Well, one of them, at least…

A council officer has admitted under questioning that since the official Manchester Climate Change Action Plan “wasn’t in their [businesses’] language” then the council did not pursue endorsements of official Council policy*, and instead allowed businesses to sign up to far less specific “Environmental Business Pledge.”

This extraordinary admission was made on Wednesday 2nd October by the head of the Council’s Environmental Strategy Team, during an official meeting. It was greeted without as much as a murmur of surprise, so well-trained and self-selected are we people who attend meetings of groups with titles like the “Environmental Sustainability Sub-group.”

The question was posed by Councillor Victor Chamberlain, (Lib Dem, Chorlton) who noted that only 220 organisations have endorsed the Manchester Climate Change Action Plan, created by stakeholders in 2009 and also going by the confusing name “Manchester: A Certain Future.”

The two headline goals of the plan were a 41% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, on a 2005 baseline, by the year 2020, and the creation of a “low carbon culture.”   The council officer conceded that the original target was indeed to get 1000 organisations endorsing the plan and that only 220 had done so.

It remains to be seen how far members of the public will get if they refuse to pay their council tax or car-parking fines on the basis that the regulations “weren’t written in their language.”  MCFly suspects that these privileges might only be open to a certain class of “person.”

Marc Hudson
mcmonthly@gmail.com

* At the time, in 2009, the Council made a very great play that this was a plan for the whole city, not just the Council.  What they clearly meant was “a plan for all those in the city who will sign up, since we aren’t going to lift a finger to persuade anyone, or do any prolonged advocacy.”  This is leadership?  Really? God help us all.