 Hi everyone, thanks for joining us today, just going to give it a few minutes while we admit everybody. Hope it is a sunny where you are, so it isn't leaves today, I've got some blue sky out of my window. I will just keep admitting everyone and we are running this as a meeting today so that we can see you and you can see us but we would appreciate it if you could be on mute, but there is a Q&A section at the end. Great. We really delighted because over 150 people registered today and so we might just spend a few minutes admitting everyone and then we will get going. Thanks for joining us. Okay, and I think my lovely colleague Emily from my site is going to help keep admitting everyone. But I will get started with some introduction and housekeeping. So yeah, huge welcome everybody thanks so much for joining us for this webinar today. And we're only going to be here for an hour and so while my colleagues keep admitting people, I'm going to get started with housekeeping and introductions. So just a little bit of housekeeping thanks so much for coming. The event is being recorded and will be shared afterwards because it's being run as a meeting if you do have your cameras on, we would be able to see you and so please do turn them off if you'd rather not have that. And then yeah please do remain on mute if you can just so that we can hear our speakers. And, but please do post questions in the chat throughout and you'd be really welcome to. And we have got 10 minutes for Q&A at the end. And, but if we don't get all the questions we will be recording them and then we might try and answer them in a blog post afterwards so if you have got a question please do tell us. Great, just to give you a sense of the running order this morning and we're doing this housekeeping I'm going to read some introductions. And then we'll be hearing from Anna Paul Smith from the Center for Public Data, and then over to my colleague Alex Parsons from my society and I'm going to say from the CCC. I'll be talking briefly and then we have councillors Joe Porter and Manesh Perak. And so we're just admitting everyone welcome if you're just joining thanks so much. We are just kicking off. I'm going to start with introducing our speakers. And as I say first we'll have Anna Paul Smith talking us through the Unlocking Pregmented Data Report which was co written by my society and the Center for Public Data. Anna is the director for the Center for Public Data and non-partisan not-for-profit working for stronger data collection and reporting across multiple policy areas. She has previously worked as Chief Product Officer at Data Visualization Startup Flourish and Tech Lead at the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science. I'm going to be my colleague and Alex Parsons who is the senior researcher here at my society and he works across climate freedom of information and our democracy work. He helped write the freedom, sorry, he helped write the fragmented public data report with Anna and is going to be talking about an example of how adopting these recommendations would improve the data we have to work with. Next then will be Owen Devane from the Climate Change Committee. Owen leads the Climate Change Committee's governance team which looks at how effectively governance structures, processes and mechanisms are set up to deliver net zero and adaptation to climate change. This includes considering how local and central government work together and the role that data can play in enabling this. I will be next up after Owen and I'll be talking through some of our thinking about the kinds of local climate data we need and the support that we'd like local authorities to receive to help deliver this data. I'm the policy and advocacy manager here at my society and previously I've worked for another climate charity Hope for the Future and I also used to work in the UK Parliament's outreach team. And then we'll have Councillor Joe Porter, who is a district councillor for Brown Edge and Endon on Staffordshire, Moreland District Council, where he was cabinet member for climate change and biodiversity for four years. He sits on the Conservative Environment, Environment Network Advisory Council and the Canal and River Trust Council. He is also a school governor and Joe works in emergency services and his day job is as a Royal Navy reservist. Sorry, he works in emergency services as his day job and is a Royal Navy reservist. And a very busy man Joe. Thanks for joining us. Minesh Parekh is Labour and Cooperative Councillor and serves as the Labour lead for economic development, culture and skills on Sheffield City Council. He has previously worked as a researcher for Labour's Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Net Zero, and is a graduate of the UK 100 Climate Leadership Academy. He was shortlisted as an inspiring locally elected leader in the climate coalition's 2023 Green Heart Hero Awards. Thank you so much all of our speakers for joining us and to all of you. It seems like we have lots of people in the call today so really, really grateful to have you here with us this morning. And without further ado, I am passing over to Anna so I will stop sharing my slides so Anna can share hers. And we can get started. Cool. Can you see you. Can you see and hear me. Yes, perfect. Fantastic. All right. Thank you for having me. I'm going to talk through at a high level the findings of the report that we wrote with my society and Alex Parsons called Unlocking the Value of Fragmented Public Data which we published earlier this year. I'm a bit of a fraud because unlike probably everybody else on this call, I'm not a climate data expert. I'm going to talk through the problem of fragmented data. And it's a more general problem, but it does particularly affect climate data because so much important climate data is published at the local level. So, first of all, what is fragmented data this weird term. As a thing that happens when many different authorities publishing the same data about the same thing, but not publishing it in the same place and not always to a common standard. So it's information that is held collectively, people are obliged to publish it, but there's no requirements to use a specific format necessarily, or to deposit it centrally and it's fairly common thing that happens. It's a bit of a sad thing because it means lots of publishers are working very hard trying to put data out there, but often you end up with data that's not as useful as it could be for everybody trying to use it. So you have a lot of wasted effort, and you have data scattered across different authorities in different formats. And so, some examples that we have come across there are lots of others. So central local government spending data, so spending over £25,000 for Whitehall departments over £500 for local authorities is published under the local government transparency code and other sort of Whitehall rules. But it tends to be scattered across different local authority websites. And if you want to use it, you have to sort of go to 300 plus different authority websites, try and download CSVs and compile all together. Here's another example published by all departments often in sort of different formats. Local authorities publish