“Building Back Better” Members’ Meeting feedback

Many thanks to all who came to our meeting this week. We had some great presentations and discussions about opportunities for Building Back Better in Herefordshire.

We are working on videos that we can share and a Question and Answer summary will be posted on the HGN website soon.

In the meantime, here are some highlights brought back from the small group discussions:

  • Sort out WPD Grid issues!
  • Engage communities at all levels – we are all crew
  • “The future is built from the ideas that are lying around now”
  • Communication on all things related to Climate, outward facing and also for councillors eg. Climate Action Hubspace project
  • Improve communications about what is going on
  • Communication to bring the public along with us, bearing in mind discretion and timeliness
  • Although we spent a lot of time talking about food, farming etc.
  • Energy and food trilemma – affordability, sustainability, reliability
  • Supporting green tourism and leisure – but embed ecology and environment and do it in a way that invites people in
  • Engaging every strata of a community
  • Section 106 agreements for community energy – planning gain
  • Communication – enabling everyone who wants to, to know what’s going on
  • Community Engagement with a clear ecological message is the key, when promoting leisure in the county.
  • Parish Councils demanding own planning standards and engagement of HGN members on Local Development Plans and objections to planning
  • Think about flexible supply (electricity)
  • Taking care of the small things as well as the big – signs of hope (sunflowers in Longtown) Think global, act local.
  • Planning requirement for zero carbon buildings and those that can’t feed into the 106 community energy fund
  • Review projects that can take capacity away from grid
  • Potholes and why not all done in area at the same time?
  • GREEN BUSINESS = GOOD BUSINESS
  • Funding for retrofitting
  • The agricultural bill will be a once in a generation change to the economics of the countryside. Lots of danger, some opportunity. Particularly concerned about unintended consequences of well-intentioned changes
  • Members communicating with Parish councillors- yes!!
  • The need for fair approach and equality would be to support now on a wider scale from all groups across the community to be Keep Herefordshire Warm support champions – so that more people can become included. The groups that needs support will not be engaging with these types of meetings or coming to local environmental meetings. This would tick the boxes on inequality, people presently struggling with fuel bills that will only get worse when it gets colder, etc etc
  • AD is one example which could see land use changing to meet a fuel need – arisings from verges can be fed in to AD to prevent the need for food crops use. 
  • Farming across the country has to change

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