Apologies to Cllr McKeown for pronouncing his name wrongly in this video! Here’s a better pronunciation. 

The Council Climate Action Scorecards is a joint project between mySociety and Climate Emergency UK.

Annie from Climate Emergency UK chatted to Cllr Mike McKeown, Cabinet Lead for Climate Change and Sustainability at Cotswold District Council, about how they’ve used the Scorecards to improve their climate action — and some of the barriers they still face from a national level in delivering Net Zero. 

How does AI know so much?

We always begin by asking how people first come across our sites, and the answers are rarely surprising: through word of mouth, via the events we do, et cetera. But Councillor McKeown’s answer was a new one on us:

“I first discovered the Scorecards via Chat GPT. I use AI a lot in my day job and when I was elected a councillor in May 2023, I asked Chat GPT for an assessment of my councils’ climate action. It came back with quite a detailed answer, so I asked it where it got this information from, and it explained that this information was found from the Council Climate Action Scorecards site.”

Good to know the robots are on board! But no matter how people find the Scorecards, the result is the same: a rich source of useful and applicable data.    

Looking inwards and outwards

“I’ve used the Scorecards in two main ways,” explains Councillor McKeown. “Firstly, to create pressure for, and focus on, our work on climate action. I presented the Scorecards at a council cabinet meeting and showed how our results compared across other councils in Gloucestershire. This was a useful level set for our council to see where we actually sat and how we could improve. 

“It is helpful to be able to point to an independent assessment of our council’s climate action, and use the ranking that the Scorecards give us as a way to push for further actions in areas where we didn’t do so well. 

“I know myself and some of the councillors were surprised when the Scorecards came out that we didn’t have a higher score. And this reaction has been used to drive our work to ensure that our score will improve for the next Scorecards. We’ve used the Scorecards at a senior management level to see a general oversight of where we’re at, as well as at a micro level, to understand specific project work with staff.” 

A framework for action

How does the council keep track of work at every level?

“We’ve set up a Climate Board as a way to review and monitor it. I brought it in after participating in the Climate Leadership Academy by UK100, who recommend a Climate Board within councils. It’s basically a series of regular meetings with senior officers from across the council. 

“One of the resources we used to review our climate work is the Scorecards. We use them as a framework to see what our current answers are and what we need to do to improve. We also plan to use the Scorecards going forward to monitor our progress.”

Real life results

Have there been any positive impacts yet?

“Yes – I’d like to share a climate project of ours which links directly to one of the Scorecards questions. We’ve secured funding from the South West Net Zero Hub to employ a retrofit officer. They’re going to be going out into the community to talk to residents and work with them to understand what retrofit is and encourage them to take the next steps to make a difference to their homes. 

“We’re also part of a partnership with all other district councils in Gloucestershire and other public sector organisations, called Climate Leadership Gloucestershire. As part of this, we have launched the retrofit centre. 

“This is a website that provides advice to residents on how to retrofit their homes. They can either use the site to create their own retrofit plan through the website portal, or they can reach out to be connected with a person who can come and do an assessment of their home in person. The site also includes a list of trusted suppliers for different aspects of home retrofit work.” 

The solution for a more effective transition

Councillor McKeown then went on to explain some of the barriers to council climate action and suggested a solution. 

“For so much of our work, the biggest barrier is resource rather than money. Often we don’t have the people able to deliver the work — so funding that doesn’t include the budget to cover additional staff to deliver the work isn’t as helpful. 

“For example, we’re seeing if we can extend the deadline by which we have to spend some funding from the Department of Transport on installing EV chargers. Many of the car parks in our area have national monument status — lots of Roman ruins! — so they require additional planning permission which takes time to secure. We do want to install the EV chargers and we’re sure the Department of Transport won’t want the money back, but we need more time to actually install them. 

“This is just one example of why a fully funded statutory duty would be so helpful for councils to more effectively deliver Net Zero. Currently, so much of what councils do for Net Zero is as a result of goodwill: it is beyond our statutory duty and we do it because we and our residents care.”

Many thanks to Councillor McKeown for sharing his experiences. 

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Image: Diliff (CC by/3.0)

Bracknell Forest Council don’t just comply with the Council Climate Action Scorecards marking — they proactively publish all the relevant information on their website.