things like assets of community value. And there are various other examples, many of which I imagine people here will know a lot about. And so typically if you want to use this data, you have to sort of spend a lot of time finding the data, perhaps writing screen scrapers, pulling this together trying to combine it into into a big sort of usable data set. And this is a powerful quote, which is data scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning data and the other 20% complaining about cleaning data. And I think in case of sort of public data that's even even more true. And so what we did, we wanted to look at this problem and think about ways that it could perhaps be a bit easier for people, especially publishers who are carrying a lot of the weight at the moment. We came up with this sort of three part model of people in the system. And we went and spoke to lots and lots of people who are very grateful to you for giving up their time got too many to name here but if you look at the report there's a long list of people. And the three part model is people who publish data. So typically local authorities, sometimes central government departments, devolved nations. They're kind of doing the doing the hard yards of actually getting data right there. At the other end of the system data users so that's people who use the data which are businesses, researchers, nonprofits, citizens. And then in the middle data conveners who are people who try to coordinate the data. And this might be a part of government. More often it's perhaps a third sector organization, or a kind of socially minded business who pull the data together and make some available to people. And we call those people data conveners. So some examples of sort of people like 360 giving who compile grants data. And various various sort of nonprofits do this. And I think it was Tim Davies who helped us with this model, thinking about is really thinking about whether costs fall in this system. So who's bearing the cost of coordinating and publishing the data. And at the moment, a lot of the cost is falling directly on publishers, a lot of it's falling on users who kind of being tasked with bringing things together and fixing up the formatting. So we spoke to lots of people and sort of found out what their experiences have been. We found the costs are uneven, typical on data publishers and users. Because of this is big opportunity costs, data is not as valid as it could be. But we think that policy makers can help tackle this for just a little bit of investment. And if they do that, then that would unlock the value of a lot of current data. But it would also, you know, potentially make future data publishing even more valuable. And so with no further ado, onto the recommendations. There's three of them. The first to a sort of technical and the third one is more, it's not technical, but it's probably the most important. So we'll build up to a big climax here. So recommendation one is about data standards. And it's, if you are a policymaker and you want to do this, you want your devolved authorities to be publishing data. It's really helpful if you can create a mandatory, but collaborative data standard. And I'm going to talk about each of these words. So data standards for anybody who's unaware is basically just an agreement about what data you're going to publish and how you're going to publish it. So if you're publishing spending data, it might be amount spent purpose, which could be, you know, defined list of purposes. The recipient and you might want to say things like, if it's a company, you've got to include the company number because I'll make data easier to join to other data sets, for example. So it's just an agreement. And we do put the kind of focus on the word agreement because we think it's a collaborative thing that should be developed in collaboration with publishers as much as possible. And that's because publishers are the experts on their data. I also find it tends to work best where the benefits the publisher doing this a clear. So where, when publishers use standards, they then get rewards back in terms of being able to use other people's data. Or, you know, compare themselves to other publishers and so on and so forth. It's very important that it's mandatory because if it's optional, you're going to end up with a lot of data that isn't in the standard and therefore can't be compared or can't be joined. So it is important that it's mandatory, but on the flip side, it's important that it's done an agreement. And we spoke to 360 giving you mentioned earlier. Data convenience for grants data. It's a standard in collaboration with people who make grants. And there's a couple of important things that are sort of good lessons from that standard, which is well used, which is it's fairly simple. So, you know, it encodes a lot of complexity, but all the important information can be entered to just one table. And also, that complexity is not necessarily something publisher has to handle. So they make fairly simple sort of Excel spreadsheets available for publishers and handle the sort of complexity. You know, it's not it's not published to manage moving on. Second recommendation is it's really helpful for users if there can be an online center repository where to find the data. So, you know, one place you go to, and that's what you find data as opposed to going 300 plus local council websites. This could be a list of URLs. That's what you recommend. Simply because it's the simplest and most practical way of doing things. It could be the data itself if you've got the resources to do that. But in any case is the, you know, we recommend the convener is responsible for keeping that list of URLs up to date and making it simple for people to access. And this one's more technical stuff in the report around that. And that's super, super helpful for the end user, if that exists. And then finally, the third and probably most important recommendation from the report is if you're a policymaker, think about who your convener is and make sure they have the staff and the money to provide support to publishers and to users. And that will give you huge returns on your, you know, on your mandate that people should publish. And that looks like giving the convener the ability to make tools to help people publish, which could be online forms or Excel spreadsheets, tools to validate data, which could be, you know, pre-formatted Excel or it could be online validation and simply the staff and the money to make it easy for people to do this. You know, it's very tempting to mandate publication of data. But without providing a little bit of central resource, you know, you're going to get often people are publishing and they don't have huge amount of resource to to unlock the value of what's there. So that's it. Those are our three recommendations. The full report is online. It has sort of more technical discussion in it about some of the points we've made. We'd love to hear any feedback. I think Alex now is going to talk about one of the one of the examples in the report. So I'll hand over to him. Thank you very much. Thanks, Anna. So I'm going to talk a bit about the example we originally brought up on the report was being