James Taplin: What this program is all about is understanding what does local net zero really look like from the citizen level upwards. So you’re getting proper buy in from people. Again, this is never going to happen unless everybody everywhere is able to play their part. And also do that. You need to understand what everybody really wants rather than assuming you know what they want.

And you need to make sure that you’re hitting. And you’re supporting every single demographic, not just certain demographics. So if you’re going to get a just, just transition, everybody needs to be pulling in the same direction. And to do that, you really need to take a local approach. And if you do that, then you can understand what a place really needs in terms of getting to net zero.

And then what the business opportunities are to get there.

Adam Sroka: Hello, and welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. I’m delighted today to be joined by two guests. I’ve got James and Rachel. Uh, Rachel, would you like to introduce yourself?

Rachel Duggan: Yeah, sure. Hello. I’m Rachel Duggan. I’m a senior net zero consultant at Urban Foresight.

James Taplin: Yeah. Morning, Adam. Uh, yeah. I’m James Taplin.

I’m an innovation lead in the urban systems team at Innovate UK.

Adam Sroka: Excellent. Well, that begs the first question. We’ve not had two guests from two different organizations on before. Could you expand a little bit on, yeah, why, how this came to be and why we’re here? Why you’re both here together.

James Taplin: Yeah, official story.

And there’s the unofficial story. Uh, wait, should you go first?

Rachel Duggan: Yes. Um, well, I’ll start with the fun unofficial story. Um, which is that in terms of this podcast, I was sat next to Adam at a different table in the black sheet coffee in Edinburgh. And I. Was eavesdropping on a conversation he was having on heat networks.

Um, and just introduce myself, um, talked a little bit about this amazing program that I’m working for and on, on behalf of innovate UK, which is the net zero living program. Um, so in short, James is my client. Um, but yeah, it’s been a great, um, collaboration partnerships. I don’t know if James, if you want to kick off.

Yeah.

James Taplin: I mean, yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting, Claire, we work really closely together. It’s a, so it’s a collaborative program that was set up a long time ago, 18 months ago, two years ago, roughly. It’s been in the, it’s been in the works for a while. A person was working on it through various different spending reviews over the last four or more years, but actively operating for the last sort of two years, 18 months or so.

And it’s a program supporting. Supporting the transition to net zero one way or another. And so the bit that I work with Wageshore in particular is looking at how are you supporting local authorities in their transition to net zero and how are you effectively working to improve the demand for net zero solutions from the market.

There’s a, there’s a whole group of us working at Innovate UK and across Urban Foresight where Wageshore works, but also other collaborators at, uh, for the future and we are Liminal and Involve and Ugen and Carbon Trust. And. Uh, thanks to that boundaries and city science. I mean, there’s a whole range of amazing organizations that have been kind of engaged to help support the program.

Adam Sroka: Uh, amazing. No mean feat to organize that many stakeholders, that many people, but, um, for the details I’ve read around the projects and stuff, it sounds like a really interesting endeavor. I guess for some of the audience, they might not know who Urban Foresight are. So yeah, Rachel, could you expand a little bit on what Urban Foresight do and what your role is there and kind of what problems you’re looking to solve?

Rachel Duggan: Yeah, of course. Um, so Urban Foresight are a place based innovation consultancy. We’re based in Newcastle and Dundee, but we work on projects across the UK, um, internationally as well. Um, ultimately to make good things happen. Um, and it’s as simple as that. Um, our heritage is in EVs and electric. Mobility, but we’ve rapidly grown in the last 11, 12 years.

Um, we have a health and care team. Sustainable economy team, transport planning. And energy assistance and infrastructure team. So, it’s quite diverse and there’s lots of of good people and knowledge involved. We’re working in a consortium, like James said, with Liminal and Forum for the Future, which are also fantastic organizations working in similar spaces.

And our role is to bring together all of the Net Zero Living project participants in a community of practice and learning, of which there’s actually now 59 places and partners, which has actually grown even since the program started.

Adam Sroka: Yeah, that’s really cool. And it’s one of those things that we talk to a lot of organizations up and down the kind of spectrum of energy, renewable and everything from like wind farm assets and storage and like heat networks.

And it’s always the common thread. And one of the reasons I think I love the domain so much is that there’s always the physical. There’s always a location. It’s not like shopping carts in the ether and all like. Finance transactions and things. There’s like, you could go to a thing and actually the constraints of the physical environment are really, really important.

