Council Watch July 2024
Items on the agenda1 for West Northamptonshire Council's July meeting pack included WNC’s Annual Report on how they are performing against their own targets.
The ‘Green and Clean’ banner, like all elements of the WNC Corporate Plan, has a set of performance measures. The target shown for some of these measures is ‘Trend’ so to try and understand what this might mean we looked back at last year’s results. We’ve reproduced both tables below.
Our notes on the 2023/24 performance measures:
- Changing the measures from one year to the next prevents tracking performance trends over time
- For a couple of the targets (Fly-tips cleared; Environmental Crime Fixed Penalty Notices) the 2023/24 performance is down on the previous year
- The tree-planting measure has disappeared – perhaps to be replaced by something bigger and better once the new Tree Strategy has been finalised?
- 3 out of 8 measures are about EV charging points – possibly because they are easy to count rather than because they are that important
- Nothing on Active Travel
- Nothing on Air Quality
- Nothing on greenhouse gas emissions, even though this year the council released a good report detailing its emissions, and managing emissions is central to meeting its target of Net Zero by 2030 as a council. Projects planned or underway such as the funding secured for electric buses and installation of solar PV would be expected to have a positive impact on emissions.
Other points to note from the report pack:
- WNC is “now working with DEFRA to further enhance the [air quality action] plan which will seek to improve air quality across West Northamptonshire and reduce the impact of air pollution on our communities.” And “DEFRA have requested some further work be completed to allow WNC to better target its actions towards the source of pollution in the AQMA’s, and this is underway.” It’s tempting to interpret this last sentence as DEFRA saying the action plan wasn’t good enough. We look forward to seeing the enhanced plan - it would be helpful to have a target delivery date.
- Proposals for the Abington Area Active Travel Scheme are being developed, with Phase 1 construction due to start Autumn 2024. This will “consider improvements for drivers whilst creating safer routes for pedestrians and cyclists at the junction of the A5095 Park Avenue South / Rushmere Road / Billing Road.” Does this mean that money for an active travel project is being directed towards making life better for drivers, or are these improvements a happy by-product of the changes designed to benefit cyclists and pedestrians?
- A survey on the new Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) will be issued soon – CA-WN will look out for it and let you know when it is live.
- There’s a detailed update on the work of the Sustainability team on page 151 of the report. This includes development of a Climate Change Strategy which should shape how the council and the area as a whole move towards meeting those important Net Zero targets (for a more detailed look at the proposed strategy, check out our April meeting with guest speaker Councillor Jonathan Harris2).
- There’s quite a lot happening on the flood risk management front – there was a consultation on the proposed Local Flood Risk Management Strategy (LFRMS) earlier in the year and the Resilience And Innovation Northants (RAIN) project3 is working with communities to implement flood risk measures.
References
1. https://westnorthants.moderngov.co.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=142&MId=1566&Ver=4
2. https://exchange.ca-wn.org/ca-wn-18-april-meeting-report/