With its planning appeal looming, St. Mary’s Church in Moseley desperately need to convince local support for their proposed photovoltaic array to put their feelings in writing. So on Saturday, a group of local people gathered in the churchyard to make a small fuss, in the hope that we could attract some media attention for the project.

I was particularly happy that the gentlemen from the nearby Hamza Mosque took such an active role in the photoshoot. Notably, their mosque actually stands to benefit if the church’s appeal should fail, as we are likely divide the Green Streets funding between the mosque and the MADAHAL allotments should that occur. But this was not even a factor.

“We felt that if something could happen that could bring the two congregations together, then that would make cohesion easier, and this project has been a godsend,” remarked Saifer Rehman, an active citizen in the community surrounding the mosque. “We can say to the Muslims, ‘look, if the Christians are doing things for the Muslims, then why can’t Muslims do something for the Christians?’ – and vice versa.”

Community before self-interest – it is what won the Green Streets money for Moseley, and while I would be lying if I said I was confident that the Planning Inspectorate will be delivering us good news, it’s hard to not feel a bit joyous when the projects seems to be (slowly) improving community cohesion.

Incidentally, if anyone out there would like to help by writing in support of St. Mary’s, details are in the press release below!

Press Release Community Support

Categories: Community Power, Planning and Regeneration
Tags: birmingham, climate change, community cohesion, community groups, microgeneration, moseley, planning, sustainable moseley

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I got some bad news on Thursday – a local Grade II listed church, St. Mary’s, applied for planning permission for a photovoltaic array. The electricity generated per year would have been around 8000kWh, the surplus of which would have been sold back via a feed-in-tariff. Sustainable Moseley, the local group that I am Vice Chair for, worked tirelessly to galvanise support in the community, and even managed to get £30,000 for the project from British Gas. But it was turned down.

In many ways, this was a genuine shock – photovoltaic panels are hardly the most controversial form of microgeneration (that dubious honour belongs to the poor old wind turbine) – and the project as a whole was remarkably well-conceived. The proposed array adhered to the guidelines laid out by English Heritage in their publication ‘Small scale solar electric (photovoltaics) energy and traditional buildings’ and aligns with the wishes of the National Trust, which first installed photovoltaics onto one of its Grade I listed buildings in 2008. Indeed, they say, in no uncertain terms, that if we do not tackle the issues surrounding climate change, there will be no heritage left to conserve. If you fancy some more in-depth reading, cast an eye over Planning Policy Statements PPS 1, 2 and 22.

It was also widely supported by the people of Moseley (you know, those people who use, live and work near the church) – notably by our local Labour MP Lynne Jones, local Liberal Democrat Councillor Ernie Hendricks and the Moseley Society – the group that first enabled Moseley to become a conservation area in the first place. Further, Birmingham launched its Green New Deal last week, and the City Council signed up to the 10:10 scheme mere days ago. The Planning Committee’s rejection of a promising microgeneration project such as this has little resonance with those commitments, and bodes ill for Birmingham’s low-carbon future.

I know, I know. The mind boggles.

Ultimately, this project was, as much as anything else, a victim of planning policy, which makes no real provision for the differing priorities of the politics of conservation and climate chance. Indeed, there is clear policy gap in situations where issues of conservation and climate change coincide, and for the sake of the sustainability of Moseley and other conservation areas, this needs to be closed, and quickly – so that other backwards-looking public servants cannot exploit it. I’m going to be following this closely.

In this case, the church is now likely to miss out on the £30,000 of Green Streets funding. Most churches don’t have that sort of money lying around. Most churches would jump at the change to reduce their energy bills to zero. Perhaps they could use the money they save to…hmmm, run and maintain the fabric of the church? Just an idea.

While it’s tempting to extrapolate the actions of the six who voted against the project to cover all of Birmingham’s Conservative Councillors, I’m not going to do it. But all six voted against it, and that is still telling. If David Cameron says that his Councils are where we should look for his government, well, this situation shows me a potential government that is not serious about climate change, sustainable living or community empowerment. What good will come of us voting for that?

