Date published: 2007/08/28
The BBC says:
Households should receive council tax rebates to encourage them to install solar panels and wind turbines, an independent think tank claims.
The New Local Government Network says planning laws should be relaxed to increase the take-up of green energy.
It also suggests local authorities could offer interest-free loans towards the cost of installation.
...
Currently the government offers a grant of up to 30% towards the cost of installing wind turbines or solar panels.It has also been consulting on whether they should be permitted without planning permission where the impact on neighbours is minimal.
But the New Local Government Network report, Finding the Energy, says ministers need to be bolder by allowing councils to be even less restrictive where there is public support.
It is calling for local councillors to be able to consult with residents on whether to reduce the amount of planning permission required to create eco-friendly homes.
James Macgregor, author of the report, said: "Listening to the voices of local people in this way would ensure that residential amenity was protected as defined by residents.
"Council tax rebates and capital loans for householders that install domestic microgeneration equipment would incentivise local people to engage in the process."
Chris Leslie, director of the New Local Government Network, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that planning laws should be changed.
"The tests about whether, for instance, a wind turbine on somebody's house has a detrimental impact in a town should actually be left to the neighbourhood to decide themselves," he said.
Solar and wind power are often inappropriate technologies at the level of single households. Microgeneration is all flavour-of-the-minute amongst so-called environmentalists (who of course hate anything corporate) but for now it largely does not make sense. The fact that the New Local Government Network (NLGN) wants even more subsidy of these technologies shows that the only way they can make the sums add up is by externalising a large fraction of the cost onto the taxpayers of Britain, so in fact the sums do not add up.
And on the planning permission front, the idea that local councils should "consult with residents" and that it "should actually be left to the neighbourhood to decide themselves" is fairly pointless. Which residents exactly? Well, no doubt they mean people just like themselves, i.e. the usual academic middle class suspects who already dominate so-called public consultations (which are not representative of the public exactly because they are dominated by the usual academic middle class suspects). And what is the "neighbourhood" which will "decide themselves"? The people most likely to object to planning permission are not the local council but the neighbours.
It looks like NLGN is just another one of the zillions of useless consultancies which plague the nation.
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