So yeah, I could see how open foresight has, uh, it’s work cut out for it and a lot of these projects, I guess. Innovate UK won’t be new to many of our listeners, um, but James would be interested to hear about what is you do at Innovate UK and how you wrangle projects of the scale and size that we’re talking about.

James Taplin: Right. Well, so I guess for those few who might not know who Innovate UK UK government business innovation agency. Uh, we’re funded, uh, by Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, DSIT. Uh, we used to be called the technology strategy board, uh, that was a change about 10 years ago, which is actually when I joined Innovate UK.

So I’ve been at Innovate for about 10 years. I joined just in the final days of technology strategy board. It’s quite interesting. I think the shift from TSB as well as technology strategy board to Innovate UK, because it kind of reflected a bit of a move in the organization away from an explicit focus on technology, as the name suggests, into something that was much broader innovation, and that, that is kind of Led us to where we are now because the innovation that we’re looking at now, it’s very much innovation in the way that places operate innovation in the way that you, um, break down non technical or technological barriers to the deployment of solutions.

And we’ll probably come on to it later in terms of exactly what we’re doing and why this is important and why we work with local authorities, but in terms of. What I do, um, as I said, I’ve been at Innovate for about 10 years now. Uh, I’ve been in sustainability all my life. So, um, uh, I’ve worked for Sustainable Development Charter before then, and I worked for various different consultancies, spent seven years hugging trees in a Tanzanian rainforest, um, back in my early days as a sort of environmental economist and ecologist, a lot of what I’ve been doing at Innovate, why I joined Innovate in the first place was to bring a sort of systems perspective and systems thinking, uh, to.

To the new team that was set up. So I helped set up the urban systems team there. So again, Innovate used to be quite, quite set on individual technology strands. So it would have an energy team and a transport team and a food team and a health team and a satellite team and all the rest of it. And the urban systems team was deliberately set up as a new team to kind of cut across that, to try and look at these spaces where those different systems interacted and combined and to kind of take a bit more of a systems thinking approach.

So what I’ve been doing, I guess, the last 10 years is trying to bring some of that approach in terms of how we manage project like this. That’s an excellent question. I should say we have never done anything like this before. And I don’t think anybody across Canada government has done anything quite at this scale and ambition before this is, um, in terms of numbers, we spend more money on this, but it’s about a 60 million pound program across the local authority side and the business support side as well.

But what makes it quite different is this kind of active program of learning and management that sort of sits around it. Very often what innovate traditionally does when we fund large amounts is we sort of fund, and then there are sort of monetary officers and monitoring functions that make sure those projects are running and sort of feed in and that they’re hitting their goals and that they’re spending the money that we’re supposed to, and they come to the end and then we’ll run another project.

This is very different in that we’ve got this massive. Kind of intelligent function that sits at the heart of it, which is where Rachel sits, which is why Rachel’s actually a lot closer to a lot of this work than I am when it comes down to it, which is pulling insights out of the projects and out of the participants.

And as it goes on and feeding them back into the program so that we are iteratively improving it and giving people the information they want and need. So it’s a bit of a new departure for us. It’s very exciting. It takes a lot of work. Be careful what you wish for. I mean, when I was dreaming this up a few years back, I thought wouldn’t it be amazing if And it is, but it’s definitely a lot of work.

I can see why lots of people shy away from it.

Adam Sroka: So, uh, like that’s really interesting because we at Hypercube put in a smart grant application this week and, but this isn’t like a smart grant application. This is something different, I guess, Rachel, James, how do you get involved in, in a project of this scale of this size?

How’d you get on the list? Like, if you want to contribute as a business or an individual, how would you, how would you be in line next time around something like this comes up?

James Taplin: So. This phase of the project is going to run through till somewhere towards the middle end of 2025, as you know, we’ve got a new government in place and we’re sort of going through spending review process at the moment.

So we look like we’re going to have another, a one year spending review, a settlement of 25 to 26. And then in the spring we’ll have announced a much longer program after that. So that’s just to kind of set the context in that. Right now, I guess the program is we’re in delivery phase of the program. It’s in flight.

We are looking at what happens next in the next year. We suspect that there’ll be small activities in the 25 to 26 period, but they’ll kick off again, a ramp up a bit more, hopefully in the sort of 26 onward period. So in terms of kind of getting involved in it directly right now, I suppose there are fewer opportunities to be kind of intimately part of it, but, We’re always, in terms of businesses, I mean, there are kind of other business engagements that are going on.