This blog was originally posted on House of Twits.

Categories: Planning and Regeneration, Sustainable Lives
Tags: 10:10, birmingham, birmingham city council, climate change, conservation, david cameron, ernie hendricks, feed-in-tarriffs, lynne jones, microgeneration, moseley, moseley society, planning, renewables, sustainable moseley

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Today, Ed Miliband posted an article on Twitter from the New York Times Magazine, entitled ‘Are Your Friends Making You Fat?’ Not, as it sounds, a quiz from Sugar, but a fascinating insight into how good (and bad) behaviour passes “from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.” The article considers a study into the causes of heart disease, which followed more than 15,000 people in the US town of Framingham, near Boston, since 1948. Their results were reinterpreted by a pair of social scientists, and the results are remarkable – social scientists have assumed for decades that behaviour passes from person to person in this way, but this is the first time that those social scientists haven’t engineered the situation among a small group of people, in a limited period of time. This was real life, a “moving picture” that spanned decades – and was therefore an important set of proofs as to how behaviour spreads among those with connected lives.

This is all too familiar, and I could name hundreds of occasions when I have done things because other people were doing them. Not overt, Grange Hill-esque spoken imperatives like “smoking is cool”, but more subtle and insinuating. For example, no-one at my school would entertain the idea of carrying their rucksack with the weight evenly distributed between two shoulders, but no-one really knew why. Nonetheless, this is why the power of community is so important when making positive change – communities are groups of people who feel that have something in common, bound together by a set of beliefs, a shared activity, or even a building. They already “fit in” with one another in some capacity, they subscribe to a shared identity – so successfully planting the seeds of change into a few members of a close-knit community will (or at least should) have a more tangible effect.

I’m interested in this in all sorts of ways, but especially because this concept of contagious behaviour is the basic premise of the community engagement aspect of Sustainable Moseley’s contribution to the Green Streets project, which is composed of a microgeneration aspect (photovoltaic arrays for St. Mary’s Church, Hamza Mosque and the MADAHAL allotment pavilion, and solar hot water for Moseley CofE school), and an energy efficiency/behavioural change aspect.

The latter is very important – 20 homes will be receiving around £3000 each of energy saving measures based on individual evaluations of those properties – but a whole lot more needs to be done if we can justifiably say that the project is a community-wide success, never mind a template for how behavioural changes relating to sustainability and climate change should be instigated.

So what are we doing to put these observations into practice? Firstly, we’re taking our own advice literally. The local mosque is connected to Moseley’s Islamic community via short-wave radio, and we will be using that to broadcast tips for saving energy via behavioural changes to households. At the start of the project, households will bring their first meter readings to the mosque, and from then, we’ll take readings periodically. This and their bill history to ascertain how much energy (and money) people are saving by changing their behaviour – and more importantly, they’ll be doing it together, allowing them to compare, support and even compete. We will, of course, be encouraging a combination of all three.

More ambitiously, we’re trying to challenge the concept of community, by creating new ones – or exposing those which people may have been unaware of. Too often, we get hung up on the differences that divide us – but then you go into people’s homes, meet them and their families, look at the things that matter to them (like a warm, cosy house in winter that doesn’t cost the earth to heat) – and you see how absolutely ridiculous that is. Respect the differences, yes – but embrace the similarities! We are social creatures, and this makes us happy. So we chose the biggest microgeneration projects for the church and the mosque, who are working together. This has real resonance with people – something which the success of Birmingham’s Faith and Climate Change is testament to. It’s hard work. But people’s lives are connected, and we have to understand and work with those connections to make positive changes.

This blog was originally posted on House of Twits, with photo from ell brown.

Categories: Sustainable Lives
Tags: birmingham, community cohesion, ed miliband, microgeneration, moseley, renewables, social sciences, sustainable moseley

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