Sutton Council have recently released a report on One Planet Sutton and its progress in meeting environmental targets, and the Lib Dems are trying to tell residents that they have met most of the targets.
However, the truth is that the targets marked as ‘met’ in the report have changed since 2013, and some have been reduced.
Perhaps the most embarrassing part of this report, was the lack of progress made in improving the environmental sustainability of the Council's own offices, such as Council staff using greener transport to get to work and recycling more. For example, they have a target to reduce council water usage. They failed this because water consumption in council office increased by a third, yet they awarded themselves a success! How come? Because the closure of Cheam baths meant that overall council water usage did temporarily fall. I don’t think you could call that a sustainable approach!
Conservative Councillor for Beddington South, Neil Garratt, said: “In theory One Planet Sutton is a good idea: cutting waste, cutting energy and water usage, recycling more, and so on. These are all sensible ideas. Unfortunately, it’s become a farce. Behind the glossy report, Sutton has made little or no progress on its key targets since 2009. So it has become an annual exercise in dressing up their failure to kid people that they’re succeeding.
They should spend the money on actually improving their performance, not on misleading reports to cover up for failure.”
This report also presents a bizarre scoring system. A single green tick actually means a target wasn’t met and isn’t on target. If a target is met or on track, it gets a double tick. It means anyone scanning down the performance table will see lots of green ticks and think that things are going well, not realising that single green ticks indicate failure.
Picture: Lib Dem Council leader in front of a pile of rubbish she thought was sensible to dump on Sutton High Street as a PR stunt.