written back at the start of the year, but now we have some more information around how other ways to get the data and the pros and cons approach. So one of the things you brought up in the report was the idea of how the efficiency energy efficiency of council on homes. So we work with climate emergency UK who produce a council climate scorecard. And as part of that, they wanted to understand the energy efficiency of council and social housing across the country. So first of all, this data is already available as open data, the EPC certificates themselves publishes open data one big beta sets and English councils are required to publish a register their assets to include social housing. In principle, you take post codes from one set, but against post codes in the other set, and then you can do the analysis yourself so that happened above or anyone. However, because the data is fragmented across all the different councils, rather than joining two big data sets, you need to reconcile hundreds of different data sets in different formats. So the benefits of open data is supposed to be that can be used in ways that weren't originally intended, but with fragmented data that is just so much harder because these setup costs. And because the original requirement to publish the assets data didn't specify how to publish publishers and local councils are doing all this work to create the data and put it in public. But without being in a way that users can make the easiest use of it. So there is not the sort of use and value being seen all the way through the trade chain. So a huge amount of potential value that work was already happening is being lost because the setup work wasn't done right. So instead, trying to get more information about this issue coming from the UK use freedom of information to ask local authorities for information about this distribution of the EPC ratings. They then used a huge network of volunteers they use that using like national volunteers that will bring all this together to bring all the information together into one big data set. So this data set fed into their scorecards website but also as its own data set they pass it on to financial times. And this I sort of think brings out a few of the different sort of benefits of bringing together in one place. So for one thing is it can highlight differences across the country, but it's also about the national story telling me use the data but like obviously the key point of the scorecards thing is to an extent being able to compare councils in different areas. One of the things they really want to pull out and we want to put up for this data is that where is not this isn't about where one area is doing when I was doing badly, but where we can pick out new national stories speak to national decision makers. So in this case, I'm updating to compare contrast, but also it's about saying like, what is the picture of energy efficiency in social housing across the country. So making good use of fragmented data can convert local stories to national ones, and that's key when so much decision making power remains at the national level, even if it would be better if it wasn't. So in this case, the story where the times was able to emphasize the importance of national funding and programs, and in the sense in the sense that the obstacles were not always local decision makers but were the absence of national support to make the changes needed. So in a way that by having it all in one place, the story about where issues are becomes much clearer and also the story about what the national policy response should be. So in the end, this was a happy data story in that they got the data they wanted, and they were able to make use of the data. We like freedom of information because we're in what they know we think it's useful, but I sort of see it as should be like a last resort. Disclosure law, it has costs for requestings and authorities, and in this case still requires a lot of volunteers to join up the data so what we want is more efficient ways of publishing data that are less work for everyone. So like data publishers are already publishing the data required to do this it's just not usable enough, but if we get it right from the start and the cost go down right through the system, and the data is much more useful as a result. If the if our recommendations in this report have been available around 2015, the hundreds of require requests made to produce the data set wouldn't have been necessary the data would already been usable in a public format. And that's what we want is that we want to get benefit to this public data at the lowest cost possible across the system. It's the end of my slides. And if so on time, in fact Alex you're one minute ahead so you get bonus points today. And brilliant thanks so much. I think we're now handing over to Owen Devane from the Climate Change Committee. Thanks Julia morning everyone I'll try not to squander on timeless. Yeah, as Julia said earlier, I, I'm Owen Devane I lead the governance work stream at this climate change committee the CCC. Just as a brief background. What is the CCC. We are the UK government independent advisor on climate change mitigation and adaptation issues we were established under the 2008 Climate Change Act. We have a dual role to advise both government and parliament and that essentially comprised of three duties we advise on emissions pathways through setting five yearly carbon budgets, advising on the level of those carbon budgets at a national level. We also report to parliament on progress towards meeting these and adapting to changing climate through our annual progress reports and five yearly climate change risk assessments. And we provide whatever ad hoc advice is required by the government at the time. And increasingly in recent years this role has become mirrored across the devolved administrations as well so we provide similar reports from the Scottish government etc. But broadly speaking therefore our focus has been to date mostly on central government. And our role is to advise central government to advise parliament on the sort of progress delivered by central government, but increasingly in the past couple of years we've turned our attention to thinking about those questions about how high level strategies on paper turn into concrete action on the ground. And that means addressing questions of delivery it means thinking about how we deliver things what the enablers are and crucially who's delivering them. And our assessment is that about a third of all emissions reduction action, and in fact will be more than that on the adaptation side is going to come through, or at a local authority level. And this goes way beyond the sort of two to five percent of emissions that are directly under their control through influence of their procurement powers of their sort of influencing powers on local communities etc. And you will all know far more than me about this. But just suffice to say we've begun to focus a bit more on how our advice can be more useful to local authorities and also can identify where the kind of barriers or opportunities are for central government to do things that can enable this to happen a bit better. And one of those areas is data. So what