Climate Emergency UK’s assessment of all UK councils on the actions they’ve taken towards net zero is a complex process that involves seeking the required evidence from each council. As you can imagine, when we discovered that Bracknell Forest had put it all in one place ready for the marking process, we were very impressed. 

We spoke to Will Barnes, Climate Change Officer, to find out more. How did the council first come across the Scorecards?

“Originally, it was one of our councillors who brought them to the attention of council officers. With climate change being a top priority for the council, both councillors and officers have gone on to take a particular interest in the Scorecards methodology and results.”

As Will continues, he confirms our belief that the Scorecards are not just a useful tool for the public: they also provide an invaluable service for councils themselves.

“We now use the Scorecards as one way of having our climate action independently and externally assessed. 

“We use it as a way of marking our progress on tackling climate change as a council, and benchmarking ourselves against how other single tier councils are doing, and what they are doing too. 

“To support this process, we have been centralising answers and evidence on the council website to assist the scorecard markers and to make this information available to the public too.”

We are so impressed to hear this, on many levels. Of course, we’re very grateful that the work of assessing the council has been made easier; but we also admire the transparency with which Bracknell Forest has approached the project, for the benefit of the public.

We’ve heard how the Scorecards help the council and the general public. There’s one more person benefitting — Will himself.

“Having started in my role as Climate Change Officer four months ago, I’ve found that the Scorecards have helped me to understand the climate action already taking place across all corners of the council. 

“They’ve also helped me to identify potential opportunities for further projects which we could implement in support of our ambition to be net zero by as close to 2030 as possible.

The climate change team work to embed and promote sustainable practices and initiatives across the council, and the Scorecards have provided us with ideas for action and have supported us to put projects forward to various teams for consideration. 

“In doing so, they’ve played a part in the progress that has been made on a range of projects since the 2023 Scorecards. For instance, we now have a social value policy in place that aligns procurement and contracting activity with our commitment to address the climate emergency and achieve net-zero carbon emissions. 

“One of the workstreams of our new business change project is focused on delivering carbon awareness training across council teams, and the Public Protection Partnership (PPP) have developed a project plan to enforce the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES) for privately rented domestic properties in the borough. 

“Projects like these will help us to achieve our ambitions of tackling climate change and reducing emissions in Bracknell Forest.”

That’s great — thanks very much to Will for sharing his experiences. We don’t think we’ve come across any other councils proactively publishing their evidence like this before, but as we hope this case study shows, it’s beneficial all round. Perhaps others will follow where Bracknell Forest leads. We hope so!

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Image: Alan Hunt (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Prefer to watch this post as a video? Scroll down to the end.

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The Council Climate Action Scorecards are compiled by a cohort of volunteers, trained up by Climate Emergency UK. They’re currently recruiting for the next round of marking, so if that sounds like something you’d like to be involved with, check out the details here.

The knowledge that volunteers acquire isn’t just applicable to the Scorecards: it upskills them for life, empowering them to apply their knowledge to informed climate action. In that way, the benefits of the Scorecards project are more longlasting, and spread further than we might have expected!

Fiona Dyer was part of the volunteer cohort of 2023, and she shared her journey from climate-concerned to climate-informed. Her story can inspire us all — especially those who may be feeling powerless or hopeless in the face of the climate crisis.

Fiona explains: “At the start of the COVID pandemic I had to retire early from the NHS to look after my mum. I had more time to read, and the more I read, the more concerned I felt about the impact global heating and biodiversity loss was going to have on my children’s future. Across the world people were already suffering. 

“I heard about the CE UK Scorecards project from a friend, and decided volunteering would be something positive I could do that I could fit around my other commitments. I doubted whether my computing skills would be adequate, but the CE UK team was friendly and supportive, and we volunteers learnt from each other via a chat forum. 

“Reading through councils’ climate action plans to find information was challenging at times, but it also gave me a good understanding of the scope, powers and potential influence councils have to help communities mitigate and adapt to the challenges that lie ahead.” 

So, that’s where it started — but it’s certainly not where it ended! Fiona goes on to tell us how she could bring that acquired knowledge to a whole new arena.

“I went on to join Climate Action Durham (CAD), and learned that they’d held a Citizens’ Forum on Climate Action the year before, in collaboration with Durham County Council. 

“I suggested we used the Scorecards at the next forum, as up to date, publicly available research that would give us a better understanding of the breadth of topics councils should be addressing, as well as performance data. 

