Concluding remarks

Against a backdrop of extraordinary activity and inventiveness by local authorities to progress their net-zero goals, this research sends a very clear message. Whatever the timescale they have set themselves to slash their carbon emissions, local authorities need a close working partnership with energy networks.

The idea of drawing up a LAEP is designed to bring those two sets of heads together, but the financial straits councils find themselves in can make it hard to justify spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on such an exercise. Work tackling climate change is a necessary but entirely voluntary process – though more than nine out of ten councils have declared a climate emergency and don’t see it that way in principle. The fact is, though, that when the choice is between care home provision or decarbonising homes, net zero has to wait.

Those interviewed for this research repeatedly point to the pressure to justify expenditure on decarbonisation. Their elected members are often dismayed to find the returns on investment will not be seen for two to three decades. An exercise in mapping out a decarbonisation strategy with a precarious balance sheet can seem like a luxury rather than a priority.

But as Greater Manchester Combined Authority and others that have produced LAEPs attest, having a clear breakdown of where local authorities are starting from, and where they need to get to, including options for how they get there, provides a clarity of thought that has been lacking across the decarbonisation landscape. As Energy Systems Catapult points out, having the scale of the task laid out in front of them allows local authorities to break down the "energy elephant" into bite-sized chunks. Reaching net zero will always be a Herculean challenge, but having a list of priorities and options, even if it’s a very long list, can make it seem more manageable.

It can also provide a more attractive shop window to display the opportunities for private investors to develop heat networks, or offer decarbonisation services and EC charging infrastructure.

So what part can networks play in helping councils progress their decarbonisation plans and develop their LAEP?

Some participants would like to see the networks take over the whole LAEP development process, claiming it makes sense given they hold a lot of the necessary data and have the skills to interpret it.

But ultimately local authorities need to be masters of their own decarbonisation destiny – again, the key is working in consort.

Among the excellent suggestions to emerge from some thought-provoking conversations between our interviewees were ideas such as secondments, jointly funded apprenticeships to develop skills, and better communication that enabled local authorities to feel more confident they weren’t been passed around between different teams inside networks who didn’t themselves speak to each other.

One also commented: “You can give us all the data in the world but it’s no good without the insight. Training to go with that data would certainly help to a certain point but we still have to free up the people to do that. What we really need is staff from networks seconded to us, to allow us to make sense of the data and to tell us what is possible.”