have we said about the role of data. Well, fundamentally, we are an evidence driven organization we, we focus on what the, what the evidence and therefore what the data tells us around what needs to happen. And what is happening and kind of reconciling the two and trying to build an evidence based picture of what we can recommend what we what we need to say needs to change. So, I've looked back at a couple of our recent reports and preparing for this talk, our progress report which we published in June of this year, and then our reports which we published alongside our 2020 advice on the sixth carbon budget about what is for local authorities I've looked back into the kind of quick control of the word data in those reports and data comes up 20 times in our progress report recommendations, and it comes up 49 times in our local authorities report. So this is obviously something that is very relevant to our work across across all of our sectors and all of our aspects of our of our work. I'm not going to go through all 69 of those of those references you'll be pleased to hear but I tried to kind of tie them together into some sort of cross cutting themes so starting at kind of the high level the top level. And something we've recently developed is what we call our monitoring framework, which is a collection of data indicators that allow us to track progress in key sectors they. We're not only at the outcome we're looking to achieve which is the emissions reduction but also at the sort of intermediate outputs that are needed to get get there so on the transport side we have data on electric vehicle uptake charge point installations, the use of different modes of transport public attitudes towards those different modes etc. We develop this framework and importantly it's not just this collection of data indicators but it's also a set of maps that show how these linked together to achieve the outcomes required. And obviously that identifies some areas in which we don't actually have the data that we need or there's a kind of link in the chain that's absent. At this level, we've called on government to essentially focus its work on filling these gaps so that we can have that joined up picture of how all the data how all the, the deployment actions required work together to achieve the ultimate outcome. We've also underscored that government needs to do better on transparency made a good start on this with its carbon budget delivery plan back in March. We build on this to set out how it plans to monitor delivery evaluate performance of different measures and identify when and where there might be need for contingencies if things are seen to be going off track. That's kind of the, the national government level, then coming down to more local level. So the recommendation again focusing on sort of how local and central work together is that there needs to be some sort of agreed position on what the roles and responsibilities are for delivering the tasks required, and how those kind of are divided between the needs of government whether you call this a framework or something else there have been lots of examples produced but if you don't have something like this. There's a potential that there's a huge amount of local commitment but definitely very varied understanding on how to act on this and what's what actions are needed how things should work together etc. So if you do have it, then you can begin to tie things like powers funding data requirements to it. Obviously we've got the local net zero forum, it should be a good first step but our understanding is it's not yet delivering to its full potential. In my view that's the kind of fundamental framework requirements. But without that, essentially we have lots of local climate action, but we don't really know if that those all those local plans add up to deliver what's required nationally. If they're going to work together constructively or in fact they're going to interfere with each other and work destructively. And in fact what the key enabling actions are needed from government to actually help them them happen in the first place. And we're clearly therefore missing opportunities to harness this potential and data is quite a key part of that. I've just heard that the current landscape is very fragmented. You'll know this the range of organizations that local authorities get climate data from the government the OS Ashton apsee the LGA scatter tool Tindall center, carbon trust science based targets, a debt salix etc. Not to mention people like ourselves, universities, each other consultants I could go on for probably the whole hour. But essentially what that leads to is a lot of wasted effort, pulling all that together duplicating as well the similar work that's being done elsewhere. And where there is good work going on it makes it hard to learn from that hard to replicate best practice. So, essentially, what we see is a key opportunity here is for government to take this hardest this and try and build a platform of work to simplify and standardize that that data landscape, and it links into that framework requirement it links into that ask about proper contingency planning because your data is a prerequisite for both of those. And then my final minute or two just to quick some eyes of what we at the CCC are doing in this space. So we're just about starting work now on our advice on the level of the seventh carbon budget which we will publish in 2025. And this call is pretty good timing because just this morning we've launched our sort of launch document on this so I'd encourage you to go to our website and have a look at that. As part of that there is a call for evidence and we're very keen to invite responses to that as to the sorts of evidence data advice you'd like to see within that that publication. It will involve refreshing all our analytical pathways of how the whole economy gets to net zero. So you'll find in that document our broad brush approach to developing this key data set. And as I said opportunities for you to feed in what you'd like to see one particular area I'd like to highlight is that we're aiming to try and make our advice a bit more useful at a local level. While we're not going to be able to develop bespoke pathways for local authorities. We would like to try and use some example areas or something like that to essentially show how our national pathways can be interpreted locally. And then try and be as transparent as possible in publishing our workings to enable others to replicate that approach based on their own local data or based on evidence that they have but we're very much open to your suggestions. So I'll just end by saying please go and take a look at the call for evidence and please do get in touch if you have thoughts on how we might do this most effectively. Thank you. Thanks so much, Owen. I've actually just posted the call for evidence in the chat everybody to have a look at. And so yeah please do take a look at that that was brilliant. Now it's over to me and so I will just wrestle with my slides if you'll give me. Great. Do this great and now I just want to see you all. Okay, brilliant. I think this will hopefully lead on nicely from everything we've heard so far. And so, as alongside the