We’ve got sort of strands of work around kind of international engagement as an associated part of this, which are going on, and there’ll be sort of standard competitions and things come out of that. Businesses that have particularly interesting solutions for local authorities, uh, we’re always interested to hear in.

We. We have, as Rachel said, now a group of 59 local authorities we work really closely with. We engage them online monthly and in person quarterly. So we bring them all together. We have sharing sessions. We have a business showcase sessions. We ran one in Liverpool just last week and we’ve got some more coming up where we get groups of interesting businesses in that might have something that is applicable to local authorities.

And we put them in the same room together. So there are opportunities like that for businesses to get involved, to get in touch. There are business showcases. There’ll be annual events coming up informally. Any Intel that we can kind of gather constantly about new ways of doing things, solutions that might support local authorities we’re keen to hear about, and we can then help the right people.

Adam Sroka: Rachel, I guess, what’s it like on the other end of that, like being a part of that consortium, because it sounds like it’s quite a busy space. There’s a lot going on. You’ve got lots of stakeholders, lots of participants. Uh, lots of like a significant chunk of funding projects of this scale can sometimes get a bit lost in themselves.

Like what’s it, what’s the experience like on your end and how have you navigated that as well?

Rachel Duggan: I guess the 1st thing I’d say, just to add to James’s point is that. Although this program is focused on local authorities, I think almost every single organization in the program does have a partner in the private sector.

Or in the academic sector, not all of them, but I think the vast majority are working collaboratively across different sectors. You know, I guess 1 piece of advice would be, um, if you are a business that’s looking to get involved in the space is to make sure that you do have those. Relationships because, um, you know, it requires cross sector collaboration.

So if you don’t have those relationships in your, in your space already, definitely reach out to, um, different universities. Please. Other people that are in your kind of place, um, to see what sort of funding is available, um, on local net 0 transition opportunities. As far as our work, um, urban foresight for, um.

For the future and liminal, so we deliver the capacity building service for project participants. There’s quite a focused work packages that we deliver. So we have kind of the whole program coordination of the service. So project management, we have, um, Diana Jackson’s the program manager of the future ready service and Jenny Martin is the assistant program manager.

They keep everything going is the, the short, yeah, the short answer. It definitely, you know, it couldn’t happen without them and they’re, you know, just keeping everything going. I’m turning, so I manage the insights forum for the future and delivers the mentoring service for kind of the, the people focus projects, liminal.

Curates coordinates excites the community of practice. My colleague, tip Scott also manages the action learning and evaluation. Arm of the program and. Yeah, just to echo it, it’s not easy. The, the scale, um, you know, 59 local authorities all delivering also across a vast range of themes. So, heat, power, mobility.

There’s now some agriculture and food projects and a new small group of 7 department for transport funded decarbonization demonstrator projects as well as 3 Desnes funded local net zero accelerators. The short answer, as James said, is it’s innovative in itself. Um, it’s a new endeavor, new relationships across sectors.

Across different levels of government, and also private sector, academia, and I think everyone’s kind of learning as they go. But the exciting bit is that Because we’re now a year into the Insights work, we’re really looking at shaping up the structure of our final program report, which will be in December 2025.

And that’s to structure how we kind of share our collective learning. Um, it’s ultimately going to inform how to do net zero in a place and how to support place based net zero and kind of an actionable playbook is kind of the final. Hopefully, boom. Guide for everyone.

James Taplin: Something that, that you reminded me of, I should kind of go back to basics.

So we’re talking about local authorities here, but it’s all of what we’re doing is for business. I think that’s really important to kind of make it clear. We are the UK government business innovation agency, and we’re about supporting business innovation. The focus, particularly now on, on local authorities has come about because Well, a few things, first of all, we did a piece of work recently, a year or so ago with PWC looking at what does it take to get to net zero if you take a place specific or a place agnostic approach.

And what we discovered or what that report discovered was if you take a place specific approach, so one that’s tailored to each place rather than the one size fits all, for about half the cost, you deliver twice the energy savings and a better About three times the social benefits and the social savings.

So it’s much cheaper. And it’s like a six times improvement in terms of taking, taking a local, a specific approach rather than a generic approach. So it’s important for the economy to take a place specific approach rather than one size fits all. But if you’re going to do that, you then need to understand what does that local specific approach look like?

