More money needed for 'eco-schools'

12.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Thu 10th Apr 2008

Norfolk Lib Dems say schools should be enabled to do their bit for the environment

A more realistic level of investment in schools will be needed if a new green strategy due to be agreed by Norfolk leaders next week is to have a real impact on their contribution to global warming. That is the warning from Liberal Democrats in response to Norfolk County Council's planned climate change programme, which is set to be rubber stamped at a Cabinet meeting on Monday.

While proposals to provide significant new funding for energy saving initiatives in schools and other council buildings are to be warmly welcomed, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Environment and Waste at the County Council, Tim East, cautions that the resources provided for schools may not be enough to generate real change unless an additional package of funding is provided.

Cllr East said:

"As a former headteacher I am very pleased to see that Norfolk County Council is starting to take climate change seriously and is accelerating the work it is doing to reduce its own carbon emissions and those in schools.

"Included in its proposals for change is a new fund of £250,000 a year for schools to give them an incentive to make energy saving changes. This is a fantastic first step but when you do the sums it only works out as about £500 per school. Even if they managed to double this amount by pulling in match funding from other sources I'm not really sure how much of a ground-breaking change in reducing carbon emissions a school could achieve with that sum of money.

"One major change the Liberal Democrats would like to see in schools is to replace old boilers with more energy efficient ones. The cost of replacing fossil fuel-burning boilers with environmentally-friendly alternatives can be as much as £80,000 compared to a cost of just £10,000 to £20,000 for a new oil or gas-fuelled boiler. We need to encourage schools to invest in these energy and cost saving changes but how can we expect them to do that when we are offering them less than 1% of the total cost of replacement? In Suffolk schools have been given grant funding of up to 100% of the cost to make sure that they are making decisions that are future, rather than funding, focused. We would like to see similar support made available to Norfolk schools and pledged to ringfence £600,000 of unallocated Council money for this purpose in our last set of alternative budget proposals.

"Norfolk County Council admits in its own climate change report that it needs to re-examine its strategy for school boiler replacement. As a future step I would really like to see consideration given to an extra funding package being made available to schools to help them make bigger changes to address climate change."