Regular readers will know I’ve been an elected City Councillor here in Newcastle for 20 out of the last 21 years*. Normally at midnight on the first Thursday in May, I’ll be blinking under the merciless strip lights of a leisure centre watching votes being counted, nerves frazzled after a stupidly long day on the doorstep. But every fourth year, we get a ‘fallow’ year with no elections in Newcastle, and, as many County Councils count at a more civilised time, we get to watch the results come in from a distance on Friday.

Last week, the big headline was the sweep of Reform UK across the county councils, often going from no Councillors to a majority and political control. Reform’s ubiquitous leader Nigel Farage (right) soon appeared on the media to declare that Council staff involved in DEI or Net Zero should start looking for another job. Deputy Leader Richard Tice then popped up to say that Reform-led councils would fight against solar farms, battery storage systems and the like in their borough.

So is this a terminal threat to Net Zero on a local level? I predict this morning, as newly selected Reform Council Leaders meet senior Council staff for the first time, will be a rather brutal collision with cold hard reality.

Take Net Zero staff. What do they do all day? Well, terribly ‘woke’ things like rolling out electric vehicle charging infrastructure (Tice drives an EV), insulating the homes of the fuel poor, saving the Council money through energy efficiency or in house renewables and/or building flood resilience. Almost all of these projects are funded through central Government schemes, so cutting them will have a net cost to the Council or local residents. Will the new Reform Councillors deliberately sabotage this work and give themselves or vulnerable residents a financial headache just to make a political point? Will they condemn elderly residents to high energy bills? What would having a dearth of public EV charging do for the already struggling economies of County Durham or Lincolnshire?

The other lever Reform has pledged to use is the planning system. The problem here is that each local Planning Committee works on a quasi-judicial basis where political whipping of the Councillors on the Committee is banned. If a member of the Committee expresses an opinion for or against a project before the decision is made (known as pre-determination), that excludes them from the decision. When they do make a decision, members are obliged to judge each application against planning policy, not their own opinion – I spent a couple of years on Planning and reluctantly voted for several proposals I thought were pretty ropey, but there was no good policy reason to vote against them.

What happens if these rules are ignored? Well, the developer can appeal to a Planning Inspector who, if the complaint is upheld (as is often the case), will approve the development and award costs against the Council concerned. So the project goes ahead and the Council is saddled with substantial legal fees. Result.

Longer term, a Council could produce supplementary planning document on renewable energy systems, but this is a lengthy and bureaucratic process, and the final policy has to be approved by central Government. So again, a Reform-based Council wanting to pursue this route would be very likely to spend a lot of time and money to achieve absolutely nothing.

The one area I think would be most vulnerable would be active travel, particularly safe cycle infrastructure. These often take political bravery to push through, so I would expect Reform wouldn’t bother.

As I mentioned above, a few years ago I had a year off the Council at the behest of the electorate. When I won my seat back in May 2019, out of curiosity I decided to do the induction training with the newbies. I sat in the Civic Centre reception waiting to be taken through and got chatting to a newly elected Independent Councillor. “I want to come in and shake things up a bit” he declared grandly, gesturing with disdain at the hustle and bustle of Council staff around us “Get things done around here!” It was the last I heard from him.

Of course having majority on a Council is different from being in a loose coalition of Independents, but given the realities and practicalities of Net Zero, and how Local Authorities have to operate, I predict the anti-Net Zero rhetoric will splutter out.

* For the record, I’m a Liberal Democrat councillor