Greater Manchester Environment Plan 2019–2024

5 min readMay 1, 2019

Chapter 8: Our businesses

An in-depth analysis of city region’s environment policy and where it falls short, presented in a series of 10 chapters related in the style of a fictional leader using language the crisis calls for #TellTheTruth

Now when it comes to business, we’re going to put a lot of faith in you guys doing the right thing.

Because most of the things that need to change are not the subject of regulations — yet anyway — so you’re going to have to do it voluntarily — which is going to mean eating into profits.

Housebuilders, what are you waiting for?

Having said that when it comes to new buildings — that is something we can regulate using the powers we already have in GM.

We’ve decreed all new buildings in GM need to be zero carbon from 2028.

I expect you’re wondering why we don’t go further and start that NOW, given it’s one of the few things we already have the power to do ….

I wondered that too but am told house-builders are a powerful lobby so we ‘have to give them plenty of time to alter their business models …’ which is clearly laughable given we’ve been talking about it for…only about a decade.

And of course, the government let them off the hook once already, back in 2015 when a national plan to require new-builds to be carbon neutral during day-to-day running, was scrapped.

To date we’ve also had problems when a new-build buyer is a middleman who sells it on — sometimes they don’t want to cough up for the energy efficient measures to be installed — and don’t mind if the family who eventually live there get lumbered with a gas-guzzling pup.

However, let’s not get distracted — new builds only make up a small proportion of our housing stock (though we do have another 201,000 planned for Greater Manchester) so the retrofit revolution is mainly how we’ll tackle this ‘gas gap’ in the medium term.

Though of course as it currently stands, its you private homeowners who’ll be paying for that — whereas when we do it this way, its the businesses.

So we say — housebuilders — why not do this from next year voluntarily anyway ? You’ve seen David Attenborough’s shocking warnings and heard Greta Thunberg and the other school strikers?

What are you waiting for?

In fact, I can’t help but wonder if these isn’t an easier, cheaper, fairer way — some bigger bolder moves that would tackle much of this at the source.

For instance taxing all the dirty fuel companies for the price of some of this work (and thus only capturing a fair and true cost of their product), given the things we’re describing are national problems.

But it seems that’s not on the agenda …. yet.

Shame, because of course ultimately it is us — in the form of our taxes — whether it is in the form of grants funded by our taxes, forking out directly, not to mention paying for the actual impacts of climate change — who will be paying for this one way or other.

Shut that door!

Do you own a shop, office, hotel, factory, or warehouse?

Well guys ! We need you to move much faster — to get heating and cooling demand down by 10% in five years and 22% by 2040.

So — no more open shop doorways blasting out heat, no more default-on air con you can’t turn off in hotels, no more heating, lights or IT kit left on overnight, no buildings where it’s impossible to find stairs only lifts — you get the picture. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course on this one — as you know we don’t actually monitor your properties’ heat performance and emissions, so we’re going to have to trust you. Can we? Will you?

Make do and mend 2.0

So there’s this thing called the ‘circular economy’, which I know sounds a bit of a fancy buzz phrase — but basically means keeping resources in use for as long as possible, extracting the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recovering and regenerating products and materials at the end of its life.

Ask your gran or grandad. It’s what they did in the war — like Make Do and Mend.

Only this isn’t some temporary measure, it has to be how we approach our relationship with the resources we use.

We’ve got 120,000 business in GM and we need all of you to bring emissions from the production of resources right down — by 38% by 2035 and more and sooner if we can.

We also need you to make them more efficiently but only you can tell us how you get on with that coz we don’t monitor you.

We all need to step up here — it’s not our job to monitor you. Why would we need to anyway, if we all shared our responsibility to the earth?

I know that a bunch of you have formed the Greater Manchester Sustainable Use Partnership (are you online?).

And we have got the Manchester Climate Change Board (though it doesn’t seem to have met since last September when we need it MORE THAN EVER right now given this is now an emergency…)

And we heard some good stuff at the Green Summit where we launched this plan, from the likes of the Co-Op on emissions, plastic bags and packaging.

But we really need businesses, especially high profile, high emitters such as those on industrial zones like Trafford Park, voluntarily stepping up to the plate and leading from the front.

And we need you to up your game on cutting work-related transport too, including commuting.

How can you make it easier for people to work from home? to cycle to work? to use less energy?

Can you provide showers and lockers, make bike parking plentiful in your urban spaces, encourage walking meetings, get some video conferencing that works…

There are loads of benefits to the bottom line. But even if there weren’t — you just need to get on it!

Because token gestures aren’t enough any more — it’s got to count.

We need a new mindset — that business in this region prides itself on operating in this way.

That whole ‘we do things differently here’ thing — northern grit, generosity, and wit.

Let’s make it mean we ‘make do and mend’ — and so much more too.

This page is part of a series critiquing and presenting the Greater Manchester Environment Plan, in the style of fictional leader Sandy Turnham.

All measures and facts and descriptions are accurate as far as my understanding but some artistic licence has been taken with tone in order to #TellTheTruth.