A report inviting the Committee to note the outcomes of ‘The Strategy Room’ project to engage residents in discussions about climate change, to be summarised in a presentation at the meeting.

The Committee received a report and presentation on the outcomes of The Strategy Room Project. The Strategy Room was a project designed to engage people in discussions about climate change led by Nesta, the innovation agency, University College London’s Climate Action Unit and Fast Familiar, a Reading-based digital agency. It was described as “an immersive experience which uses facilitated deliberation, interactive polling and collective intelligence to identify the climate change policies that would best help a local area to reach net zero emissions”; and as “a way for people to walk in off the street, and within 90 minutes imagine together the benefits of a Net Zero future, and help create a strategy for their local area on how to get there”.

In late 2022, the Council had been invited to be one of 12 local authorities to take part in the pilot phase of the project. The Council had welcomed the opportunity to participate and had worked with partners to organise five workshops in March 2023. Three sessions had been arranged for residents, one for Reading Climate Change Partnership (RCCP) Board members and one session for Councillors. The project team had also worked with the University of Reading who had hosted a session so that six workshops were held in total in Reading with 67 people taking part, over 10% of the total participating in the entire pilot. Reading had achieved the highest participation rates of any of the 12 pilot areas with a good turnout at all of the workshops.

The report explained that, following the workshops that had been held around the country in spring 2023, the data that had been gathered had been analysed and published at a launch event on 12 July 2023. The results could be interrogated via a new website that had been created for the project at strategyroom.uk. The website gave further details of the scenarios and policy prescriptions that had been discussed at the workshops and allowed the results from Reading to be compared against the national results. The report explained that the Councillors who had participated in the workshop in March 2023 had expressed an interest in receiving a presentation on the findings of the project.

The presentation gave an overview of the Strategy Room project nationally, explained the project’s general approach and methodology, and set out the project’s headline findings. The findings had shown that there had been a strong level of support for net zero ideas across energy, travel and food scenarios and that levels of support for policies that tackled climate change were higher than the current political debate would suggest. The project also found that climate ‘deniers’ were rare, there had been only one out of the 639 participants and the 70 people who had taken part in the co-creation workshops. The project had found that disagreements tended to be about what should be done about climate change and what policies were felt to be meaningful and fair. The project had also found that people  ...  view the full minutes text for item 17