fragmented data report we've done a bit of thinking about, okay, what kind of data do we want. And so we're saying that we'd like a bit more data we'd like that to be joined up but we think it would be useful to be clear about that data. And we think that there are three kinds of data that are useful to us. And the first is an obvious one and is something that obviously a lot of councils are already delivering, and especially those who are in Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland because there are statutory reporting templates in place there. And that is structured data of council scoped one to three emissions. We really welcome these reporting templates and we really are grateful for this type of data is very important piece of the puzzle, but is just one piece and I'd like to speak a bit more to what I was just saying about what else makes up that one third figure that he just mentioned. Needless to say there is also a debate on how we calculate scoped emissions but I didn't think that in this one our webinar we ought to get into that today, and maybe another time. And this second kind of data then in addition to the scoped emissions is all about understanding the local authorities influence and activities in their wider era and so as I mentioned this is things like procurement, but also all of those strategies that council officers are so busy and brilliant working on across the country. And this helps just us draw a more detailed picture of the work that is taking place. And as already mentioned is all about sharing best practice because there is brilliant work out there going on, but there is no joined up easy way to look at it. And within this second kind of data, we would include organizational plans and targets relevant to climate change. So, obviously, many counts across the country have published, sorry have released net zero dates and plans to go alongside this. I think the council school cards project originally was designed to evaluate these plans, and now is obviously looking at actions as well. And we would like to be able to offer a route for councils to publish this directly and capture the work that they are doing internally and externally to support carbon saving across their wider community. And so yeah, these carbon saving projects will be unique to the reporting body but will be and there will be versions of them across the country and so where we can join that up we think it would be really useful. And can illustrate what is taking place across the authorities local area and may provide inspiration and opportunity for others. And then finally within just this second category is risk assessments and action plans for climate adaptation and adaptation is obviously such an important piece of the puzzle that we don't always hear about, but we know that councils are working on. And this helps to build a picture of planning across the local area. And again sharing this will help councils facing similar challenges, such as coastal communities or flood prone areas where we can share practice with this we think that we should. And then this third and final type of data that we are looking for is about council's own progress assessments. And for the data people in the room what we're talking about here is a free text where we can semantically search being most helpful because we really want to understand this in council's own words. And that's because we're really looking at here and basically a more holistic understanding of progress made and progress to date, and so in progress that needs to happen. And so this type of data would include the personnel systems and processes to manage climate monitoring and reporting. And so we want to know who is doing the work and how the resource allocation happens, because we think that there's real learning that can come from this. And also then progress into the last reporting period, and key areas of focus for the period ahead. This would give a vital sense of context and perspective from inside the reporting body, and help situate the scale to work undertaken against the work yet to be done. We just know that there is so much brilliant work taking place here, and we want to try and understand which interventions are proving the most helpful and which aren't. So if we can share that learning and reflection, we think that that's really, really valuable data that adds so much around that kind of scoped data. Brilliant. And then on to this next part, which is that we really want to be clear here and recognize that asking councils to publish more data, and especially climate data can't just happen in a silo and it is, you know, we're operating a situation where council resources are already very stretched. We're really lucky to be a part of the blueprint coalition, which is a coalition of local government and climate NGOs, all who are advocating for more clarity and more support for local government on the net zero delivery task. And so please do come and have a look at our social media and things like that and follow their work where you can. As has already been mentioned, the local net zero forum has the possibility of being, you know, a really great opportunity for more clarity and connection between national local government, but there is a lack of transparency around at the moment at the moment and you know we would like to see that and really fulfill its potential. And then another government body, the office for local government off log. And we'd like to see a bit more coherence about that is in the early days obviously, and we know there's been some communication recently about how they prioritized their metrics. And we can see that climate is quite low in those at the moment, even though there are some elements like waste and recycling. Again, I'd be really interested for people in the call to for their reflections on this too. And then finally the central digital and data office as Anna said right at the beginning, we think that this central government convening role is really important somebody has to manage that data, publish it, make sure that it is easy to use and can fulfill that role that we've talked about throughout about sharing best practice and making it really useful for council officers. And so the central digital and data office may well be the place that we look to for that. And I'm actually ahead of time I do usually talk quite quickly. And so maybe we will just I'll just see if there's anything in the chat that I should respond to now. And I think we'll come to those at the end, but I will stop sharing my slides. It's not nice to be ahead of time. And I think I'll now pass over to, please do ask obviously anything wasn't clear there. And I will now pass over to our first counselor which is counselor Joe Porter. So the last little talk to question that we asked our two counselors today is how can local climate data be useful to you and just some reflections on being a counselor who is working in the area of climate change. So I'll hand over to you Joe. Thank you very much Julia and thank you to everyone who's attended today it's really important that we have events like this and we can share best practice and expertise amongst each other. My name is counselor Jay Porter and I'm a