair and general housekeeping matters.
Minutes:
The chair welcomed Andy Egan, the new Climate Change Lead for South Oxfordshire District Council (SODC). The chair addressed the committee:
“First and foremost, let me welcome Andy Egan to the Council. Andy is our new Climate Change Lead Officer. Amongst councillors, we have lost Simon Hewerdine from the Committee because he has resigned from Council, in a move to the Channel Islands.
Today, the Government has launched its scheme to support farmers for making environmental improvements to their land, in a post-Brexit world. Rather than subsidies paid out for the amount of land that a farm has, it will make Environmental Land Management payments (ELM). This is a welcome step forward, although perhaps too little and too slow.
Environmental management pays dividends. The restoration of a ghost-pond in Norfolk has disturbed the dormant seeds of the grass-poly. The grass-poly in bloom has delighted locals as the plant has not been seen in Norfolk for over a hundred years. Meanwhile in Exmoor, beavers have been re-introduced. They have set to work and built the first beaver-dam in Exmoor for 400 years. Let us bring success stories like this to South Oxfordshire.
The Government has also launched its 10-point plan for a green recovery, with much that is laudable in it. Unfortunately, a key decision to stop bringing gas to new homes by 2023 was removed from the plan post-hoc as being too onerous for developers.
We head towards the adoption vote for the Local Plan on December 10th. The extremely high number of homes will increase the housing here by over 50%, trashing the Green Belt. Our Executive has advised that should Council vote against adopting the plan, it is likely that a Commissioner would be appointed to take over all activities of Council. Councillors would be sacked.
As the targets are very high, our land supply will quickly fail (remember land supply does not mean supply of land, it means the number of homes that will be built). When we fail to meet targets, we lay ourselves open to speculative bids for more land. In anticipation of our new plan, developers have already offered to ‘help us out’ in meeting targets, with bids for more land around Didcot. Of course, all land covered with concrete is lost forever to nature restoration.
The Government’s Future Homes Standard which was meant to take effect in 2020, the same year that a belated consultation on it came out, languishes in some dusty corner of Whitehall. We continue to build new homes oozing out five tonnes (T) of carbon dioxide a year for their lifetime, and responsible for 50-100T just in their construction phase. Developers lobbied for the 2016 change to zero carbon building regulations to be stopped. Presumably they still play the same game.
The Government’s Green Grant scheme offering £5000-£10,000 to householders for insulation and renewables has failed to come up with the goods. The scheme was supposed to start on the 1st September. I wish to install an air sourced heat pump in our home. I had to get a quote from an installer and apply for a government voucher. Works cannot begin until I receive the voucher. I applied 3 weeks ago and nothing has come through. We anticipate a very cold winter with our broken boiler. At the time of application, our installer told us that government had failed to issue any vouchers at all, two and a half months into what was then a 6-month scheme. I do not know if this is so.
One of the problems with retrofit installations is that the boom and bust and short-term nature of government incentives since 2010 have put people, including myself, out of business. It will take years to build up the industry. We are hoping that OxLEP and South Oxfordshire can take a lead on this.”