“It was agreed that by using the Scorecards we could more easily assess the council’s climate response plan: its strengths and weaknesses, how it compared with similar and neighbouring councils and how we could gauge improvement over time. 

“The citizens’ forum was held in the autumn, timed to be just after the publication of the Scorecards. As we had already established a ‘critical friend’ type relationship with the council, it was agreed that the introduction to the forum would be given by myself, alongside the council’s Neighbourhoods and Climate Change Corporate Director. 

“My presentation was a combination of some of the council’s own slides and slides I created using Scorecards data, chosen to highlight issues that would help focus discussion in the work groups that followed. 

“I would not have had the confidence to do this without my experience of being a Scorecards volunteer, as I have no previous experience in this area. It was also an opportunity for me to champion the broader agenda of increasing local democracy. “

That’s the increased confidence that knowledge can bring. And then, as Fiona explains, the event itself was enriched and informed by the Scorecards data.

“The Citizens’ Forum on Climate Action was open to anyone who wanted to attend. People were asked to choose the work group they wanted to be part of in advance: these broadly aligned with the Scorecard categories and they were given the link to the Scorecards website. 

“The questions and scores in each of the Scorecards categories enabled us to be more effective in scrutinising the council’s performance. 

“The council said they welcomed CAD’s involvement in consulting the public on its climate plans and being held to account in a constructive way.”

And from this one day emerged some longterm outcomes:

“The feedback from the forum work groups was written up in detail as a report, including nine specific recommendations. Where possible I used my Scorecards knowledge to cite examples of good practice by other councils for each recommendation, these were included as footnote references. 

“For example, Bristol use an Eco Impact Checklist that is applied to all their new projects. This report was shared with the council and made available to the public via the CAD website. 

“CAD members who facilitated the groups in the forum have continued to work with the relevant councillors, to varying degrees, as the next iteration of their climate plan is being developed. We will see how many of the recommendations are included in the new plan when it is published later this year. 

“As a group we intend to continue supporting, lobbying and campaigning where it is needed. We have just set up Durham Climate Hub, part of a national network of climate emergency centres and are continuing to work with the council’s community engagement officer. In the run up to this year’s forum we plan to hold sessions in the Hub on some of the forum themes to increase interest and participation from a broader section of the public. 

“I have suggested CE UKs training to various other groups, one of which I have co-hosted with CE UK using my local knowledge. It feels good to be playing my part in raising awareness of the challenges we face and working creatively with other people to improve local resilience, not forgetting the bigger picture and fundamental need for system change.”

Fiona’s account is a phenomenal example of how citizens can work together with their local councils to understand, oversee and encourage better climate action. It shows how the Scorecards training has a ripple effect that is tangible and longlasting. 

Big thanks to Fiona for sharing her experience — we hope it will inspire others who are looking for a way to take practical and productive action on climate issues.

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Image: David Ross

Canada differs from the UK in many ways: obviously it’s vastly bigger, extending across many more latitudes; its climate, nature and terrains vary hugely; its cities are more dispersed and diverse — and accordingly, the challenges the two countries face around tackling the climate emergency are different, too. 

But there are some significant ways in which we are alike, too, as we learned when we chatted with Hannah Muhajarine, National Campaign Manager at the Climate Reality Project Canada. 

Climate Reality, like mySociety and Climate Emergency UK, have identified local councils — or municipal governments as they’re called in Canada — as crucial contributors to our respective countries’ decarbonisation. Both sides run projects that monitor the climate action of these authorities, helping citizens to keep an eye on their progress.

“Scorecards helped us reimagine both our content and project design.”

Hannah first heard about the Council Climate Action Scorecards on the Local Zero podcast, and immediately saw the parallels between our two projects. Not only that — she understood that Climate Reality could learn from our project, adopting some of the Scorecards’ approaches. 

We were keen to hear how the Scorecards have encouraged Climate Reality to enrich and broaden their own work in monitoring climate action at the local level. So, first of all, what is Climate Reality?

“We’re the Canadian branch of The Climate Reality Project, which is an international climate organisation,” explained Hannah.”We work by training citizens on climate advocacy, education, and communication.  

“This includes supporting a network of Community Climate Hubs across Canada, which mobilise citizens to get involved in local climate advocacy targeting city and town councils. 