district counselor for Brown Edge and Ending here in the beautiful Staffordshire Mullins just on the edge of the Peak District. And I was cabinet member for climate change and biodiversity for four years. And we've been on quite a journey since we declared climate emergency back in 2019 when a lot of other councils across the country started that journey. And first we'll just want to mention why I became a local counselor. So I joined politics if you like to try and leave our world in a better state than we found it. So the environment has always been a top issue for me personally as well as politically. But ultimately I want to improve the lives of local people and I believe that by climate change and restoring nature we can improve people's quality of life as well. So we can all unite behind this important issue now. We all know that councils play a vital role in this topic. We all know that we can't achieve these ambitions without the roles of local authorities and communities across the country. As previously mentioned councils have huge amount of influence on this. Obviously we've got powers and resources at our disposal. We know that the resources bit of that is a bit more constrained than it perhaps was in the past. But the way I see local authorities we are where the local strategic leaders on this. We're here to set the framework, set the direction and we're kind of where the conveners if you like of these debates locally. So we're here to bring local businesses, community groups, residents together to come up with solutions on climate change and other environmental issues that affect all our different communities. Because I think councils have a huge amount of influence on the ground and as local ward councillors in particular I don't think it should be underestimated how much we can do with communities in our own local council wars to try and have an influence on climate change. And I think in the coming years councils have a very important role to play in this particularly on things like biodiversity net gain, planning and trying to decarbonise all our different operations. I mean one of the biggest challenges that I think we all get face is the fact that councils come in different shapes and sizes. So one of the questions that Julie sent round was around comparing councils. And one thing that I think is a particular challenge is comparing councils because obviously we've mentioned the climate scorecards which has been really useful for councils to identify opportunities to tackle climate change. But it's difficult because you've obviously got some very small councils and very large councils across the country and we all come in different shapes and sizes and we all represent different kinds of communities with different needs and lots of different things really. So I think that's important to consider when it comes to this debate. But what we've done in Staffordshire Mourns is every year we have an annual climate change report where what we do is we monitor our progress every year of what we've achieved. So we have a net zero target of 2030 for the district council. At the moment we are reviewing that for the whole district. We know it's going to be very challenging to achieve that for the whole district but for the council specifically we stuck behind our 2030 target which we have recently reviewed. We are sticking behind that for now because we believe it's the right thing to do despite the fact it's going to be a challenge. And every year we report on where we're up to, we look at what projects are going and what new projects we can take forward to advance progress on this agenda. And what we do in terms of scrutiny we have our regular community panel meetings throughout the year and at those meetings members can scrutinise the portfolio holder and the offices. And we can report back on how different things are going and every year we'll have like a big annual sort of like climate change review meeting where we can review how things are going. But as I say we keep this as an ongoing thing we keep it in. I mean what we're trying to do is we try and make sure that the climate change strategy is a living document that can be changed and added to because that's really important because data on this is constantly changing. So it's really important we keep that as a living document. And one project that we've just done very recently and the reason I mentioned this because I think nature restoration and climate change are very interlinked and it's very important that we consider that as part of climate change. So we've just had our plan for nature report that I commissioned two years ago from Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and I think this is quite an important one from the data point of view because Staffordshire Wildlife Trust did a lot of habitat mapping where they looked at different kinds of habitats and the quality of them and what we can do in terms of nature restoration for each of those different habitats. What we've got is we've got a target to restore to have 30% of all our land across the district for nature restoration. At the moment we have 17% I think it is roughly so we've got to climb up by about 13% to reach that target. So we have a rural area so we've got a bit of a head start compared to some of the more urban parts of the country. And in terms of monitoring that we'll be working with the Staffordshire ecological records. They were part of Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and they'll be monitoring our progress on how we restore all those different kinds of habitats across the Staffordshire moorlands. And obviously we know that habitats like for example, Peatlands which store 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon altogether across the UK so quite a lot of carbon. Progress on things like restoring carbon will be able to monitor that progress and how all that matches up with the 30% target that we're going to have by 2030. And there'll be lots of opportunities to do that across the district to all those different habitats. But one thing that we've done that I wanted to mention that I think was quite a powerful thing from a data point of view was obviously when it comes to all of this some people connect better with data some people connect better with anecdotes so what we tried to do to represent climate data to the public is we had a project across Staffordshire called the Carbon Bubble where what we did is we had this massive balloon that went around the county to get all the main towns across the county. And the carbon bubble represented one tonne of carbon and what happened was community groups were able to come along and see the carbon bubble and they were able to see the fact that obviously one tonne of carbon was represented in that bubble. And it was a great way of engaging with members of the public on this issue so they could see all that data represented in that. And that's something we've done across the entire county as part of the Staffordshire sustainability board which brings together all 10 Staffordshire councils together under one body. And through that body obviously we work together on data sharing on lots of different issues because obviously like we say sometimes it can