It’s a Quintuple!
The Gods have spoken. Communities Secretary Steve Reed came down from Mount Westminster this weekend and proclaimed that 15 councils in Essex will be abolished and replaced with five local authorities. I was surprised that UK Gov had not gone with the three unitary authority model proposed by Essex County Council, which seemed to be the only one that fit the government brief.
The five authority model was the one favoured by most existing authorities and does not centralise powers as much as the three model. It is still a centralisation however and decision making will move further away from the people it affects, while the case that the reorganisation will save money is surely weakened by choosing to have five rather than three.
The Dengie will be in the ‘Mid Essex’ unitary – an authority that will stretch from the Greater London boundary to the North Sea coast. It seems likely that the seat of power will be in the City of Chelmsford. It’s the only city in the region, it’s fairly central geographically and it has the buildings and staff of the doomed Essex County Council to draw on, making a transition easier. For similar reasons, I imagine that Chelmsford will also be the seat of the Greater Essex Mayoral Authority when an Essex Mayor is elected in May 2028.
(this all presupposes that a General Election doesn’t happen before local government reorganisation and the Mayoral election and that the next government doesn’t cancel the whole thing as a Starmer folly. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has said he is “deeply sceptical” about changes to local councils in Essex, “I think that to maintain overall the presence of an identifiable county council is the right way to go” and that Reform UK would try to put a stop to local government reform).
For the Dengie, a move of powers from Maldon to Chelmsford means authority moving from a town it abuts to one that is further away. It’s unclear what value strategies developed at Maldon District level will have when Maldon District is no more – not least the Maldon District Local Development Plan 2014-2029 (reviewed Feb 2025), more recent Neighbourhood Plans across the district that are constrained by the LDP, and the Maldon District Council’s Climate Strategy and Action Plan [pdf].
We are entering a crucial period for achieving the UK’s legally binding target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the interim target of a 58% reduction by the period 2028-2032.
This uncertainty at District level is multiplied at County level. Essex County Council, under a Conservative Party administration, has developed a raft of climate and environment strategies and policies which say a lot of the right things, even though delivery has often been frustratingly slow.
That lack of speed may prove fatal if the political character of the local authorities changes to one less enamoured of net-zero and climate goals. The current polling is therefore sobering.
https://www.pollcheck.co.uk/council-projections/essex/#/essex
With a few weeks to go, the Conservatives look set to be wiped out at the May County Council elections. Even the low end of projections for Reform UK would give them majority control in Essex. Conservative Party ‘Climate Czar’ Councillor Peter Schwier is one of those who looks set to lose his seat to Reform UK.
What happened across the Thames at Kent County Council (KCC) when Reform UK took control is a guide as to what to expect: the party initiated sweeping reversals of previous climate commitments.
• Reform UK councillors rescinded KCC’s 2019 Climate Emergency Declaration
• The Reform-led council removed Net Zero/carbon neutrality targets and abandoned efforts to meet those targets previously set by the council.
• Background information provided by the Reform UK group said the council’s 2019 climate emergency declaration had “endorsed the unproven view of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change” [pdf].
• They cancelled £32 million of renewable energy property modifications.
• They cancelled £7.5 million of electric vehicle transition plans
• They voted down motions aimed at supporting the recovery and growth of wildlife and biodiversity by reducing harmful pesticides – despite environmental and public‑health concerns.
• Reform UK councillor Chris Hespe called anthropogenic global warming a “hoax”.
• Reform UK councillor David Wimble shared a Facebook post highlighting a “Climate Catastrophe Hoax”, where “the climate apocalypse narrative is exaggerated, wrong, and built on fear rather than fact”
• Seven out of ten Reform UK controlled councils have scrapped their climate targets since being elected
• Academic analysis from the Grantham Research Institute (LSE) found that Reform‑run councils “removed content about climate change from strategy documents” after taking control. KCC is explicitly listed among the councils where Reform UK councillors expressed climate‑science denial and participated in these removals [pdf].
