Barry Sheerman: 'Microcosm of Huddersfield should be sustainability blueprint for the UK'

Labour stalwart Mr Sheerman has been working on the idea of making towns more sustainable for more than 20 years.

Mr Sheerman’s work has not only focused on environmentally-friendly measures, but also making sure communities are future-proof in terms of their economies too.

Mr Sheerman said a Future of Huddersfield Group was looking at what the town would be like in the future.

“Not short-term, long-term,” he said. “What’s this town really going to be like down the line? I’ve always run a group like this, back in the day I ran a group called the 2000 Group and out of that came the new stadium.”

He said the group continued in various forms over the years and the idea was now not to run a PR operation for Huddersfield, but instead to have a specific focus.

Mr Sheerman said: “And I’ve been working on this idea of making Huddersfield a sustainable town for quite a long time.

“We’re taking the United Nations sustainability criteria as the criteria and we’re going to really rigorously look at how good we are in terms of transport, in terms of energy, in terms of every bit – in the broadest sense of a sustainable town, culturally, health wise, education wise.”

He said it was “quite a tough assessment” which would benchmark Huddersfield against the world leaders in sustainability in Scandinavia, and then look at what could be done to make improvements. But he hoped looking at issues such as transport could see early wins.

“You’ve just got to look at how people travel in your town,” he said. “Because everyone knows the most sustainable transport is public transport.

“We realised sustainability in the broadest sense does encompass everything but looking at where we are currently, as we’ve shut down transportation of the most polluting kind such as cars and to some extent aircraft, we’ve suddenly got clean air. We’ve got the cleanest air anyone can remember.”

He added Huddersfield was the ideal testing ground as it represented a snapshot of the UK.

“It’s a microcosm,” he said, and he hoped to appeal to Boris Johnson’s “pragmatic” nature to sell the idea.

“The last thing I would say in terms of the ambition is this has to be replicated,” he said. “If were going to have sustainable towns it’s got to be about health, it’s got to be about education, and it’s got to be about culture.

“What I want to do is show here is something that works, it’s grass-rooted, with a little bit of help from Government in terms of match funding we could have this kind of pattern of development in every town in Britain.”