And that’s what this program is really all about. It’s about understanding. What net zero looks like at the local level and how do you meet net zero goals and opportunities at that local level? There are only, there are some 300 or so, 400 or so local authorities in the UK, relatively small number. If you can get those, that relatively small number of stakeholders moving, that’s a great way of getting change across the economy as a whole.

Local authorities touch on every single household in the UK. They are on the front line for many people as far as net zero is concerned. They are feeling it in a way that lots of others aren’t. They, you know, they see the pressures in air quality and they see the pressures in Transport and congestion.

And they see the project pressures in infrastructure, not be able to cope with increased climate or the rest of it. So they are on the front line. It is, you know, they want to be doing things on net zero. Most of them have made some sort of commitment about how you get to net zero, but many of them still don’t really know how you’re going to do that.

What this program is all about is understanding what does local net zero really look like. From the citizen level upwards. So you’re getting proper buy in from people. Again, this is never going to happen. Let’s everybody everywhere is able to play their part and also do that. You need to understand what everybody ever really wants rather than assuming you know what they want.

And you need to make sure that you’re hitting or you’re supporting every single demographic, not just certain demographics. So if you’re going to get addressed, just transition, everybody needs to be pulling the same direction. And to do that, you really need to take a local approach. And if you do that.

Then you can understand what a place really needs in terms of getting to net zero and then what the business opportunities are to get there. And this program is all about that. It’s what are the problems in a particular place and then how are you skilling up local authorities effectively to be better clients to then be able to procure the right solutions to meet those needs.

So it’s linking, understanding what people want, how do you then link it with business to create the right solutions and then how you’re linking through them to kind of sustainable finance models, then make sure you’re developing a sustainable pipeline of projects, sustain that kind of transition in such a way that everybody, everywhere can do net zero for the good of all.

So it is, I wanted to kind of go back to that bit because it is absolutely about business. I mean, we say what, what are the business opportunities that may be less grant funding opportunities from our team in particular, coming up, the kind of capacity that we’re looking to build. It starts with what Rachel was saying is in local authorities is engaging with local authorities, understanding what they want, what they need, and through the work that we’re doing, hopefully making them better clients for business to be able to deploy innovative net zero solutions at scale that accelerate transition to where we need to get to.

Within what limited time we have available.

Adam Sroka: It sounds fascinating. I attended a really, really good talk recently that was looking at, um, some research across the UK on the secondary and like indirect benefits of investing in net zero, so for every pound you invest in, in net zero, what secondary and tertiary benefits do you get?

And I, and it was really, really varied depending on location, which I thought was really interesting. And it went as high as like, I think it was like 25 times the return in some parts of, of the UK and Northern Ireland. And it was just really, really fascinating to see. So I can totally understand how that location specific approach is really, really important.

It feels like from what you were saying, Rachel, it’s quite a hands on approach you’re taking as well. It’s not just like, Oh, here’s a training course and then you get, or here’s a tech solution. It’s not only tailored, but also there’s quite a lot of like process in helping the end user on that journey.

So. In my experience in different projects, like for these kinds of amorphous, ethereal things that are a bit complicated, actually that is quite useful because we’re all humans at the end of the day and trying to make decisions and context is always really, really important. We’ve talked about innovation a lot, and that’s a word, there’s two questions I want to ask here.

We’ve talked about innovation a lot, and that gets banded around quite a bit. And we’ve also, we’re saying net zero, and that as a term, I think can mean it. A million and one things, everything from like behavioral change, like, I’m going to stick my washing machine on in the middle of the night to actually going and getting hardware and technologies, change my EVs or put installation in retrofit old buildings.

So just to bring this to life for some of the audience, are there, have you got any really crunchy specific examples of where innovation has really made a difference to businesses or local authorities as part of the program?

Rachel Duggan: Yeah, so so the 1st thing I’ll say is that, um, you know, a lot of the local authorities in this program are innovating in this space for the 1st time.

So, I can’t stress enough the feedback that we’ve heard from local authorities is that. Even the distribution of this award has been opening doors and groundbreaking for, um, not only, um, project delivery, um, in terms of, like, in terms of tangible. You know, what is the specific project they’re delivering for some places?