be really difficult when you've got lots of different kinds of data out there but on the staff which is the Staffordshire sustainability board we all try and work together as councils to share that data and share best practice expertise etc. Thank you. Thanks so much Joe that was brilliant really really really fascinating to find out what's happening inside and outside the council and all the work you're doing. Perfect I will pass over to Manesh who is another councillor and I'll allow you to tell us your thoughts thanks so much Manesh. And thanks so much for inviting me to you know share my thoughts as well about the place of local authorities in this picture to give a brief introduction. I'm Manesh, I'm a Labour and Corrective councillor in Sheffield have been for 18 months and I hold an economic development culture and skills portfolio. I guess for me I became a councillor because I wanted to see more ambition on the climate crisis you know particularly with a focus on measures that would improve people's material conditions, such as decarbonising housing and lowering energy bills something that's been become particularly acute since and more broadly because I want to see better outcomes for my city. I think the two main points I want to cover today are both you know what data is needed to support councils and what data is needed to support councillors these are interrelated but they are different. Picking up on the second first, so I work part time for a Member of Parliament in my day job and what's really interesting from that perspective of you know seeing both my inbox and hers is the real disparity in terms of information in terms of data and reports that are shared with you as decision makers. You know councils have their own policy teams research and compiling data but the thing we have to recognise is 13 years into the era of austerity that is a really limited resource and those are brilliant but stretched people. MPs on the other hand will receive a litany of emails brief things reports on an even daily basis. I think there is a real disparity in the information councils receive compared to MPs and there's certainly nothing you know tailored to your area in the way MPs receive you know regularly receive unsolicited reports with constituency level data. I think there's much less ward level data available than there is constituency level data, presumably because researchers and data gatherers know that Parliament is the supreme decision making body in the country that with the most centralized state in Europe but that is a real problem for local decision making and I think that's something we do have to look at addressing where data is gathered in the first place and what levels and what purposes at all. We know there's a need for councils to leave the way in addressing the climate crisis. Even if there was more willingness from central government, this isn't something that can be tackled centrally or top down over a third of emissions are under local authority control and for authorities like mine as a city council, which has authority and responsibility for transport owns large swathes of housing is essential for councils and local authorities to be leading in this space. As mentioned previously we have that also convening role and the role in ensuring a pipeline for greener jobs. One of the ways Sheffield is doing that for example is making retrofitting courses free and linking retrofitting projects with the local colleges and FE institutions to ensure we'll have a skilled and trained workforce to build a greener economy. But a lack of data about problem areas is a real issue you know for example if we didn't know EPC ratings in wards across the city how would we know where to focus retrofitting efforts and similarly and you know more acutely how do we know where to focus household sport grants during the cost of living crisis. Because we are as local parties having to do in that upfront. I guess life saving work at the same time as we're trying to build a more sustainable future and the impossibility of both of those is stymied by high quality data high quality access I think. I wouldn't say there's publicly I think local authorities and local councils are under lobbied compared to parliament and parliamentarians. And that is a serious issue. We don't know and we only have a partial view of this the modes by which people travel and their emissions impacts how can we plan for a modal shift. And that data is also vital for reassuring people about the decisions we are taking that we are taking the right decisions or cover how responsibility for clean air came to local councils. So that's an area where it's really hard to reassure residents about the decisions we're taking that they are the right ones and it's where misinformation abounds. Because data about the negative impacts is not widely available of clean air and particularly a local level for example. How many people are hospitalized with respiratory issues due to clean air is hard to make that link or data showing results from reduced pollution does not follow as quickly as you know action is being taken. We know there are strong correlations between you know poor air and race or poor air and class but we don't have a strong enough local data pool to make a strong case for this and therefore you know the conviction and potential strength of our arguments are really diminished because of that. I think there's you gain a salience of argument you can tell your arguments much better if you actually have a stronger base of data to build on I'll leave it there because I know. I'm happy to expand on that later on as well. That was really brilliant. Thank you so much. And great we have only one minute over nine minutes for Q&A which is perfect and we will be finishing 11 because I do value everyone's time and the other things you'll have to do today. And please do put your questions in the chat or if you'd like to raise your hand and speak if you're very welcome to. I'm just going to have a look through what we've got already and we had a shout out from John about the environmental data network, which I have to also plug because it's brilliant and really great to really great network and so for as many people as possible to be in that I think would be amazing. And then Paul had a great question about in terms of gathering new data. Do we think that local authorities are sufficiently aware of the technologies and tools available to gather data, which is a really great point today what we've been talking about is is what we're doing with that data and but the tools available to local councils and I think Paul you mentioned some really great examples in there. I wondered if any of the panel wants to build on that or we can just take it as a great point. I think it's safe to say councils are not sufficiently aware and I think that's something we can say will stop. I mean, as an example of Sheffield in the civil society area has a fantastic organization called Sheffield digital and it's an area where it really exemplifies the need for cultural shift in our organizations that we have people on the ground and there's fantastic work to compile data together. And that is really difficult to then imagine council decision