This year’s Council Climate Action Scorecards involved thousands of hours of volunteer time, hundreds of FOI requests and a lot of scrolling through local authority websites. Now we’re excited to launch a brand new filtering tool that lets you unlock the value of all of this amazing new data: question pages. 

These individual pages allow anyone — from campaigners to council officers — to unlock the most interesting data from the Scorecards. You can now view a dedicated page for each question, which is itself a brand new and comprehensive dataset of local authority action. This will filter by type, rank all the councils from highest to lowest scoring, show the evidence for why councils scored point(s), and will tell you how many councils achieved each of the possible available marks.

Find these pages by clicking through from the question you’re interested in from any council’s page.

This allows anyone to:

• Get a sense of where best practice is happening in the country, by policy area
• Share examples of best practice, so that more councils can more easily access the policy solutions they need
• Evaluate trends in where local authority action is succeeding or stalling across the country.

Not sure where to start? Below, we’ve pulled out three really interesting brand new datasets. And, because these illustrate some of the gaps that we identified in our Fragmented Data report, we hope they’ll show just how useful this kind of nationwide picture would be if they were being published as standard.

3.1 Is the council’s area wide net zero target a strategic objective of the Local Plan?

Local Plans are the key piece of local authority policy that guide how a council will run its operations. We want to see climate action and net zero move beyond siloed ‘Climate plans’ and into day-to-day local planning. On Scorecards, councils scored the one available point for this question if the Local Plan included reaching net zero as a strategic objective, and if the council’s net zero target date is a) area wide and b) also found within the Plan. See this question page here.

Through volunteer research, we now know:

• 44 out of 186 single tier councils got full marks for this question.
• 31 out of 181 district councils got full marks for this question.
• 0 out of 24 county councils got full marks for this question.
• 0 out of 11 Northern Ireland councils got full marks for this question.

This is a great example of something you can ask your local council to do that doesn’t cost them any money, but will make a huge difference to day-to-day climate policy in your local area. Using the questions page, we can highlight councils of the same type that score well, in order to surface the evidence, allowing them to share it as best practice.  

In this case, you may wish to share Wakefield’s recent local plan with your council. 

4.3a Is the council reporting on its own greenhouse gas emissions?

Our Fragmented Data report details why we think it would be useful for central government to support local government in compulsory and collaborative reporting standards for local councils, especially on climate action. We can’t know the progress made and the progress yet to happen without better data – and the Scorecards project would certainly be a lot easier if we had more data published in more useful formats! See this question page here.

A council got a point on this question if it is reporting its own emissions and fulfils all of the following:

• the council states whether they are using the Environmental Reporting Guidelines from Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the GCoM Common Reporting Framework (CRF), the Greenhouse Gas Accounting Tool (from the LGA), the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities (Community Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventories) or for Corporate Standards to develop their inventory.
• the inventory covers a continuous period of 12 months, either a calendar year or a financial year
• there is data from 2019 and 2021 (or the financial year 2021/22)
• the council is measuring their own scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions

Thanks to hundreds of hours of volunteer time, we now know:

• 69 out of 186 single tier councils got full marks for this question.
• 48 out of 181 district councils got full marks for this question.
• 11 out of 24 county councils got full marks for this question.
• 1/11 Northern Ireland councils got full marks for this question.

We have lots more on why climate data is so essential, and the sorts of climate data we need, in this blog post. 

If you’d like to share best practice with your council, take a look at Westminster City Council. You may also want to encourage your council to participate in the CDP reporting programme, a brilliantly in-depth reporting framework that is used across the globe, and published in the open.

6.3 Has the council lobbied the government for climate action?

This is such an interesting question — the results of which have been uncovered through FOI  — because it gets at the often-obscured links between local and national climate action. Local authorities are undoubtedly limited in their ability to act by budgets and resources handed down by national government, but they too have a voice in asking national government to prioritise climate spending. See this question page here.

Councils got a point in this question if they:

•  sent a letter or had a meeting with national or devolved governments calling for the government to take further action, 
• or asked for councils to receive more funding, powers and climate resources to take climate action.

Through FOI requests sent via WhatDoTheyKnow, we know:

• 86 out of 186 single tier councils got full marks for this question.
• 59 out of 181 district councils got full marks for this question.
• 11 out of 24 county councils got full marks for this question.
• 5 out of 11 Northern Ireland councils got full marks for this question.

Across the board in this question, about half of councils have lobbied national government for climate action, with district councils lagging slightly behind. 

Once again, this is an example of an council action which requires no additional cost and very little resources. If you’d like to email your council to ask them to start lobbying national government, or to do more, you could point to the great example from Chorley Council.

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Image: RMHare (CC by-sa/4.0)