Hopes of Newcastle reaching net zero by 2030 are “very heavily reliant” on a massive shift in Government funding, with the enormous ambitions set to cost billions of pounds.
City leaders have set the goal of making Newcastle carbon neutral by the end of this decade – 20 years ahead of the national target. But councillors were warned on Tuesday that achieving that aim will require a huge injection of money from the Government, with Newcastle City Council and other local authorities having nowhere near enough cash to cover the huge scale of the decarbonisation project.
Figures presented on Tuesday show that plans to retrofit almost 35,000 public buildings in the city to reduce their carbon footprint will cost £866m – including council houses, schools, and university buildings. However, that does not include privately owned homes, with estimates of a large scale housing retrofit programme across Newcastle by 2030 having been put at between £1bn and £3bn
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A colossal overhaul of the North East’s transport network, including extensions of the Tyne and Wear Metro and major investment in buses, has been priced at £6.8bn. Tim Rippon, Newcastle City Council’s principal climate change adviser, said on Tuesday: “We are very heavily reliant on Government grants for the net zero programme.
"There are so few, if any, investments that will wash their own face – they have to have some form of grant funding to make them a viable concern. That is the position as of today. We hope that won’t be the situation indefinitely and we hope that situation will change in time.”
Liberal Democrat Colin Ferguson, chairing the council’s finance scrutiny committee, said that nobody questioned that the implications of not reaching net zero would be “dire”, but added that leaders needed to find ways to make the finances stack up. He raised concerns that the local authority’s annual capital programme budget of roughly £100m could be entirely swallowed up by decarbonisation plans alone.
Labour’s Jane Byrne, the council’s cabinet member responsible for climate change issues, said that net zero was “extremely important” but that it was “not realistic” to pump all available funds into environmental programmes at the expense of other areas the local authority is responsible for. She said that the numbers presented on Tuesday were intended to “show the scale of the challenge” rather than be considered as firm funding commitments.
Coun Byrne said: “In order to achieve net zero, we are going to have to see a change in the national picture and the national funding. That is clear.”
Newcastle emitted 1.885m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent during 2020/21, 90% of which comes from “controllable” sources such as energy use in buildings and transport.
The council has embarked on a programme of retrofitting some schools, libraries, leisure centres, offices, and theatres through £27m secured through a Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme. Bosses have also won £10m to invest in improving the thermal efficiency of both council-owned and private homes.
Tuesday’s report also highlighted the economic opportunities presented by net zero, with the North East already boasting the highest concentration of green businesses in the country and up to 12,500 people working in the green economy in the North of Tyne region.
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