making processes, you know, obviously, as I spoke to there is an issue of national data and data gathering. I think councils aren't agile enough as organizations to learn from what's already happening. So I think. No, I think people aren't sufficiently aware. I think there is also the link to austerity our policy teams are much too small. I think we often forget these are the areas that will cut first in 2010 is places like council policy teams because they're seen as superfluous. They're not, you know, social care. Unfortunately, that's the reality of it. I think councils definitely need to be better at learning what tools are available. I think there is also a job of we need to resource these teams and that needs central funding. Thanks so much Manesh. That was really helpful. And I will go on to the next question unless you have any other thoughts from the panel. Great. Sorry, I'm just trying to follow the chat. Does parish online collate and provide much of this data in one place. And we had a question I wouldn't know about. But maybe that's one to come back to. I don't know if anyone had any thoughts on that. Okay, we could come back to it or we could answer it afterwards. And lovely question from Councillor Sarah Barker Kings Hill PC and how staff shirt and more than involving their parish and town councils and residents. And I think that one is to you Joe a bit more about. Oh, sorry. Would you like to speak to your question, Sarah. I'm just answering councillor Stuart with Intons about parish online. I'll pop my email in the chat now for him. I was going to contact him anyway because it looks as though parish councils town councils are not highly represented here. So that's why I was interested in Joe in asking Joe how Staffordshire and Morelands are getting involved with their parish and town councils. I've had a quick look at the website but not gone in any data. So just a couple of words as to how they are engaging. If he's there, of course, he might have disappeared. Joe, we can see you and I think you're on mute. Yeah, I'm happy to answer that. Yes. Yeah, so thank you for that question, Sarah. With regard to parish and town councils, what we've done in Staffordshire and Morelands is we've got a network called the Staffordshire and Morelands Green Network that my colleague, Jillian, who's our climate change officer established with myself last year. And what that group does it meet throughout the year involves parish councils, community groups and local charities and businesses to come together on projects on climate change. We also have our climate change community fund that parish councils and community groups can all work together on community projects on where they can access up to £500 for local grassroots projects that they can deliver in their local communities on the ground. And another thing that I will quickly add that we also do is we have our parish assembly where our parish councils all come together on local issues. And quite often at those meetings, climate change will come up and what we try and do is we try and ensure that parish councillors are invited to all our climate change training as well. So we try and work as much as possible with parish and town councils because we know how important they are on the ground. I mean, I sit on two parish councils, so I know how important they are. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. That was excellent. I will go on, delve into your website further. But I think from what you've said, you're engaging with parish councils. I live in Kent. It's an uphill struggle at the moment, but we'll get there. Please do email me. Thank you very much indeed. It won't be probably very quickly, but I will. Thank you. Thanks so much. That was brilliant. And great. I will just have one or two more and then I will do our closing. So we had a question, what data would be key to collect for most climate adaptation projects? I think that was a brilliant question that maybe it should be a blog in and of itself that my society should write because I don't think I have a good answer for that right now. And I don't know if anybody didn't want to give any thoughts on that. I'm slightly looking at you, but it's a big question so. It's too big a question for 3 minutes. I talked about our monitoring frameworks. We have 1 for mitigation and 1 for adaptation. And in both cases, they set out a list of what we think are the priority data gaps. And I think someone else has done some analysis of our adaptation report and concluded that almost 40% of our adaptation outcomes lack relevant or up to date data sets to enable us to make judgments. So it's clearly a big, a big challenge in the adaptation space. Brilliant. Thanks so much. That's really, really interesting. And we have a great question here about other data sources that councils are using to analyze their emissions. Again, it's something that I'd like us to publish something on because I, as you say, there is a data lag for some of the data that central government gives out another plug for the environmental data network because questions like that go there quite a lot. I think it's a great space for officers and other people in councils who are working on this to share and that perhaps somebody will also put something in the chat. And so I won't answer that now I don't think but a very good question and great to highlight that problem. Thank you, Ed for your thoughts as well and the need for a clear mandate and good and ambiguous non technical guidance absolutely my society we are very keen on making digital tools accessible and giving guidance which is actually usable and useful and you know, I think that was really well put. I'm curious for thoughts on how this can be done realistically. And how can local authorities can work together to collect data to collaborate. I think a key point here is that central government might need to lead some of this and be the kind of driver behind that but yeah, I'm actually not going to throw that out to the panel but maybe that's something that in terms like next steps we will include in the blog that will send out after this so really well put money thank you so much. Okay, I don't think I can go through any more because it is now 1059 and I'm desperate to close at 11. And so all that is left to say is thank you so much for joining us today. We will share the recording of this to the email address you registered with. I'm going to put it on YouTube as a link because I did hear from some council officers that they can't access soon. And so you will have a multiple you have multiple formats with which to re enjoy this. And in the email that will send you afterwards there will also be a feedback form you'll be used to hearing this but it would really help us if you would fill that out to demonstrate our impact to learn for future events, all of that good stuff. That's with us on social media and also via our newsletters and email afterwards will give you the option to sign up to the climate newsletter. And so all that is left today is thank you so much to the panel for your thoughts it's been really brilliant and thank you to all of you for coming. And I hope you have a lovely rest of your Tuesday. See you again soon. Thanks so much.