It’s large scale retrofit for some places. It is a rural energy hub for some places. It’s a data data ecosystem to take an area based approach to net zero planning. So, the, the project scope and theme is really, really cool. I think in terms of what we’ve seen so far, it’s less about the kind of tangible project Delivery in terms of our capacity building service knowledge base and more about the impacts that this funding has and we’ve heard from various groups that even being in this program has really increased.

Um, their ability to communicate internally on net zero across different officer levels with senior leadership with investors. And we’ve also heard the benefits of being in a community of practice in terms of access to a wider, wider knowledge pool. Leaning on colleagues across different organizations for even professional and emotional well, being in a space that feels.

Quite challenging and lonely to deliver and, you know, some of the people that are delivering projects. Are maybe a climate change officer, and that’s their whole team. So there’s such a diverse range of impact when we talk about innovation so far in the program. We recently held a focus group on experiences driving net zero innovation in local government, which is really kind of a one year reflective point in the program.

47 percent of our local authority organizations that attended this focus group said that the culture of innovation is open in their local government, though limited by resources. 25 percent were cautiously progressive, um, and wanted stronger frameworks for net zero, uh, and their places.

James Taplin: So again, I would echo what Rachel says is that the program itself is innovative in the way that it’s bringing people to get there.

I guess also to stress that a lot of the premise of this is that it’s not about the technology, again, it’s about how do you remove those non technological barriers and that’s sort of where we’re looking at the innovation. So it’s not tech innovation. I say that we’re looking at, well, my view, my contention is that we’ve, is that we need more tech, absolutely here and there, but actually a lot of the tech that we need to get to net zero already exists and what we need is to get that adopted at scale.

And so to do that, it’s like, how do you break down the non technological barriers to adoption? So what is it stopping that adoption? And that’s where this program, I guess, is looking at is trying to innovate most. So we’ve got three different. Cohorts of, um, local authorities that we’re supporting. So we’ve got some who are doing big demonstration because we recognize that if you’re going to get sort of shift, you have to show people what is possible in order for people to then kind of be adopted.

And we’ve got various different demonstrator programs that are running. Uh, it’s an interesting program, net zero tarraced streets. So, you know, the, however many terraced streets there are across the UK, vast numbers, they’re quite hard to decarbonize, particularly around heating. And so looking at how do you develop, Uh, so district heating models, schemes for Metro for the terraced streets, but it’s not really about the tech.

It’s more about the legalities and the funding mechanism that sets this behind it, that makes it easy for people to take that step and to adopt it and for people to be able to afford it. That’s where the challenges is. How do you build this in a way that people can then afford and can sign up to it? Uh, so we’ve got a number of demonstrators that are coming out and I guess we’ll, we’ll see what comes out of those.

We’ve got some slightly sort of smaller projects, which are, um, pathfinder projects, which is sort of, they are building up, they’re sort of doing some more development. They’re looking at how do you start, start on that journey or take the first steps on that journey towards being kind of demonstrated with a view that would do some demonstration hopefully with them later.

And then we’ve got kind of a fast follow up program, which is, which is where we’ve funded net zero innovation offices in. Local authorities directly. So put that capacity into local authorities. So local authorities have somebody there who can deal with business and can sort of address these things and tend to build relationships across the organization.

So it’s going to be really interesting at the end to see exactly what comes out and where those innovations are. Um, I think there’s, there’s a lot of. or potential there and kind of crunching it into something which is useful. So we can disseminate that because the view is that we need to get this out there.

We’re supporting like 59 or so, but there are large numbers of other local authorities across the place that we’re not supporting them. So we need to get out there. Um, I think the other point you were saying you were making earlier about kind of what does net zero mean and the benefits of net the things that we’re focusing on again, when it comes to tech is not how much you push.

Net zero technology people, but how do you use technology to meet people’s needs in a net zero way? And that’s a sort of different framing because that’s what people ultimately care about. But the best one in the world, nobody has the luxury of putting net zero as their primary objective, but people do care about better jobs and better communities and better, uh, local conditions and I guess it’s not a local authority innovation example, but there was an organization we’d worked alongside called local trust to fund some of the sort of a hundred most, um, Marginalized communities across the UK and they’ve had some unrestricted funding, which they could do whatever they wanted with their slots.

It built the community and there’s a community group, um, sort of managing it, sitting around it. And, and a good example or sort of a poster child for that is the Lawrence Western community down in Bristol, who has spent their money on a, one of the largest kind of, um, Uh, so private sustainable energy solution.

