Peer Learning in Leicestershire

Leicestershire County Council shared some of its inspiring work on climate change on 25th September 2014 at Brocks Hill Country Park in Oadby with an invited audience of local authority officers from across the East Midlands. This was the sixth in the programme of peer learning days organised by Climate East Midlands, following previous successful events in Kettering, Derby, Leicester, West Leicestershire and Nottingham over the past 2 years.

The half day session included a series of presentations and discussions about the work of the council's Climate Action Team and gave participants a look behind the scenes into Leicestershire's achievements and challenges. Highlights included:

• The setting up of a Green Champions network with 170 members of council staff
• A County Hall composting scheme, dealing with 2 tonnes of green waste a month 
• Embedding environmental management into the council's internal processes and agreeing targets for improvement
• Capturing key performance data and generating regular 'dashboard reports' for managers on their environmental performance
• Having well evidenced and clearly prioritised plans and targets for internal carbon management, area wide emissions and resilience
• Good stakeholder and partner engagement
• Funded projects and programmes in place to deliver change, including SCoRE for schools
• Joint work with the council's property services department resulting in a major REFIT project for County Hall designed to save 500t CO2 and £165k/yr
• Clarity about what can't be influenced - the target for transport based emissions is to stay at the same level, given the level of expected growth in the county
• Engagement with the Local Enterprise Partnership and the development of plans for EU Structural Investment Funds on low carbon

The event concluded with a tour of the Millennium Commission-Funded Brocks Hill Visitor Centre, led by Carolyn Holmes, Country Parks and Environment Manager and Nick Hague, Brocks Hill Park Ranger.

In conclusion, it was a very informative and insightful day into the way the council is reducing carbon emissions and adapting to climate change both as an organisation in its own right and in the wider community of Leicestershire. It is hoped that other local authorities will be able to showcase their work in the near future.

Climate East Midlands is grateful to the whole team for their contributions: Oliver Savage, Jonathan Cattell, Dave Nicholls, Donna Worship, Chris Clarke, Hannah Moss, Nailesh Ramaiya and Nichole Brown.

A huge thanks to those who attended and stay tuned for the next Peer Learning event. 

Hannah Caplin reporting for Climate East Midlands