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Notes from Public Meeting 21 May 2026

CA-WN Exchange

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Notes from Public Meeting 21 May 2026

Please note one of our occasional socials is coming up at Northampton Museum on Saturday 13 June from 2pm to 4pm. We meet downstairs in the café, all welcome, it's very informal so feel free to drop in at any point.

Delivering Change Locally

Our speaker this month was Stuart Dawks, CEO of PECT, an independent sustainability charity formerly known as Peterborough Environment City Trust, which has delivered over 30 years of practical climate and environmental action. Stuart’s slides are available here. and a recording of the meeting is on our YouTube channel. Details of PECT here.

Apologies: Clare Robertson-Marriott, Clare Slater, Peter Nalder, Roy Hawkesford, Teresa Cox

Present: Alexina Cassidy, Bruce Durham, David Garlick, Harry Mellor, James Hadfield, Jane Rogers, Jane Wood, John Hunt, Kate Nash, Leonie Beale, Martin Coombes, Mick Lorkins, Mike Longman, Rachel Tighe, Rupert Knowles

Introduction

PECT’s vision is to protect and enhance the environment throughout Peterborough and beyond. Their mission is to create sustainable places meaning:

  • healthy natural environment
  • communities involved in their areas
  • health and well-being is improved for all
  • responsible resource use

PECT was founded in 1991, after Peterborough became one of 4 UK environment cities. In the early years, there was a lot of community-focused work, improving neighbourhoods, supporting recycling campaigns, and helping people think differently around the environment.

Climate change has become more central, and the challenges more complicated. PECT now does more around energy, fuel poverty, behaviour change, and working with businesses, and has recently been working on large-scale net zero planning and biodiversity programmes.

Though the scale has changed, many challenges are still human ones; trust, confidence, affordability, and how to help people make change in real life.

About 18 months ago, PECT split into different flagship programs to help communicate more effectively with clients and stakeholders and now has 4 main programme areas, as well as projects still sitting under PECT:

  • Investors in the environment business accreditation scheme, working with businesses across the country to help them save money and reduce environmental impact
  • Climate education - a membership-based online platform to help educators bring sustainability into their schools
  • Aspect Sustainability Consultancy working with businesses
  • Green Energy Switch delivering a range of energy related services including Void Energy Management service

Early behaviour change campaigns

  • The Green Wheel  - cycle paths created as a millennium project
  • Get a Green Grip – reusable bags, innovative at the time
  • Greeniversity - green skills sharing and peer-to-peer learning, supporting people to pass on skills of all kinds from beekeeping to how to fix a bike

PECT is about making sustainability visible and practical for people. Conversations around behaviour change used to be about litter, transport or recycling, now they are about carbon emissions, climate resilience and biodiversity collapse, but the principles are still the same - how do you make sustainable behaviour feel normal, positive and achievable?

Nature Recovery and Landscape Scale Action

  • B-lines - creating joined up corridors for pollinators and restoring fragmented habitats, part of a national programme run by Buglife. Verges and small areas of grassland can connect landscapes together.
  • Forest for Peterborough - target to plant 230,000 trees, so far have planted 130,000. A major challenge is finding places to plant. Right tree, right place and long-term management plan is important. PECT recently signed a lease for 15 years to develop their own tree nursery which will also provide a place to take communities to learn about trees and how to maintain them
  • John Clare Countryside - about heritage, rivers, access, farming, well-being and education, as well as ecology, on which PECT is part of a wider partnership. The plan is to double nature in the project area. PECT has worked with communities to plant hedgerows and trees, create ponds and develop educational resources. The landowners are also putting together a master plan as part of a DEFRA landscape recovery bid.

Behaviour change programmes

Information alone isn't enough, people need support, and solutions need to be affordable and practical.

  • Cool Food - focuses on food waste (at this point Stuart showed a short video which is in his presentation slides). People pledge to reduce food waste and carbon in their diet (e.g. swap soft drinks for water, introduce vegetarian meals, have coffee-free days).
    The project was so well received PECT was then funded to do Cool Food Pro to work with catering organisations. They work on this with the Soil Association, who are taking it forward on a national scale.
  • Blueprint (circular economy) - aims to make the circular economy practical and community-focused. They use the seven R's: Rethink; Refuse; Reduce; Reuse; Repair; Repurpose; Recycle
    PECT developed a range of projects including recycling for flat-dwellers, who usually struggle to recycle their waste, and resources for schools about reusing and repurposing materials. They developed Re-Directory for Peterborough, a listing of places to get things repaired, and worked with the Peterborough Repair Cafe. The repair businesses were given stickers to put in the window.

Domestic Energy Advice

A big part of PECT’s role is helping people navigate issues by providing trusted and impartial advice; often relatively small interventions can make a big difference.

PECT has an energy van that travels around Lincolnshire, supporting rural communities. They train frontline workers and also have access to some grant funding to help pay debts, as well as pointing people to other grants for home improvement measures.

Bring It Back

A project focused on encouraging people to rethink single-use plastic packaging. The programme worked with 10 locations introducing reusable cups, achieving a 71% return rate and avoiding around 4,000 single-use packaging items.

In Oundle all the cafes used the same cup, so you could take the cup back to any shop. At Nene Park in Peterborough, you could buy your coffee or tea, walk around the park, and drop the cup back off to be cleaned and used again. It’s important to make things practical for people as well as telling them about the impact of disposable cups discarded in nature.