“These grassroots groups get involved in a variety of projects, including making sure that climate is a priority during municipal elections and budget-setting; participating in public consultations relating to climate; campaigning to get their council to declare a climate emergency; organising campaigns; hosting community-facing public events on climate, and more.”

All good stuff, but a lot more hands-on advocacy than we’ve been doing over here. So, where are the links with the Scorecards project?

“To support the Hubs and their local advocacy work, since 2018 Climate Reality has led a project called the National Climate League (NCL), where we trained volunteers to collect data every year on a set of climate-related indicators measuring climate progress at the local level across Canada”.

Ah yes, the overlaps certainly begin to become obvious — in fact, that’s exactly what Climate Emergency UK did for the UK Scorecards. So, what sort of data were Climate Reality collecting?

“For example, the number of Passive Certified buildings within municipal limits, the number of transit trips per year, household waste per year… we also tracked a smaller number of policies, like climate plans and climate targets, adaptation plans, green building policies and so on.”

And, like the Scorecards, all this information was a useful way of letting the public know how their local government was getting on: “Climate Reality staff would pull together the volunteer-collected data each year and publish it in a report, with data visualisations comparing municipalities across the range of indicators, the results of our policy scan, and case studies of top-performing municipalities.”

“Learning about the Scorecards provided a great inspiration, and a specific model for us to work towards.”

Hannah goes on, “In the spring of 2023, we’d just launched the fifth edition. We were interested in re-evaluating the design of the project, and especially expanding the policy aspect.”

This was great timing: “It was around then that I heard about the Scorecards on an episode of the Local Zero podcast. I was really excited, since the project had many parallels to ours, but featured more detailed and extensive criteria — plus it was a bit larger scale in terms of volunteer participants and the number of councils covered, and it used the scoring method to compare councils with one another, which we hadn’t previously considered.”

What great synchronicity. So, what changes did Climate Reality make, inspired by the Scorecards?

Hannah explains, “Scorecards helped us reimagine both our content and project design. For example, we introduced more extensive and in-depth training for volunteers. Inspired by the way that Climate Emergency UK work, we identified volunteers with key skills, and harnessed them to help with data verification. 

You also influenced us to add questions around retrofit programmes, support for low-income homeowners and rental housing; renewable energy targets; and community climate action funding.”

And so, what were the outcomes of these changes?

“We were able to recruit 51 volunteers to participate in data collection this year, and collect data for 53 municipalities across Canada, which is a great expansion on the project compared to last year.

“Plus, the new version of the NCL includes 21 policy questions, each with several sub-questions. So we’re now tracking things like climate plans, community greenhouse gas reduction targets, citizens’ climate advisory committees, mode-share targets, curbside composting programmes, and more. 

“We’re hoping the new Scorecards-informed version of the NCL will provide a great boost in terms of the data and information available to our network of climate advocates, and give them a new tool they can use to engage in local climate advocacy, targeting city councils, towns, and even other jurisdictions perhaps — as well as communicating with their community about how their city/town compares to others on climate. 

“My hope is that expanding and strengthening the policy element of the NCL — which the Scorecards helped us do — will really help boost local advocates’ policy literacy, help them identify specific policies, targets and programmes that other municipalities have implemented and which they might like to build a campaign around and encourage their municipality to adopt. They’ll be able to evaluate their council’s climate plans and targets against what has actually been implemented and what the outcomes have been — in other words, they’ll be empowered to draw the connection between policy and action, just as the Scorecards have done.”

Climate Reality won’t actually be scoring the municipalities this year, though Hannah says it’s a consideration for future iterations. “As you all know, there are challenges with designing an objective, properly weighted scoring system, so we decided we didn’t have the capacity to go all in on trying to design something this year, but it would be something we’d like to do in the future. Obviously it is a really good method for translating a lot of detailed, diverse policy information into something that can provide an at a glance comparison.

“Overall, learning about the Scorecards and connecting with Climate Emergency UK provided a great inspiration, and a specific model for us to work towards, as well as really helpful advice on specific shared challenges.”

We are very gratified to hear that. It is always wonderful to connect with other projects around the world that are working towards similar aims by similar means, and to exchange ideas. Thanks very much to Hannah for telling us all about it.

