Retrofitting Solar PV
Retrofitting Solar PV

The Crawley Economic Recovery Taskforce (CERT) created by your Labour led Council has five key priority areas including ‘Green New Deal’ or Green Transformation.

This is not only a highly topical issue currently but something that we must embrace as a Town as we seek to meet our Climate change obligations and manage the change that is happening, and about to happen, across the Country and the whole world to deal with Climate change.

But we see the way to do this as rather than just a ‘tick-box’ exercise where organisations verify that they have met their obligations by ticking boxes on a form or undertaking token and often meaningless changes in the way that they work, we wish to embed ‘green’ activity into everything that we do as a Council and as a Town. We have already started this by adopting a Climate Change emergency motion that obliges us as a Council to review every element of our activity and to take action to reduce our impact on the environment. A detailed plan to deliver this is under preparation right now and will be available shortly for public review.

But we also need to take a leadership role across the whole Town as we strive to deal with the fall-out from Covid-19 on our economy as well as climate change impacts. This means adopting a some major changes and activities that meet multiple objectives including diversification reducing our reliance on Gatwick and associated businesses, expanding tech businesses across Crawley, skilling and re-skilling Crawley people to take on the new jobs that this will create and building capacity for activities like replacing gas in people’s homes.

More specifically this includes:

  • Construction skills hub – focusing on green and/or replacement technologies
  • Assisting Manor Royal and other businesses to ‘decarbonise’
  • Retrofitting ‘green’ elements to Crawley housing stock – insulation, solar panels, gas replacement etc
  • Low carbon energy, including district heating schemes and micro energy generation, in major developments
  • Skills academy for decarbonisation activities (built into education programmes and mature worker retraining)
  • Innovating in sustainable transport services and opportunities

We have detailed ideas and proposals for most of these items that we will be bringing forward in the next few months.

We would like to hear your ideas. You can email: peter.smith@crawleylabour.org.uk with your suggestions and ideas, and help us improve our Crawley recovery plan further. We have already been contacted by business people that are excited by our ideas and welcome further contacts.

Most importantly, unlike some other organisations, Crawley Labour is not just talking about these issues while waiting for someone else to take action for our Town. Only Crawley Labour has the vision, the ambition and the drive to bring all of this together, building on the work that we have done over the last seven years to re-activate the New Town ethos – we grow and we rejoice, as we move forward into a better, greener future for the whole of our Town.

Cllr Peter Smith

Ifield and Ifield West

Cabinet Member for Planning and Economic Development

Note: the detail published plans are available to everyone here: Crawley Economic Recovery Task Force and Town Deal Board | Crawley GOV

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