Case studies

Climate emergency has been declared by councils in Worcestershire. This created an opportunity to bring together a unified set of targets that were shared across the districts of Worcestershire through the Local Enterprise Partnership’s Energy Strategy.

South Cambridgeshire District Council set up the Zero Carbon Communities (ZCC) Grant scheme to harness local action and enthusiasm, build local community networks and to enable this through a consistent and sustainable funding approach.

Housing retrofit is a highly important and effective programme of work and Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) has been undertaking insulation work over the last two decades in response to government funding.

The Royal Borough of Greenwich was commissioned as part of the European Sharing Cities programme to demonstrate the potential of innovation and technology in the areas of citizen engagement, mobility, energy, housing and city data platforms to benefit the environment, the city and its citizens.

Ealing council's COVID-19 Vaccine Working Group made important decisions through analysing data on vaccine uptake in the borough to engage communities from low socio-economic groups and ethnic minority backgrounds.

Cornwall Council have been using the Cornwall Development and Decision Wheel (CDDW) for cabinet decisions since September 2019. The CDDW is based on Doughnut Economics. It has been used to illustrate the positive and negative impacts of the decision being proposed in an easily accessible form that draws decision-makers to key issues that may require further debate, mitigation or even cancellation. Three years into using the CDDW, we have revisited them to understand what Cornwall Council have learnt from embedding it in Cabinet and other decisions and the impact it has had.

From March to October 2021, there was a reported increased in the number of suicide attempts, fatalities, and interventions at Stevenage train station. A Task and Finish Group was set up to quickly explore what support could be offered locally to people in crisis at the station. A NightLight crisis café has been opened close to the station, with 108 visits in the first month alone. This case study was done jointly with the National Suicide Prevention Alliance and forms part of our suicide prevention resource.

Art UK’s unprecedented photography and digitisation project has resulted in the UK’s collection of over 14,000 public sculptures and monuments being freely available to view and search online for the first time ever.

Wiltshire Council’s Climate Team supported a research project aiming to bring Maths to life for Year 7 students. Partnered with a Maths Teacher from a local school, the team developed a challenge to support their Statistics module – using real data from the Council’s public consultation on its draft Climate Strategy. The project focused on Mean, Median, Mode and Range at the level required for Year 7. Students created tally charts, bar charts and pictograms, calculated emissions, money savings and funding, and analysed how Wiltshire residents feel about climate change and the Council’s plans.