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Image: Will Clewis

Lucie Bolton took the position of Climate Strategy Officer at Rother District Council in 2022. Since then, she’s found the Council Climate Action Scorecards project an invaluable support for her work. 

Hearing this, we were of course keen to find out more — so we asked Lucie to share her journey, from brand new climate officer to now, a couple of years on, with a refreshed strategy and action plan in place.

“The council had declared a Climate Emergency in September 2019, going on to adopt their Environment Strategy in 2020”, explains Lucie, “But the pandemic and staff changes meant the production of a Climate Action Plan was delayed. That’s not to say climate action wasn’t taking place, but there were no KPIs, and it wasn’t fully embedded across the organisation.”

“Scorecards helped us reimagine both our content and project design.”

Post pandemic, recognising a need for a more concerted approach, the council employed two new staff: Lucie as Climate Strategy Officer, plus a new Climate Project Officer.

“I was brought in to refresh the Environment Strategy — which was renamed the Climate Strategy — and to develop and deliver the Climate Action Plan.”

While Lucie had highly relevant experience in her background, the council context was new for her: 

“I came from an environmental NGO, where I was involved with developing strategies, but I hadn’t developed a Climate Strategy for a local authority before. 

“I performed the usual strategy development activities — gap analysis, evidence base and so on — and when I was looking at best practices across the sector, I came across the Council Climate Plan Scorecards.”

The Climate Plan Scorecards, released in 2022, were the precursor to the Climate Action Scorecards. They scrutinised every UK council’s action plans, marking them to a wide set of criteria. 

“This was a fantastic resource for me,” says Lucie, “as I was able to see what good looks like and what we should be aiming for. 

“I used the Scorecards to look at neighbouring authorities, authorities with similar emissions, demographics et cetera. Along with other resources like the UK100 Powers in Place report, it helped me shape the Rother District Council Climate Strategy. 

“I was also able to reach out to different authorities and speak to their Climate Officers, which was useful.”

In 2023, the Council Climate Action Scorecards were launched, providing Lucie with still more invaluable data.

“I found the methodology particularly useful for developing Rother District Council’s Climate Action Plan. It was also useful to benchmark against, to see what we have already achieved and where we could do better”. 

“This was a fantastic resource for me, as I was able to see what good looks like and what we should be aiming for.”

“Overall, the results were useful in demonstrating to colleagues the sort of things we could be doing and what our neighbouring authorities were doing.”

Rother District Council adopted the refreshed Climate Strategy and Climate Action Plan in December 2023, and Lucie continues to dip into the Scorecards.

“I am now using them regularly in the implementation of the Climate Action Plan. For example, we have an action to eliminate pesticide usage in the council’s grounds maintenance. Using the Scorecards, I can quickly find examples of other councils who have already done this, and access the information I need through the evidence links.

“I’m really pleased to hear there will be another round of council scoring. I think Rother District Council will score better thanks to the action we have taken since the first round of scoring, though I am concerned the timeframe will mean some significant activities will still be in progress. Our new Local Plan, for example, is aiming to be ambitious and align with our 2030 target, but is unlikely to be ready to be examined in that round.”

Thanks very much to Lucie for sharing her story. We hope it inspires other Climate Officers to explore how the Scorecards project can aid them in their work.

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Image: Chris McAuley (CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

We were more than delighted when this news story crossed our radar, showing in detail how Cllr Andrew Murray, of Newry, Mourne and Down District Council, used the Council Climate Action Scorecards to gain support from his fellow councillors for climate action.

Cllr Murray’s proposed motion even referred to the Scorecards themselves:

“This Council acknowledges the work done to date to help address the climate emergency; reaffirms previous motions regarding the degenerating global situation; and again, reiterates that the crisis is the biggest threat posed to our constituents, our district, and our planet.

“Further acknowledges, however, that recent data collated by Climate Emergency UK ranks NMDDC 8th out of the 11 Councils within NI; and thus, pledges to include ambitious targets in the forthcoming Sustainability and Climate Strategies and Action Plans to expedite implementation.

Cllr Murray went on to explain that the council was below the averages for Northern Ireland in five sections of the Scorecards, albeit that in two — Building & Heating and Waste Reduction & Food – they had scored better than most of their NI fellow councils. Finally, he pointed out that their scores may have suffered from a lack of communication around the council’s recent activity.

