Fighting poverty must be Green Capital target

This comment article is written by Tessa Coombes, former Bristol councillor and now studying for a PhD in social policy at Bristol University

So much has been said and written about Bristol Green Capital 2015 that I am almost loathe to step into the debate. I haven’t been involved in the ‘green’ agenda for quite a few years now, but it strikes me that little has actually changed.

Sure it’s now more central to our thoughts and many more initiatives have been introduced to encourage us all to be greener, but it is still something that is marginal to many. We also continue to approach things in silos, seeing things as separate. The environmental agenda has suffered from this for many years and has been marginalised as a result.

Is it anything to do with you?

The Green Capital programme is an opportunity to take the agenda and make it relevant to the lives of people in the city for a whole year. However, it hasn’t particularly got off to the most auspicious start, and while lessons will no doubt have been learned, so much more needs to be done to convince people that this really is anything to do with them.

The question for me is how we make it relevant to everyone, how do we involve the communities and neighbourhoods of Bristol in a way that means something to them? A key point here is about priorities. When you are struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table, to pay the bills, and every day is an uphill battle against debt, how can Green Capital be relevant to you and why does the environment matter? 

The parallels of our traditional approach to environmental and poverty issues are there for all to see – separate and marginalised, divided into silos. We regularly deal with poverty and social exclusion as a separate issue, and our plans for jobs and growth all too often start with the assumption that everyone will benefit eventually. This is what we need to change. Every new plan and programme we introduce as a city should have addressing poverty at its core, otherwise we merely serve to reinforce and exacerbate existing divides and increase the gap between rich and poor in the city. The Green Capital programme is no exception, or at least it shouldn’t be.

I am sure that there is a whole load of work going on to address this, but to be fair it isn’t obvious. A quick scan of the Green Capital website gave me one page on inclusion as an action group which said very little and seemed to be a group that had not met often. I’m hoping there’s a lot more going on than is reported on the website.

Opportunity to include and engage

There’s a real opportunity with Green Capital to do something different. It shouldn’t just be an opportunity to showcase how green we are, or how many jobs we can create in the environmental technology sector, how many more people we can get onto bicycles and how much we can increase our recycling rate. It needs to be an opportunity to see how we can include and engage all areas of the city, local communities and local people, how we can bring new jobs closer to those that need them, how we can generate activities and actions in local areas that are a priority for those areas.

Environmental ‘politics’ has always had a close association with grassroots activity, with citizen engagement, inclusion and involvement. That’s what needs to be at the heart of Bristol’s Green Capital programme. 

The legacy for Green Capital should be seen across all neighbourhoods of the city and should be measured in terms of the contribution it makes to ‘sharing prosperity’, a term used in the Fairness Commission report. The notion here is that those worst hit by the recession should be the first to benefit from new jobs and growth. This won’t happen on its own, we need to accept that prioritisation of those most in need is essential in all our plans and strategies, not a separate issue to be dealt with by someone else.

So why not start with our Green Capital programme and make sharing prosperity a central concept and showcase what can be achieved by prioritisation and a little more joined-up thinking?