Green Party

It has been a very busy week! On Tuesday evening there was a full meeting of Norwich City Council. My motion asking for the Council to support the introduction of Feed in Tariffs to provide incentives for small scale renewable energy production (currently being considered in Parliament) received unanimous support.

Last night I attended a meeting of the Tenants' City-Wide Board to put forward the Green Party's views on how Community Engagement needs to be improved in Norwich.

I have also been working with residents on a range of issues as normal, such as the campaign to save New Costessey Post Office and efforts to hold to account the absentee landlords of the flats and shops at Earlham House over the poor maintenance of the place.

In addition to this day-to-day work as a local councillor and Leader of the Opposition on the City Council, I and my colleagues have been busy with two other big tasks this week:

Firstly, we have been organising the distribution of 46,000 GreenView newspapers across the Norwich South constituency (one of three national priority General Election constituencies for the Green Party). We have just produced our fourth Norwich GreenView newspaper for distribution over the next month.Over 100 local members and supporters are helping with this.

Issues covered in this edition include: green solutions to the high cost of living; the polyclinic proposal for Norwich; orangutans being driven close to extinction by palm oil production; updates on various local issues such as the Anglia Square planning application and Post Offices.

Secondly, we are hosting the Association of Green Councillors conference in Norwich this weekend. This has taken a lot of preparation but I'm sure it will be worth it.

It is a great opportunity for Green Councillors from around the country to share their experiences of working to put Green policies into practice - and several members from elsewhere in the country have offered to do some delivering of our GreenView newspaper while they are here!

The issues to be discussed at the AGC conference include free insulation schemes, working with trade unions, reducing waste and affordable housing. 

I think the highlight of the weekend will be the talk from Steve Shaw of Local Works campaign on how local councils can make use of the Sustainable Communities Act.

This new piece of legislation will give councils more power to protect local services and enhance local communities. It will make it easier, for example, for councils to reject planning applications for new supermarkets on shopping streets that are full of independent and local businesses.

We have seen from the fight over proposals for a Tesco on Unthank Road in Norwich that councils need to be able to consider the full range of effects on the local community when assessing such planning applications.

So it will be good to see our Green Councillors across the country pushing to make full use the powers provided by the Act, and stopping other parties from trying to escape through loopholes.

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