PECT learned not to make packaging too desirable. A trial in a shared building cafeteria provided nice reusable packaging, unfortunately, 50% of it went missing within the first week because people liked it so much they took it home!

Investors in the Environment (iiE)

PECT’s business arm which supports around 350 organisations in the UK. Sustainability used to be seen as optional, but now businesses are actively seeking out PECT because they need to be sustainable as part of their procurement, regulation has changed, staff are looking for sustainability when they're being recruited, and also for business resilience.

Businesses are under growing pressure but many generally want to do the right thing.  PECT supports them with training, events, peer-to-peer network and an annual award ceremony.

iiE is a membership scheme - the subscriptions cover its costs and support the charity as well.

Future Now

A more systems focused programme looking at city scale decarbonisation across Peterborough; heat networks, retrofit planning, renewable energy and infrastructure.

On this project PECT partnered with the City Council, technical partners, and the Energy Saving Trust, developing communications to engage with communities, including online platforms that model a heat network to show cost and return, and how it would be managed and communicated. (At this point Stuart played a short video showing some of the initiatives happening in Peterborough, which is in his presentation slides).

Net zero isn't just a technical challenge, it's also about governance, funding, public engagement, and long-term coordination. A challenge when delivering long-term programmes is that funding is fragmented and short-term. When the challenges faced are multi-decade, how to keep funding going?

People don't connect with technical net zero language, but they do connect with practical things like warmer homes, lower bills, healthier communities, cleaner air, and a better local environment. So the FutureNow branding focused on positivity and the engagement strategy is about listening as well as broadcasting.

There are tips and advice on the website, including the Homewise tool leased from the Energy Saving Trust, which recommends actions based on your home’s EPC rating and a few other sources.

Green social prescribing

Environmental work overlapping with health and well-being. PECT delivers nature-based activities for Peterborough residents, particularly those with frailty or long-term health conditions. This includes outdoor well-being sessions, walking groups, walking football, community gardening, Tai Chi in the park. These provide social contact, and also stronger connections with local green spaces and environmental issues.

Funding for this is ending soon and difficult to replace because most funders like to fund innovative new projects, rather than ones that already exist.

Summing up

PECT engages with different audiences; schools, businesses, individual groups, all of which require different engagement and a different way of thinking and communicating.

One of the biggest lessons is that lasting change takes time. Developing strong partnerships and trust is very important.

While national policy is important local delivery really does make a difference.

Today PECT held its 13th annual school sustainability showcase, for children who are school green champions. They demonstrate the work they've been doing in their schools, do a range of activities, and pitch to win awards. Their enthusiasm is what gives Stuart the encouragement and energy to continue.

Despite the challenges, there are huge opportunities - a growing interest in nature recovery, retrofit, green skills, community energy, healthy places, and a growing understanding that climate action needs to be fair, practical and inclusive.

Q&A

At the moment you have a Labour council in Peterborough, would there be a material effect if Reform got in with climate sceptic policies?
Yes; in Lincolnshire, where there is a Reform council, PECT had to rebrand one of their net zero programmes for business to focus on energy efficiency. However, council officers do understand what needs to happen. There’s also been something of a funding shift; 2-3 years ago there was a lot of talk about climate change but that has gone quiet.
It’s important for PECT that it has diverse income streams including Investors in the Environment.

What you were saying about communicating in different ways to different people is interesting. Sometimes it's got to be about what's in it for people. Building stronger communities is also very important and sometimes those communities need the impetus and structure that someone like PECT can provide.
You sometimes find that great community work is spearheaded by one or two people and if they step away then things can fall off. So building community resilience, as we are doing on the John Clare Countryside project, is key. That covers 21 parishes, some have larger groups than others, so it’s about sharing resources, sharing stories, and giving people the agency to start a group, or contact the right person.

Is PECT’s work all done by volunteers or do you have paid employees? How do you get volunteers and recruit people to help with projects?
PECT has a team of 20 working for the charity, and another 20 working for the subsidiary.
We also have volunteers, some are highly skilled, for example a PhD in bee science who helped with the B-Lines project. We also have brilliant ecologists working as volunteers on John Clare Countryside.
Some of our partnerships are with organisations who are completely volunteer-led, for example the Repair Café - PECT lends them some admin support.
We do struggle sometimes with recruiting volunteers.

I've been involved in a couple of groups, and one of the biggest problems that we face is turning an idea into a project, and then gaining funding to carry it through. Is that the sort of work you can help and advise with?
Yes, PECT has a business development manager who's really good at that. We also have lots of great ideas and sometimes have to put them on the shelf until a suitable funder comes along.
Some people are now using AI to help with finding funding and with bid writing.

People's Emergency Briefing film

CA-WN is showing the film in Towcester, Brackley, the University of Northampton and Daventry:

The purpose of the film is to spread awareness of the issues, but mostly to get communities to come together to discuss how we progress from where we find ourselves today, which is not very far advanced in terms of adapting to the future. We need to encourage government to do a great deal more, and the People's Emergency Briefing is an initiative that’s picking up steam across the country.

Rachel asked whether she would be able to display leaflets from a group she is part of called Parents for Future. It was agreed to put an item about the group in CA-WN Exchange and that leaflets at the film showing would be very welcome.

Help with stewarding at all showings is needed, Rachel volunteered for Northampton and Jane R and Kate volunteered for Brackley.

Date of next online public meeting

Thursday 18 June at 7:45pm.