We admired this intervention for its use of the Scorecards to do several things: point out where the council was lagging behind others in the country; give recognition to the areas where Scorecard rankings were above average; and to point out that some action they were taking may not be visible enough to outside observers.

All of these points were given further legitimacy by the fact that the Scorecards are an independent project, providing an objective set of benchmarks.

We got in touch with Cllr Murray to ask him more. He was a strong advocate for his local area, happy to describe its many charms:

“I am an elected representative for the Slieve Croob DEA,” he told us, “which lies within Newry, Mourne and Down District Council. I live in a wee town called Castlewellan. We’ve lots of forests, hills and coast within my area, and the council area as a whole.”

Sounds like an area where it’s well worth protecting the natural environment then! So, how did the Scorecards help?

Cllr Murray explains: “The Scorecards were very useful. I used them as an impetus to draw up a motion asking our council to attribute targets to actions they are taking, or will take in the future, regarding climate change and the environment. 

“Because the Scorecards were collated as well as being subdivided into relevant sections, I was able to curate my speaking notes appropriately.

“But they were also useful for a number of other reasons: firstly, they averaged out what other councils in Northern Ireland were attaining. In Northern Ireland, we have different responsibilities to our English, Scottish and Welsh counterparts. So to have them separated out regionally meant that Council Officers could not simply bat away the motion by saying the cards were not relevant – there are demonstrable things that other councils within Northern Ireland are doing that we are not. 

“That is not to say that they were simply used as a stick with which to beat Officers! There were aspects in which our council was above average, so this allowed praise to be allocated to the areas in which it was deserved. 

“Likewise, there were areas in which, from my reading of them and my understanding of the council, I think that there are some functions we are actually already performing but haven’t communicated – ergo, we could easily improve our score. 

“The Scorecards enabled me to lay things out succinctly and clearly, and I was able to get the motion passed. The hope is that sections of them can be incorporated into the targets for the council, and we can ultimately improve on our climatic and environmental impact. 

“Obviously if that means we improve our position amongst other Northern Ireland councils, then happy days. But, as the saying goes, an incoming tide raises all boats – so if our position remains the same, but councils everywhere become more sustainable and mitigate our impact on the environment, then that’s a good thing all round. But ultimately, we have to control the things that we affect here in Newry, Mourne and Down District Council.”

That is exactly what we like to hear, and goes a long way to exemplifying exactly why Climate Emergency UK and mySociety came together to produce the Scorecards project. 

We are very glad that Councillor Murray was able to use them for furthering climate action in his beautiful corner of Northern Ireland — and we hope councillors everywhere will take inspiration from his method for doing so.

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Image: Shan Marsh Bubashan

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)

As the seasons change and the leaves start to fall, grab your big scarf as we sum up what the climate team have been up to recently.

We’ve been talking about scorecards for much of the year, and this month the work has fallen into place and the Climate Action Scorecards have launched. There was a load of work done, not least by our designer Lucas and the team at CE UK in the lead up to this, to get the site polished and all the data finalised and published.

Since the launch we’ve been making tweaks and sanding off the odd rough edge. While we’ve been doing this, CE UK have been promoting all the hard work they and the volunteers have done with the result that there’s been a lot of press coverage. You may have seen some in your local paper.

If you want to see how your local council did then check out the site. If you’re an organisation or researcher interested in using the data underlying this then it’s available to buy from CE UK in a handy, easy to process format.

We, for Alex values of we, wrote a bit about some of the tech behind the Scorecards crowdsourcing effort.

On the Local Intelligence Hub front we’ve been making progress on supporting multiple versions of constituencies. For those of you who don’t breathlessly follow political boundary news there was a review of the size and shape of Westminster Parliamentary constituencies which has resulted in many of these changing.

The changes will take effect at the next general election, whenever that happens, so we need to support them, while also supporting the existing ones. Alexander has been working away on enabling the Local Intelligence Hub to display data for multiple versions of a constituency. This will also help if we want to add data for other types of area in the future. This is all working towards the new public launch date of January 2024 so you can make using local climate data part of your New Year’s resolutions.

Should you be in a position where you need to care about constituency changes, we have some potentially helpful data and code for making the transition from the old to new boundaries. If you don’t have to care but are interested there’s also some background on the hows and whys of the changes there too.