So wind turbine and solar, um, and so it’s a highly marginalized community, not necessarily what you think people would be wanting to spend the money on, but, but a great net zero solution. And the reason that. People went for it was because it was about energy security and it was about cheaper bills and it was about local jobs maintaining the infrastructure and it was about pulling together this community.

And so that, that’s what people really care about. So it’s a brilliant net zero project, but it wasn’t done for net zero reasons. It was done for all those kind of co benefit reasons. And I guess what we’re looking for in this program is how do you spark more of that? How do you understand, how do you, how do you find that innovation in?

Meeting people’s co benefit needs in a net zero way, rather than pushing net zero tech at people.

Adam Sroka: I think from just the people I speak to and we’re out and about, I think that co benefit conversation is emerging. I think that’s relatively new in. In many of the circles, the lot that we were never thinking about it, but the scale of importance of it actually.

And I totally believe that if you can get people to do the right thing because of other benefits, then we’re all going to win in the long run to help out everyone, because again, you’ve got that to fast follow, but like people will spot that one community does it and think, well, actually, why can’t we do that?

There’s no barrier for us doing it here and it will start to snowball and move us that way. I really love that.

James Taplin: And net zero is effectively a behavior change problem. I mean, that’s kind of what it is. We need to change all of our behaviors across everything, which means that a behavior change isn’t, it’s not rocket science.

You just need to give somebody something better than they had before. So let’s just give them something they had better than they had before, but make sure it’s net zero as well.

Rachel Duggan: Co benefits have come up quite a lot in the program, um, for various reasons, measuring impact and also communicating, you know, the story you tell about your net zero project is really important and that goes for investors as well.

And, you know, there’s quite a discrepancy between, you know, how do you prioritize financial returns and viability with the kind of the long term sustainability and net zero goals that are required. To achieve net zero in these kind of short term projects, we held a focus group as well on integrating health and care within local net zero projects.

And many of the local authorities already in the program are collaborating with their health and social care teams. You know, as James said, some of these topics are inherently linked. Tackling fuel, heat, transport, poverty, improving air quality or physical activity. The 1 gap that we did see, however. Is that 59 percent of the group we’re already integrating health and care 89 percent see as important, but only 37 percent at the minute are actually measuring health impacts of their local net 0 projects.

So, there is quite a gap at the minute and skills. Um, and part of that is kind of, it’s an emerging evidence based on how to measure these things. The kind of methodologies are quite limited or not standardized, and there might be privacy concerns, but there’s definitely space to improve capacity of officers in the space.

There’s some great examples of projects that are collaborating with their public health teams to kind of combine the magenta book and green book, government guidelines, so creating theories of change for net zero projects, so integrating those kind of public health approaches to net zero. this video.

And I think that’s definitely kind of an actionable recommendation that that we’re seeing to start to come out of the program.

Adam Sroka: My experience of working with local authorities and sharing data leads me down the road of very difficult and quite challenging for reasons you wouldn’t ever know unless you’ve done it.

And you’d imagine it’s like when people always moan about the NHS and not being able to just like pull up their records anywhere they go. And I feel that that was my experience of working with local authorities, that there’s just all this. Friction and challenges around who owns the data, what’s allowed to be shared.

And is that something that you’re seeing within the project? And how are you combating like data sharing issues?

Rachel Duggan: So the program focuses on six non technological barriers to delivering that zero data is one of them. And we do have an expert partner, um, Zulca Engineering that Are supporting and providing technical assistance to the local authorities on data.

I’ve got some high level data insights for you. Um, I will say just in general. There is the. Classic challenges around data accessibility, standardization, um, you know, robust data management. You might have a really fantastic data officer, um, that works really hard for three years, cleans everything up, and then those skills go elsewhere.

And then kind of lack of institutional knowledge on how to kind of manage those specific data sets. So those are all commonly cited, and I don’t think those are going anywhere anytime soon. In terms of net zero, there’s some really specific ones. That we’ve heard in the last kind of year, and those are around carbon emission, baselining and net zero targets.

And so, kind of to go back to metrics really quickly, each project will also be responsible for. Um, evaluating to their own kind of type of project. And deliverables, and because the projects are also varied, some of those are tangible. Some of those are non tangible as James said, some of them are frameworks that are.

