Hertfordshire County Council celebrates progress of ongoing sustainability project

The report into the Sustainable Hertfordshire programme was analysed by members of the environment cabinet panel on Friday, March 7.

The report highlighted a number of initiatives, including £1.4m granted in December last year to explore feasibility for a solar farm at Smallford, the first council project of its kind – which could offset a “significant percentage” of the council’s carbon footprint.

Elsewhere, ten electric vehicle chargers have been installed at the county council car park, while on the highway network, as of April last year, over 117,000 lighting units were changed to LED/CMS.

The “Part Night Lighting” policy, combined with the switch to LED streetlights, has led to a 77 per cent reduction in carbon emissions from street lighting since 2012/13, the report states.

Last year, the county council also supported the planting of an estimated 91,000 trees. Since its climate emergency declaration, the county council has helped plant a total of 415,000 trees locally.

The report revealed: “In order to further reduce HCC emissions, colleagues within the Property Team commissioned a Net Zero Exercise looking at assessing all HCC operational assets and prioritising interventions that would have the most impact on CO2e reduction whilst considering the financial investment needed and possible revenue to be saved.

“This piece of work resulted in Cabinet approving a £3.34m project to decarbonise HCC operational assets (December 2024). This project is seeking to further implement solar panels, heating control upgrades, and LED lighting upgrades to council operational assets.

“This will reduce carbon emissions and may alleviate future revenue pressures for operational energy usage.”

Members were complimentary about the programme of carbon-cutting projects.

Councillor Teresa Heritage, who was the executive member during the council’s first sustainability strategy, said: “A big congratulations to all of the staff who have participated in the establishment of this over the years, especially to Julie Grieves and her team at the time.

“We were trying to find our way and I think we’ve done an incredible job. We’ve actually delivered on what we said, some people might not think we have, but we’ve done the best with what we had.

“Putting in bids to the government, that took quite a long time. But that flowed through and I think it’s been put to very good use.

“Particularly interesting was working with the district and borough councils and that’s how we’ve been able to deliver on the planting of the trees, the districts have been handling the community level, getting residents involved, and we’ve been supplying the trees.”

One dissenting voice was Liberal Democrat Councillor Adrian England who questioned the level of progress, saying: “I don’t doubt the commitment that’s going on here…

“In Section 7, lines kept jumping out at me – measures put on pause, measures paused due to resourcing. In all fairness to everybody here, that’s really the story isn’t it? In large part, resourcing is a problem.

“There is one thing I really struggled with which was this report does not set out any conclusional recommendations… It’s very clear that a step change is needed and again, to be even-handed, it’s very clear that councils are short of resources.”

Councillor England then criticised both the previous Conservative and current Labour governments, before summing up the report once more, adding: “I don’t think this is encouraging me at all, I think we need an absolute pivot on where we go with this.”

These words were criticised as “extremely harsh” by Councillor Jeff Jones, who said: “I totally disagree with Adrian, as you would expect. I think there’s a huge amount of work that’s been done here and I congratulate the officers.

“Carbon neutral is going to take time and I can see from the graph we are certainly going in the right direction.”