On the Neighbourhood Warmth front Siôn is continuing to talk to potential partners and funders, while sharpening up our plans for the next stage of development. As always more details on everything Neighbourhood Warmth can be found in its very own monthnotes.

On the policy side Julia has been lining things up for an event about Fragmented Data which is part of our work to explain how better data will help reach climate targets. Look out for more news on that in the coming weeks. Scraping in under the spooky decorations as I write this on All Hallow’s Eve, Zarino is at the Net Zero Festival where our CEO Louise will be, or indeed was, talking about the work we do to help involve people in matters climate related.

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Image: Aaron Burden

Today, we’re happy to join in the excitement around the launch of the Council Climate Action Scorecards.

Just over 18 months ago, we were pointing at the first iteration of this work by Climate Emergency UK (CE UK), which marked every council’s climate action plan according to a detailed schema. Back then, we were impressed by the scale and quality of what they’d pulled off, and pleased to have been a partner in delivering the work.

But if that was impressive, what’s been achieved this time around is even more so. While climate action plans are simple documents, with all the information in one place, unpicking how climate action is progressing at the local government level is a much more complicated matter. 

Once again, CE UK amassed a large cohort of volunteers, trained them up and set them the task of obtaining information about the state of play in every council area via a variety of means: news stories, meeting minutes, websites and strategy docs; and where the information couldn’t be found by any publicly-available source, with FOI requests. It is a real testament to people power, coupled with one of mySociety’s longtime favourite methods of breaking daunting tasks into more manageable chunks by crowdsourcing.

To ensure the data is meaningful, CE UK have completed the work with the oversight of an advisory panel, of which our Head of Research Alex Parsons was one member. mySociety have again played an active part in the project, building a tool on which volunteers assessed action, developing and designing the website, and helping send the FOI requests to multiple councils via our WhatDoTheyKnow Projects tool.

We hope that the Council Climate Action Scorecards will help councils and other key actors such as central government to see where they could be doing more, and to knowledge-share with others. More than that, we hope that campaigners, researchers, journalists — and individuals who want to understand how their councils are doing on climate — will dig into the data and learn more about both the local and nationwide pictures.

At mySociety, our Climate team‘s focus is set by the fact that around a third of all emissions are estimated to be within the power of local authorities. That’s why we have gladly put time and resource into supporting CE UK’s fantastic work.

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Image: Markus Krisetya

A story in this week’s Financial Times [paywalled] has brought the EPC ratings of council-owned properties into the public conversation. This story was based on data obtained through FOI requests as part of the Council Climate Action Scorecards project, which we’ve been working on in partnership with Climate Emergency UK (CE UK).

What you can read in the FT is one story pulled from a wealth of data, but there’s more to come. Our WhatDoTheyKnow Projects tool allowed CE UK’s team of volunteers to conduct a nationwide survey of every council through well-placed FOI requests covering the use of renewable energy, plans for retrofitting, green skills training, road expansion and more. 

The data they gathered has allowed for the understanding of councils’ action on a nationwide scale. This level of oversight has not previously been possible: as with so much about the Scorecards project, it is allowing councils to take more informed action on climate, and individuals to clearly understand what is being done.

Why local action matters

In the UK, it is estimated that around one third of carbon emissions are in some way under the influence of local authorities. 80% of UK councils have declared a ‘climate emergency’ to indicate they recognise the scale of the problem of climate change, and are in a position to take practical steps to be part of the solution. To help local authorities achieve the goals they set themselves (and to push them to go further), we need to engage with the plans that local authorities are making, and the actions they are starting to take. 

In 2021, CE UK and mySociety worked together to produce the first Council Climate Plan Scorecards. CE UK’s upcoming launch is the second iteration of the Scorecards. It is much bigger and more ambitious in scope than the last: it scores not the plans, but the climate actions of every local authority in the UK. 

FOI requests were just one part of the process. As well as giving CE UK access to WhatDoTheyKnow Projects, we developed a crowdsourcing tool for volunteers to use while marking across the 90+ datapoints collected for each council. 

How do you score action?

CE UK moved from scoring plans to scoring actions. That required new approaches to gathering the information. 

The questions CEUK used in the new Scorecards are the result of a long and thorough process of research and refinement. Building on their own research and expertise, they conducted one-on-one consultations with approximately 80 organisations and sector-specific experts. An advisory group of environmental and local government experts provided further discussion and refinement, to help build a list of questions that would practically be possible to answer, and that would reveal important information about the climate actions of councils. 