You know, working to overcome data barriers. So South Downs National Park Authority is working in partnership with OnePlanet, as I said, to create a data ecosystem to address some of these data barriers that we’re talking about. I think the common one around emissions baselines, many councils struggle with Kind of the outdated retrospective nature of the national data set.

So I think there’s usually kind of a 2 year Um, lag for lack of better words, um. On carbon emissions baselining, and that doesn’t really align well with local baselining needs. So, some of the technical assistance requests that we’ve seen so far is more detailed up to date carbon data from national government and training on baselining methods.

And also support for kind of reconciling production versus consumption based submissions reporting. So, I think that just echoes as well, kind of a. A general need for technical assistance in this space. And kind of coming back to the need for non technical and technical skills training in local authorities is that upskilling and boosting confidence is really important.

I think, like you said, you’ve had various different. Sounds like experience is working with local authorities. Now that I work so closely with the officers that are trying to innovate in this space. I would really like advocate for everyone to kind of change the perceptions on, um, you know, what those challenges are, because, you know, we see people that are so highly talented trying to innovate and influence in the structures that they’re given.

It’s challenging. It’s really hard. How do you make change and, and, and innovate in a space where you’re kind of not given a full toolkit to do so? And the same goes for net zero targets, um, you know, some councils have set really ambitious targets back in 2019. A lot of places are trying to produce data to influence internal stakeholders around, do we change our net zero targets just to be more realistic?

But then there’s kind of tensions between a public or political perceptions on doing so. And so it’s kind of that tension between creating this robust evidence base, which councils are really trying to do. Um, to deliver net zero up against a whole variety of other kind of organizational factors and external factors as well.

Adam Sroka: I completely echo that point on the people you work with, some incredible people and they are just hamstrung by either the tools or the structure or the rules, or even just the depth of understanding you need to have about your own internal policies. It totally echoes what I’ve seen in, in that environment, but it’s promising that, that the people are out there, it’d be remiss of me not to say what you’re doing with the data.

How are you going about generating insights? How are you looking at things for the data nerds in the audience? Could you, could you get a bit technical on what you’re doing?

Rachel Duggan: Yeah, of course. I’m not sure technical is the right word, technical and non technical here. Very welcome. Um, so for the purposes of the future ready service.

You know, we very much see an insight as a deep and clear understanding or realization about particular situation or issue that accelerates net 0. so we’re really looking at anything that goes beyond surface level knowledge and provides us a more. Profound understanding of a subject. So it’s kind of the how and why behind something, not just.

The what, and these insights can be derived from various sources across the program. So this could be through one to one insights check ins that we have with local government practitioners, it can be at quarterly events, it can be from a webinar, we have an online community platform as well that we glean for lots of little nuggets of Intel as well.

And the sharing of insights often leads to better decision making and problem solving and, and innovation. So some, the classic what, how, why, so our what. Insights seek to answer two main research questions, and that’s how to do net zero in a place and how to support place based net zero, and this is through a process of insights capture, analysis, and dissemination, um, and why is ultimately to accelerate local net zero transitions.

So again, we’re now a little bit over a year into our delivery of the service. We’re beginning to shape up, um, what this collective learning looks like, um, how to do net zero in a place and how to support place based net zero and what’s looking like, um, an acronym playbook.

James Taplin: Again, just to kind of bring back to some of what we were saying earlier, that, that insights bit is, So critical to this program.

And it’s, and it’s one of the things we were talking about earlier that makes it different is that we are generating kind of real time insights that feedback into the program, as I said earlier, to improve it, but also. Kind of collating this wealth of knowledge, data, information that would allow us, I mean, if we get no more funding and if the program goes nowhere else at the end of it, well, have this amazing set of insights about what does it take to do net zero and replace, and we, that’s all going to be made publicly available for everybody else to do it.

Like this is not, we need everybody, like I said, everywhere to be able to do this, and we recognize that we’ve only been able to support some, but we want the benefits to go to warm. So this insight process is. Kind of critical because it’s getting under the skin of like, why are things working or why aren’t they working?

Or, you know, what, how would you tweak it to make it better? And, and that you don’t get, if you just give funding to a place and see the outcome, which is what we kind of traditionally do, that insights about how would you get that, how are different places doing the same sort of thing in slightly different ways?

And what does that mean about how it might work for you in your place as well? So again, just this insights piece is, is. Really innovative for us as well and really critical. And it’s, what’s going to, going to make the difference to everybody else out there. And to all the other local authorities that we’re not supporting.

