Councillors and officers go greener on travel – and will assess ‘if there is a need to travel in the first place’ before making a journey

Wrexham Council’s Executive Board are set to green light a ‘Elected Member and Workforce Travel Plan’ which is aimed at making ‘more environmentally responsible decisions about our methods of business travel’.

The plan is directly linked to the council’s commitments in their Decarbonisation Plan and “where travel is proven to be necessary, to choose the lowest carbon method of undertaking these work-related journeys”.

The council say in the report, “The Plan will guide decision-making and ensure that we all carefully consider and justify the need for travel, and methods by which we travel to conduct our day to day business. It is through such carefully considered journey planning that we can all take action to reduce our carbon emissions, improve air quality, reduce congestion, reduce travel costs and improve the health and well-being of everyone”

Lead Councillor David A Bithell said, “Everybody is buying into this now department wise. We are asking the Executive Board to come back in six months so that we can have some define targets in 2024. But, in the meantime, you’ll see that the the actions (in the report) for each department, about what they need to do to support reducing in two areas. One is reducing the cost, looking at ways we can travel around the county, and work it better. That has been fast tracked a little bit, because of the budget and need to reduce costs. The other part of it, the travel plan, needed a refresh and has been a piece of work across all departments. It has not been easy as it is on top of everything else that we do as a council.

“I honestly believe that we can reduce the cost, and we can look at other ways that we can travel across the county, including more pool cars and vehicles that we can share, especially around the city centre area for different departments”.

The report contains some data to inform the decision making, “In 2019/20, grey fleet vehicles drove over 1,400,000 miles and emitted around 400 tonnes of Green House Gases (GHGs). The data we have comes from mileage claims, so does not include any journeys that were not claimed for. We have seen an improvement on this over the last few years, though it should be noted that some of the data covers the period of the pandemic, when we would have expected business mileage to be significantly lower, inline with the disruption to services”

Councillors and staff are pointed to principles that state “…we individuals should start with the principle of assessing if there is a need to travel in the first place. Remote digital meetings should be investigated as the first option and are a great way to reduce carbon and cost. When travel is deemed necessary for shorter distances, it should be undertaken using a method that produces no emissions such as walking, wheeling and cycling”.

Then, if they have to make a journey and can’t walk, wheel or cycle they should ‘consider using public transport’ – which could prove eye opening to some going by the local provision.

Pool cars and rentals are then the next step, and then ‘finally and only when all other options have been discounted” travel via petrol and diesel vehicles with single occupancy should be used.

There are a few caveats, with it noted “We acknowledge that different services within the Council (and different roles within these services) have different travel demands and needs. For
example, for office-based employees, it’s feasible to shift the majority of meetings to online or virtual. However, for officers who are delivering frontline services to residents, this may not be possible.”

With data being used and further collected to make decisions and assess progress we pointed to seven carbon related projects that were recently “paused” as Wrexham Council look to cut £23.8m off their in year budgets, and asked if this was the type of project that could be affected indirectly or directly in the future due to the lack of data. We asked if that illustrates that the cuts showed that the climate emergency response wasn’t real locally.

Cllr Bithell responded, “I disagree with that. You have the information on the seven projects that will be paused, and as you know our carbon reduction manage is looked at an alternative provision for each of those projects. Clearly, we have a financial position where we need to balance the books, but I think this demonstrates that we’re still committed the decarbonisation project.

“Everybody is committed to carrying on with the work that we’re doing following the declaration of a climate emergency.

“I think the only difficulty I would say, is that if we have more money, we’d like to do more and we’d like to roll it out faster.

“It is really difficult, and we have been pushing this over the years. It hasn’t been easy to push this at the time of financial difficulties but we are trying to make that difference.

“On top of that, we, the Administration put £200,000 pounds into bus services, and that went to tender. We have the tenders back. Now, I’m not going to make an announcement today, but we are hopeful that we will see some additional bus services in the near future.

“I think we are doing a mixture of a few different things to change the behaviours of people on how they travel, and setting some good examples of elected members and staff reducing their business miles and also how we travel to and from work as well will help.”

(Top pic: Delighted councillors head to the Guildhall for a meeting)