Why Yorkshire is a key player in Britain’s green revolution

Caroline Flint has only held her new job on Labour’s front bench for a few months, but it’s pretty clear that already this particular Shadow Climate Change Secretary is taking a rather different attitude to those who have gone before.

As the party’s spokeswoman covering issues such as cutting carbon and building wind farms, you might expect to hear a little flowery rhetoric about the need for us all to knuckle down and save the planet.

Far from it.

Indeed, the Don Valley MP – guest speaker at the Yorkshire Post’s Environment Awards next week – is even a little scathing about the way environmentalists have failed to engage the wider public in the past.

“When people think about the green economy, a lot of people think – ‘yeah, really? Is it about polar bears’?” she says.

“What I’ve tried to do is find a different way to talk about this agenda.

“It is so important, but it has to be a debate that isn’t about everyone going off to these big international conferences or whatever – but is actually about people back home in Yorkshire who’ve got other things they’re worried about.”

A fresh approach is needed, she says, to re-engage a public who have quickly tired of the save-the-planet rhetoric. She sums it up pithily as “bills, not bears”.

“It is a more practical approach, but I think it’s a more thought-through approach and it’s trying to engage people in a more intelligent way,” she says. “It’s been totally abstract for people in the past.

“I, like many people, was glued to watching Frozen Planet last year, but the truth is tackling climate change has gone down in terms of people’s concepts of what’s important.

“We’ve got to somehow address this in a different way. The problem is the consequences of climate change are often decades ahead, and that’s hard for anyone to think about often. For a lot of people that’s a long way away – they’re in the here and now.

“And if we don’t work with the people focused on the here and now, we won’t actually deal with the problem.”

For Ms Flint, the answer is obvious – it’s all about highlighting the job opportunities, the lower fuel bills, and the energy security that a low-carbon economy can bring.

“Obviously it is about climate change,” she says.

“But when it comes down to hard jobs and cash and businesses adding to our economy, I think we’ve got to do more to make that connection.

“Especially in terms of the past week having headed into a double- dip recession, more than ever we should look at creating a low carbon economy as crucial to create the jobs and growth we need for the future.”

She has no doubts about the opportunities on offer for areas such as the Humber, where the production of offshore wind turbines looks set to spark a huge manufacturing boom.

“It is an industrial revolution,” she says. “Just like the industrial revolution in Victorian times, and the important part Yorkshire played in that; just as we saw with the development of coal-mining and steel in our region, so renewable energy and low-carbon energy is absolutely crucial in reasserting Yorkshire’s role in this adventure.”

It is now almost 15 years to the day since Ms Flint first arrived in Parliament as one of the huge intake of Labour MPs who swept into office on the back of Labour’s landslide victory.

She served under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, before resigning from the latter Government dramatically in 2009, accusing the Prime Minister of treating her like “female window dressing”.

Ed Miliband quickly restored her to the shadow cabinet after becoming leader, giving her first the communities brief and then moving her to energy and climate change late last year.

She found a Government, she claims, in open disunity.

“I took over in October 2011 and was faced with a coalition Government where the Treasury was saying we need to slow down on green energy and renewables; where DECC, then under Chris Huhne, was saying something different, and where we also faced a huge attack on the solar industry in this country.”

Berating the Government’s decision to slash the subsidies available to people installing solar panels on their homes, she goes on: “The solar industry was one of the few growth areas. We went from something like 3,000 jobs to 24,000 jobs in the previous year.

“We’ve seen an industry that has been directly attacked.”

The concept of Government disunity is a key theme for her, and she calls on the Conservatives to start “pulling in one direction” over renewables after a letter calling for a moratorium on new wind farms was signed by more than 100 Tory MPs; and after Chancellor George Osborne suggested far-reaching CO2 targets could yet be rolled back.

“None of this helps,” she says. “If you want investment, you have got to create confidence and Government has a role in that. People need to be certain that there is the backing and the vision but also where Government can intervene to make things happen.

“I just don’t think this Government is doing anywhere near enough.”

n Caroline Flint is guest speaker at the Yorkshire Post’s Environment Awards night which takes place at The Queens hotel in Leeds on Thursday, May 10.

Tickets are on sale now to businesses and the general public – call 0113 238 8432 or email [email protected].

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