And indeed to all the other businesses that are interested in working with the local authorities. It’s like, this is, this is the sort of problems that local authorities face. Uh, this is what you have to be able to overcome. These are the kinds of questions you need to be able to answer. This is how you need to be able to look at what, what are the real problems that places face and then how are you as a business.

Meeting those needs, don’t go and pitch them a wonderful widget, which they can’t work back to like, well, what problem is this solving? Like you need to work with what the problems are solving. And also what are the constraints that they face internally about how are they managing these different processes about kind of procurement finance and data and all the rest of it.

So that’s, I mean, I can’t stress highly enough how important all this kind of insights process is and how it’s going to be one of the kind of core pieces of legacy of this program.

Adam Sroka: Oh. Yeah, great conversation. Thank you very much. It sounds super exciting. And you’ve left us on a bit of a cliffhanger, find out what’s going to come out the other end.

So we can have a follow up. We’ll do a follow up. Before, yeah, definitely. That’d be really cool. Before I let anyone leave, I always like to ask, um, if people in the audience want to find out more about you or your organizations, or if there’s anything you would like to promote or plug to our audience, where should we point them?

James Taplin: There’ll be lots of, for those who are interested in getting funded, just cause this program hasn’t got lots of funding. Definitely look on our website. There are funding opportunities coming up across all sorts of different sort of technical areas, which we’ll touch on this. And you should go and look at that in terms of this program.

As a whole, we are in the process at the moment of kind of beefing up our kind of comms function. We’re very aware that we need to get more of the message out there and be seeing its praises. There is currently a thriving places. LinkedIn page, which is where a lot of the information, the kind of stories that are coming out will be posted.

So we have a, on the Innovate UK, um, Business Connect, uh, website, which used to be called the KTN. We have a landing page there at the moment for the entire Net Zero program as a whole, the thriving places side and the user focused product side. And we’re going to be populating that, uh, from now on with lots of information that’s coming out.

So all of the reports that we’re generating. Across our own activities. So the insight reports, for example, annual reports and reports from our various different technical assistance providers. So we’ve got reports from involved, for example, about how’d you go about doing citizen engagement and reports from regen about addressing various sort of policy challenges.

All of that information is going to be collated and we’ll be going out through that webpage other than that. You can get in touch, I’m always very happy for you to get in touch with me directly if there’s particular questions you want to ask and I can share.

Rachel Duggan: Yeah, um, feel free to, uh, take a look at Urban Foresight’s website, so urbanforesight.

org. We also have the Future Ready service inbox, so futurereadyaturbanforesight. org if you have any specific questions on that service. In terms of me, I’m happy, you know, LinkedIn is a great place. All things climate, health, net zero. I have a public health background and so if anyone’s ever told you that you have soft skills rather than technical skills, you can be in the net zero space.

And so I’d love to chat and hear from you.

Adam Sroka: Amazing. Well, thank you both very much. It’s been a brilliant discussion and yeah, I’m excited for round two in a few months time.

James Taplin: Yeah, that’d be

Adam Sroka: great. Wish you all the best. Wish you all the best with the program. Thanks very much.

James Taplin: Brilliant. Thank you.

Adam Sroka: It was great to talk. there to Rachel and James about the net zero living program and some of the outcome is what program getting that many people into a consortium to deal with some of the challenges that I think often get overlooked. It’s very easy when we talk about net zero to think about big industrial adoption stuff and like changing the energy supply or electrification of vehicles.

But actually in my experience, every time you get into the weeds of, you The transition context of like the local space really makes a difference and seeing them trying to call that like on a regional level, a local level really makes a lot of sense, but it’s a huge undertaking and hearing them talk a little bit about the co benefits.

I’d seen research up in Edinburgh with a similar conclusion saying actually. For all the investment in net zero, COVID, I’m really, really important. And actually they start to go hand in hand and really help to accelerate that journey and bringing partnerships of organizations together. I think it’s the only way we’re going to do this, the skills, the expertise, the technology, the talent required to really drive this change.

I think it’s not going to be kept to any one sector, any one type of organization. We need to see public private partnerships. So. An amazing program. It’s going on till 2025. Um, and the insights from that will be shared by them next year. And then, uh, fingers crossed there’s another round. They do more stuff like this in the future.

So I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled. Thanks very much for listening once again, and see you next time.