Chichester Climate Emergency Action Plan Discussed

Chichester councillors have asked questions about the proposed use of hydro-treated vegetable oil (HVO) in the district council’s vehicles.

During a meeting of the overview & scrutiny committee on Tuesday (July 1), the draft Climate Emergency Action Plan 2025-2030 was discussed.

The aim of the plan is to reduce the council’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2040, while helping residents and businesses to make their own improvements.

One of the projects proposed in the plan outlines the switch from diesel to HVO within the council’s fleet, reducing emissions by around one-third in the space of a year.

It’s a change that’s being considered by authorities up and down the country and prompted Henry Potter (Con, Goodwood) to ask whether there was enough waste cooking oil in the country to provide what was needed.

Mr Potter said he didn’t believe the project was deliverable and also questioned the wisdom of spending more than £80,000 a year on the fuel, which is more expensive than diesel.

He added:

“That’s an awful lot of money to achieve not a particularly big reduction in carbon, particularly when you bear in mind that, as development goes on in the district and more people live here, there will be more waste requiring more vehicles.”

Jonathan Brown, cabinet member for environment, said there was enough of the oil.

But he added that the real challenge would be finding a genuinely sustainable source to provide the fuel to the council – ‘one that isn’t produced by cutting down rain forests and planting crops in its stead’.

He described the proposed change as ‘an interim measure’. The council has tried out two types of electric vehicles but found that neither was reliable enough to be able to deliver services such as the collection of waste and recycling. That doesn’t mean it won’t be possible further down the line.

In the meantime, Mr Brown said:

“Unless we switch to HVO, we cannot meet our carbon reduction target or come close to it.

"These vehicles are the single biggest source of council emissions. It is a lot of money but we have budgeted to be able to pay for it.”

And he warned that, while he was ‘very hopeful’ that things would go to plan, if a reliable source of the fuel could not be found, there was no Plan B within the action plan to allow the

council to meet the net zero target.