April 1st: no laughing matter for councils

Everyone agrees - councils should do more on climate change. But there's an elephant in the room: where on earth are councils going to find the money?

April 1st has been a dread-letter day for councils since George Osborne's ferocious Comprehensive Spending Review kneecapped their funding by 28 per cent over the next four years.

Now, with the start of the new financial year, the cuts start to bite. The elephant's moved out of the corner of the room, opened a bag of nuts, and parked itself on the sofa with the telly remote.

Over 100,000 council jobs are expected to go, or have already gone, as a direct result of the cuts. That's devastating for local people and places.

And grim for councils' vital work on climate change. News continues to trickle out: whole climate teams being laid off or dramatically slimmed down; programmes of work stopped; bus services axed.

Council action was sporadic enough to begin with. We phoned every council in England to ask what kind of target they have for cutting carbon in their local areas. Less than one in three have any kind of medium-term target at all.

The most committed councils, like Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham, are still determined to make big emissions cuts, because it makes sense for the future of their local areas, will save money and will create lots of new green jobs. But for lots of others there's a real risk climate change will be an early casualty of the cuts. There's no requirement for councils to act on local carbon reduction; even the existing (voluntary) performance indicator for council leadership on climate change has been scrapped.

Here's what the Government has to do.

Firstly, climate change has to be made central to every council's business. The Energy Bill has just entered the House of Commons, and we're campaigning for it to be toughened so that no council can opt out of doing their fair share on climate change.

Secondly, the Government can't hang councils out to dry: they need cash, and they need staff. About £15 million a year would be a good start for funding - peanuts in the scheme of the £500 billion or more that will need to be spent to green the UK's energy supply. Last week the Chancellor found £10 billion he didn't know he had for cutting fuel duty. So don't tell us there's no money.

Helping councils futureproof their local economies is win-win all round. Councils shouldn't be forced to choose between greening their local areas or keeping libraries open.

The Government says that councils are "pivotal" to meeting national carbon budgets. But Mr Osborne's ruthless cost-cutting means the chips are down.

And the elephant's about to trample them into the carpet.