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Mayor’s environmental strategies are shortchanging Londoners
TweetLabour Assembly Member Murad Qureshi has criticized the Mayor’s recently published environmental strategies for downgrading a number of their original targets. Despite the Mayor nearing the end of his four year term and consultations starting in 2009/10, the Mayor’s Climate Change Adaptation, Climate Change Mitigation and Energy, Water, Municipal waste and Business waste strategies were only released this autumn with many key pledges revised or quietly dropped.
Labour’s environment spokesperson Murad Qureshi AM said: “This is not value for money for Londoners considering we’ve had to wait so long for these strategies to be released. I am most concerned that the Mayor is doing little to affect Londoners’ quality of life now. For example, his Energy strategy no longer calls upon the government to recognize the true scale of fuel poverty[1]. This is astonishing in today’s economic climate, with rising energy costs and more and more families slipping into fuel poverty.”
Here are just some of the targets dropped by the Mayor at the last minute:
- Water – Target for dealing with leakages no longer aspires to “Uk industry standard by 2035” but instead to “simply continue to tackle leakage”
- Climate Change Adaptation – The Mayor’s RE:NEW target to improve the energy efficiency of 1.2 million homes by 2015 has been dropped. His new target is to treat just 55,000 homes by 2012.
- Energy – The Mayor no longer aims to replace 100,000 conventional vehicles with electric vehicles, instead, he’s now just looking to put 100,000 electric vehicles on the road. His target for 25,000 electric vehicle charging points by 2015 has been slashed to just 1,300 publicly accessible charge points by 2013.
- Municipal Waste – Boris has ditched plans to ask the government to consider a national deposit system for cans and bottles and his waste reduction reuse/repair target has slipped from 40,000 tonnes in 2015 and 120,000 tonnes in 2031 to 20,000 and 30,000 respectively – a drop of up to 75% from his original target.
- Business waste - As part of its total investment fund of Ł58 million, the London Waste and Recycling Board allocated fund of Ł36 million has been slashed to Ł21 million to help develop waste infrastructure. Consequently, the target to “secure 1.2million tonnes of waste diversion from landfill per year” has been downgraded to just 500,00 tonnes, and plans to save 300,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year have been reduced to a saving of 3 million tonnes of CO2 over the lifetime of the projects.
Ends
Notes
On 26 October 2011 the Mayor released three final environment strategies:
Climate Change Mitigation and Energy
On the 18 November the Mayor released the final two environment strategies:
Murad Qureshi is a Londonwide Assembly Member. He is Labour’s environment spokesperson on the Assembly and Chair of the Assembly’s Environment Committee
For further information please contact Nikki Salih on 0207 983 4400
[1] Fuel poverty
Across England the number of households in fuel poverty has risen steadily since 2003. A household is said to be in fuel poverty if it has to spend more than 10 per cent of its income to keep the home adequately heated.
A 2009 study for the Mayor of London found that one in four London households (760,000 homes) are living in fuel poverty.
Household income is by far the biggest factor in determining fuel poverty. London households in the lowest income bracket are over 117 times more likely to be fuel poor.
