14 January 2015
Green Party councillors say that the City’s new environmental strategy needs to go much further in a comprehensive consultation response. Although many of their previous suggestions and recommendations taken up in the strategy document, words now need to be backed with action.
Green Party councillor Sandra Bogelein: “Green Party councillors have worked extremely hard to ensure that Norwich proposes an adequate response to the environmental challenges we are facing. We were the only party to respond to an officers’ call for additional suggestions and throughout the year we have continuously raised necessities for improvements. We have also submitted a comprehensive report on how to engage the public in environmental issues and showed a serious, co-operative presence at a cross party workshop on the environmental strategy. This hard work has partly paid off, but this strategy still has a long way to go to contribute as much as we need to for a safe future for our children.”
Green Party councillors especially criticised that a number of important recommendations from scientists based at the UEA have not been included in the strategy, such as co-producing the strategy with Norwich citizens. Ensuring public support and enthusiasm for the stated goals is as important as having ambitious goals in the first place. They also emphasised that climate change and the environment need to be considered in all of the council’s decisions and actions.
Parliamentary candidate for the Green Party Lesley Grahame says: “Protecting our shared environment should be at the heart of policy, and we hope the City is at last moving in the right direction. But good policy is only as valid as the actions that support it, so we look forward to changes in the city’s transport that match up to the intention of de-carbonising. The current plans to build new roads and car parks surely don’t fulfil that criteria.”
The Green Party invited everyone to complete the consultation on the environmental strategy on the council’s website and express their opinion on the suggested measures. Alternatively citizens were given the option to submit a response containing their opinion and further suggestions to the council by Monday, the 12th of January.