The aim was to identify areas where information was publicly accessible; but also where gaps existed, especially in operational matters that aren’t often made public. Additionally, CE UK wanted to investigate whether councils are truly implementing the actions outlined in their climate action plans, including aspects like lobbying for additional powers.

Making use of Freedom of Information

Freedom of Information laws means that a huge range of information held by public authorities (including local councils) can be requested by any person who asks. This provides a legal tool to create greater transparency where information is not being published proactively.

For CE UK, the potential of FOI for the Scorecards project was clear – but there were concerns. In consultations with council staff, there was pushback regarding the use of FOI requests due to the potential time and financial burden on council officers who work on climate – with some requests for a more informal survey approach to be used. But the drawback of that would be making good data dependent on goodwill everywhere. FOI requests provided a way to make sure the scorecards were not just effective for councils who engaged with the process and provide an approach that was fair across the country. 

To balance a process where they want to encourage positive engagement from councils, with one that works without that, CE UK’s approach was to plan out the most efficient and least burdensome use of FOI requests. 

Based on feedback from the advisory group, and trial runs to a small number of councils, they eliminated questions that were less important and useful, made more ‘yes/no’ or ‘single number’ responses, and learned where certain questions weren’t relevant to certain areas or groups of councils. 

The subsequent FOI requests became more streamlined, and this resulted in quicker response times for the final requests than they had in the trial – as the information sought was more direct and concise.

In the end, CE UK submitted a total of over 4,000 FOI requests to councils across the UK. The questions were divided into 11 categories, with some being specific to certain types of councils, such as district councils or combined authorities. The next stage was taking these 4,000 requests and getting them into a form that can be used for the scorecards. 

Crowdsourcing and review process

CE UK used WhatDoTheyKnow to manage their FOI request process. mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow acts as a public archive for requests – requests made through the site have the responses shown in public to bring more information into the open  – making it more discoverable by other people interested in the information, and reducing the need for duplicate requests being made. As of 2023, a million requests for information have been made through the site, with hundreds of thousands of pieces of information being released. 

A feature we are trialling with a range of organisations is WhatDoTheyKnow Projects, which integrates crowdsourcing tools into WhatDoTheyKnow, and allows the task of extracting information into a new dataset to be spread out. The goal is that this helps organisations be more ambitious in finding out information and helps people work together to create genuinely new and exciting datasets, that no single organisation has ever seen. 

As CE UK’s approach already made heavy use of volunteers and crowdsourcing, this was a natural fit.  Alongside a wider group of 200 volunteers working on getting answers to the other questions, 15 volunteers specifically worked on the FOI requests. These volunteers were a mixture of people with prior experience or professional interest in FOI requests, campaigners well-versed in FOI processes, and individuals new to the concept but eager to engage in activism.

After the crowdsourcing of FOI data was complete, it joined the rest of the data in the new tool mySociety had developed for helping volunteers crowdsource information for the Scorecards.  

From here, councils were given access to the data collected about them and given a right of reply to correct any inaccuracies or point towards information not previously discovered or disclosed. The results of this process will then be reviewed to produce the final Scorecards data, which will be launched this month.

But the Scorecards data will not be the only useful thing that will come out of this process. Because of how WhatDoTheyKnow was used, to see evidence supporting the final Scorecards, people will be able to click through and see the original responses, for instance, to see what councils have lobbied on support for their climate work. 

Some of the FOIs are being used to construct datasets that have a broader impact, and here we come back to that FT story on the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings of council-owned houses. Building these new public datasets will be useful for councils to understand their own situation, and as we see with the news story, more broadly to understand the challenges ahead for local governments to meet net zero emissions goals. 

Onwards

The original Scorecards project has already been influential on how local governments understand their own plans, and how organisations like the UK’s Climate Change Committee understand the role and progress of local government in the challenges ahead. When the next generation of Scorecards is released, we hope that they continue to be useful in shaping and improving local government action around climate change.

mySociety believes that digital technology can be used to help people participate more fully in democracy, make governments and societies more transparent, and bring communities together to address societal challenges.

The Scorecards project showcases how the combination of digital tools, people power, and the right to information produces powerful results. We hope that the impact of this project can inspire and make possible similar approaches for other problems, or in other countries.