Leader of Manchester City Council Richard Leese has suggested that councillors might want to get on their bikes as part of their efforts to lead by example and engage with their constituents around climate change. In a wide-ranging interview conducted yesterday morning [see full transcript here], he also repeated his enthusiasm about “carbon literacy” as a potential engine of low-carbon job creation, re-affirmed the importance of Airport City, and extolled the virtues of Annual Carbon Budgets.

Asked what Councillors could be doing to engage both with the Council and their constituents, the 15 year leader of the Council, who is up for re-election in his Crumpsall ward in May, said “I think there’s a little bit of leading by example, as well. Not everybody’s going to be able, even if they want, to ride a bike, but there are behavioural things that I think councillors need to do. But also when it comes to a planning issue or other local issues they are engaged with. Every ward has a ward plan – it’s to ensure that climate change and environmental strategies are an integral part of those plans as well.”

Airport City was first item on the agenda, and the Council Leader was predictably robust in its role as creating (rather than merely shifting) jobs within Greater Manchester. He sees the spectre of peak oil being allayed with new highly-efficient engines being developed by Airbus and Boeing, and dismissed a hypothetical freezing/shrinking of Manchester Airport as very bad news that would not last.

Asking about Biodiversity (the Council has recently released a new Action Plan on this), MCFly was told “If you look at what we’re working on for designs for new housing areas and so on, we are increasingly taking the best practice – mainly from Northern Europe – in terms of how we increase green, water management… increasingly within green spaces it won’t all be sculptured lawns and so. We have a greater use of tree planting species that will encourage insects and birds and so on…”

The half hour interview is available as a rush transcript. Hyperlinks to various matters raised will be added over the coming days.

MCFly welcomes criticism – what questions didn’t we ask (we ruefully thought of a few, minutes after leaving). What questions should we have asked differently? What killer-facts should we have brought to the table? We are all ears…