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 really valued the opportunity to discuss climate change even if it was with people who held different opinions to themselves. Overall, the support for policies had increased following discussions. However, the project had also found that the biggest obstacle faced in tackling climate change was a perceived lack of trust. People felt they were living through a crisis of trust and that it was hard for to people to buy-in to systematic measures of change whilst that trust did not exist.

The presentation provided a summary analysis of Reading’s Strategy Room Project data. Ten policy ideas had been presented to participants who had then ranked them from those that they recommended the most to those they recommended the least. The presentation compared Reading’s results to the results of the rest of the UK. Reading participants of the Strategy Room project were comparatively more supportive of policies to make social housing more energy efficient, policies to redevelop the town centre in order to cut traffic and community renewable energy schemes. By contrast Reading participants were comparatively less supportive of subsised car clubs, policies to provide more electric vehicles and infrastructure, environmental ratings for supermarkets and policies to trade-in schemes for petrol/diesel cars. It was noted however that all ten of the policies had achieved a level of at least 50% support from participants.

The Head of Climate Strategy advised the Committee that the Strategy Room Project had provided some useful data and insights and that consideration was being given as to whether it could be used as a tool to form part of the future engagement plan to inform the review of the Reading Climate Emergency Strategy which would take place over the next two-year period.

Resolved –

(1)           That the outcomes of ‘The Strategy Room’ project to engage residents in discussions about climate change, as summarised in the presentation, be noted;

(2)           That the organisers, The Strategy Room Project, be thanked for their work and presentation.