Use torches instead of expanding street lighting to rural areas, urges government climate adviser

Britain’s local councils must re-evaluate their responsibilities and try to see everything they do through a lens of dealing with the worsening climate crisis, one of the government’s leading environment advisers has said.

For example, local authorities should not approve relatively large housing developments for smaller villages, or put street lights into rural areas where people could use torches, said Lord Deben, the chairman of the Climate Change Committee, which is an independent advisory body.

Light pollution in rural areas has been named as a key reason for the sharp decline in insects across Europe in recent decades, with fears the “insect apocalypse” could result in a catastrophic collapse of ecosystems across the natural world.

Giving evidence to Parliament’s Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee (HCLG), Lord Deben warned: “The pressures to urbanise the countryside are largely antagonistic to dealing with climate change.”

He said street lighting in rural areas was unnecessary: “When people move into the countryside you just have to say to them, ‘this is not the town, we do not have street lighting in this village, you have a torch, that’s just how we do it’.”

But he said street lamps remain important in towns where their use can make people feel safer and more likely to walk.

Councils “must be looking at everything they do, their waste collection, road building, so they are thinking all the time, ‘what is the climate change issue here, what do we have to do to make our contribution to net zero’,” he said.

Lord Deben also told the committee it made no sense to allow the building of hundreds of homes in villages where most people commute to work by car, and instead urged councils to focus on building new homes in cities or towns, or near railway stations.

“You’ve got to plan your future around hubs so that people can get to work on their feet or a bicycle, not by car,” he said.

He also attacked rising sales of large SUVs and called for them to be taxed more heavily to reflect the greater environmental burden they have, both in terms of the space they take up, and their emissions.

“SUVs are really, frankly, for many who buy [them] unnecessary. They are not driving over terrain – it’s become a fashion – and we have to recognise there is a cost to that and we have to charge that.”

Lord Deben told the committee that central government must work in partnership with local authorities to deliver on the UK’s targets to cut emissions to zero overall by 2050, or the goals will not be met.

He said people have greater confidence in local authorities to deliver schemes such as retrofitting homes with energy efficiency measures, and councils know their areas, but he added that they need more information to make decisions, and called for a new planning act to reflect the country’s climate commitments.

“It’s not fair to put the local authority into a position where it doesn’t have the statutory backing with a proper planning bill which covers that and the informational backing,” he said.

“We’ve got to be radical and very direct because we don’t have any time.”

He added: “We need a planning act which fully represents the facts that we are signed up to net zero internationally and nationally, otherwise we’re not going to do it.”