- 3. Local leadership
Creating co-benefits through local government leadership
Greater Manchester set itself a target of becoming net zero by 2038 in 2020 and Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham told Carbon Crunch that going earlier than the rest of the country was very much “a Manchester thing”.
“It is the Manchester way for social progress to go hand in hand with economic progress,” he explained. “We believe that if the UK is going to hit a 2050 target, some regions have got to go faster. Some places have got to go out there, prove the new technologies and build the skills base.
“If everyone moves at the same speed, the country won't get there.”
Andy said that five years on from setting the 2038 target, the region is still on course but he described it as challenging and said that there are areas where the city is going fast and areas where more progress needs to be made.
“The biggest change that's happening in the City right now is the move to a London style public transport system,” said Andy. “I'm the first City Region Mayor to have taken the decision to put buses here back under public control and if you don't have public control of the essentials, or stronger public control, you can't dictate the pace of decarbonisation.
“The public control gives us the power to electrify the depots, which we've bought back, and to put in place a pipeline for the electrification of all of our bus fleet. We're moving at pace on that and could have the first zero carbon public transport system at street level in the UK by the end of this decade.
“I'm always amazed when Transport for Greater Manchester tells me how much it costs to charge a bus overnight – the buses themselves are expensive – but it costs £30 to charge for a day’s service. It's pretty impressive when you actually put it into practice and you see the benefits that can be reached for our residents in terms of air pollution and noise.
“The really good news is that, after 40 years of declining use of our buses and the car dominating more and more every year, we have a 5% uplift in the number of passengers using the system. So you can see how that shift is coming through and starting to change people's lives, as well as giving them more affordable, lower cost travel, which is what the network represents.”
Getting to a net zero grid and energy system
Andy went on to talk about progress on energy decarbonisation in Greater Manchester: “We have also undertaken a unique exercise around energy where all 10 of our districts have carried out a local area energy planning exercise. It is a real deep dive into the energy systems of Greater Manchester such that we know exactly what needs to be done to get us to a net zero grid by 2038. It calls for a £64bn investment, however, the good news is 70% of that would have been business as usual investment.
“The co-benefits of this are, that if we can get to a situation where we lower the cost of living for our residents because we make their homes cheaper to heat and to light, then that's massive.”
According to Andy, the role of devolution in empowering local authorities to make decisions is critical to improving resident’s lives through retrofitting homes with energy saving technologies. He said that the single settlement funding under devolution would allow Greater Manchester to develop a stronger pipeline of retrofitting work.
He added: “If we get the right deal, we could be looking at around 140,000 homes in the city region being retrofitted in the current parliament. We've already made a start. We've got some early funding through the social housing decarbonisation fund and we've done some public building decarbonisation.”
Andy went onto talk about plans to invest in new net zero council homes and said that “when you've got homes that are both cheaper to rent and cheaper to run, then really you're doing something about inequality”.
Manchester is also the first place in the country to develop an integrated water plan with the Environment Agency and United Utilities, with the water company expected to invest £3bn to support that plan in the next spending period.
Reforming technical education – the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate
Nonetheless, Andy said that the biggest barrier to achieving net zero is the workforce to do it.
He asked: “Are young people clear about the opportunities in the green economy? Are they beginning to plot their path towards those opportunities? I don't think that's happening at this moment in time, and it's why the reform we're bringing through of technical education in Greater Manchester could provide a solution to this.”
Greater Manchester wants to create an equal alternative to the university route called the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate. Andy believes this will give young people growing up in the region an alternative set of opportunities so they can get good, well-paid jobs in the region in much larger numbers than before. “We recently launched the Beeline, which is an online platform that links to the sectors in our economy, which we believe are going to be the biggest sources of good jobs in the future,” said Andy. “One of them is construction and the green economy.
Through the platform, young people can see what they need to do at 14 and what to do at 16 if they’re interested in a specific sector, as well as see real jobs being advertised right now in Greater Manchester at the end of those pathways. “So like heating technicians, E- related jobs – a whole range of jobs that schools just don't know about at the moment,” Andy explained. “What we're doing is giving them a line of sight to the jobs in the green economy.”
While Andy was keen to point out the progress made on net zero in Greater Manchester, he stressed that time was running out. He added: “We've really accelerated on transport, but we've not yet got going on energy, homes and buildings in the way that we need to. We are about to go out to a market tender for district heating systems and we've got a lot of investable propositions about to move forward here.
“We are making a big play to the government to say let's go for growth and, as a country, let's go for green growth.”
Andy’s ambition is to secure a package of support that allows Greater Manchester to become economically stronger, but also a place where everyone can get on, in a clean environment, aspire to good jobs in the green economy and have a more equal Greater Manchester at the end of it.
