Echo Comment on Durham council voting to scrap its climate emergency

Both “emergencies” are real and both require a county council to take serious steps to address them as well as all the other major issues that confront it.

The Reform councillors are right that the social care crisis is one of the biggest issues facing the NHS and that neither Conservative nor Labour has had a plan to tackle it – despite promises of “oven-ready” schemes. They are also right that the special educational needs sector, on which a growing number of young people rely, is running desperately short of cash.

Having identified those problems, it will be fascinating to see the demonstrable ways in which the Reform-led Durham council starts to solve them.

Those solutions should not be to the exclusion or detriment of climate initiatives. Just as we can see that the social care crisis is a looming threat to society so we can see that the changing climate – from heatwave-induced water shortages to winter floods of ordinary people’s homes – is also a major problem coming at us.

Durham should be positioning itself to tackle head-on all these future challenges. It should want to be at the cutting edge of finding solutions to these crises; it will not want to get left behind on any of them, especially not if the only benefit is a bit of reverse virtue-signalling.