Strategies and policies are much easier to reverse than already existing actions on the ground. I can’t help but think that much of the last decade was wasted and all the pretty pdfs and consultations produced are now dead in the water. Essex should have taken direct control of buses and integrated public transport ticketing and timetables, planning authorities should have demanded net-zero, low bills, homes with domestic energy generation, rain/grey water recycling and minimum 30% on-site biodiversity net gain, the county should be laced with segregated walk/wheel/cycle paths breaking car dependency and improving health outcomes, money spent on waste incinerators should have been burned creating a circular economy instead, our anchor institutions should have collaborated and built community wealth via local procurement led by the public authorities.
Peter Harris, the Reform UK mayoral candidate for Essex, hasn’t yet made any statements specifically about environmental issues such as climate change, net‑zero, renewable energy, pollution, or biodiversity. He has mentioned ‘protecting our green spaces’ as part of a very general policy agenda, but there’s no detail on what this means in practice.
His promo video has him stood in some fields and his comments there seem to position the ‘green spaces’ protection as being about housing developments rather than nature recovery or habitat protection.
There’s a brief shot of the tide coming in on the Essex coast with the Gunfleet Sands Offshore Wind Farm visible in the distance – but there’s no mention of sea-level rise or renewable energy. Over this image, Harris is talking about the council and the government ‘letting you down’ – is the tide and the wind farm relevant to this, or just B-roll? Hard to tell.
Last week, The Reform UK Local Election Tour, obliviously called ‘Reform will Fix It’, visited the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, Essex. Following some chat with former glamour model Jodie ‘#frippsfarce’ Marsh and Cllr Jaymey ‘bankrupt / ‘unsolicited private parts’ McIvor, and a warm-up from David ‘ONLY Reform UK will scrap the insane Net Zero targets’ Bull, it was on to Zia “If there’s one thing [the UK] is not under threat from, it’s climate change” Yusef, and Nigel “I haven’t got a clue whether climate change is being driven by carbon-dioxide emissions” Farage.
With the Earth’s climate further out of balance than at any time in recorded history, the crash in wildlife populations constituting an extinction event, and human activities increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium, creating consequences for hundreds and thousands of years, the return of climate change denialism is a bitter pill to swallow.
This week The Times reported that it had seen a document called ‘Status of Defra’s critical systems to 2030 and beyond’, commissioned before the 2024 election by civil servants at the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra).
Tasked with identifying looming threats to the underpinnings of modern life, its authors in the Defra Futures team, an expert group of civil servants, concluded that not only Britain’s food supply but also its water supply and international trade networks were “almost certain” to be “on a decline and collapse trajectory”, meaning there was “a realistic possibility that by 2030 (increasing to 2050) our food, water and natural ecosystems (etc) are at strategic risk of catastrophic failure”.’
The Government denies a document with this name exists, but a couple of months previously, The Times reported on a different study ‘Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security‘ put together by the joint intelligence committee (which oversees MI5 and MI6). Due to be published last Autumn, it was suppressed until an FOI request produced an abridged version.
The Times reports that it has seen the unabridged version which paints an even gloomier picture of how climate change might affect the UK: driving mass migration from parts of the world made uninhabitable, provoking wars and acts of terror, and creating a global competition for food.
It looks like those of us working to address the climate and ecological emergencies are about to encounter a hostile political environment. When I directed my energies into working with a local climate action group (which was encouraged into existence by the local district council), I did so because I saw opportunities for genuine positive change afforded by the commitments and strategies agreed at political levels from the national to the parish. If, and when, those commitments are abandoned, those strategies are shredded, targets are scrapped, and actions to address the climate and ecological emergencies are ditched – the way forward is unclear. These are the conditions that often produce climate despair and depression, a fatalistic surrender to personal consumption and hedonism, or moves towards more confrontational approaches and direct action.
Dengie Bioregion 