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Toolkit: Decarbonising Transport Action Learning Sets

Are you a councillor who holds the transport portfolio for your council, or an officer tasked with delivering your council's ambitions for decarbonising transport? Our Decarbonising Transport Action Learning Sets have brought together councillors and officers from across England to explore how emissions reductions could be achieved using local transport plans and associated transport investments.


Delivered through a collaboration between the LGA and Mott MacDonald, the Decarbonising Transport Action Learning Sets have brought together councillors and officers to address decarbonising transport and local transport planning.

The new Local Transport Plan (LTP) guidance which is to be released later this year will place a greater emphasis on officers to demonstrate how their LTP and associated transport investments will help reduce emissions. The Action Learning Sets is supporting councils' work, by bringing together people from different backgrounds and contexts to foster a diverse range of solutions and perspectives, on how reduced emissions could be achieved using their LTP and associated transport investments. Creating a participatory, inclusive, safe space, where councillors and officers share experiences and learnings, ensuring that best practice decarbonising transport policy can be delivered.

The Action Learning Sets provide ideas on the following questions in response to the following challenges:

  • What does effective local leadership of decarbonising transport look like?
  • How do we ensure that people are not left in transport poverty?
  • What tools can be used to support community engagement?
  • How do we ensure a whole council / cross-party approach?

The Decarbonising Action Learning Sets consist of an overview / training session, analysing the decarbonisation challenge we face and starting to analyse ways we could tackle these challenges.

Followed by five Decarbonising Action Learning Sets sessions, each lasting up to 1.5 hours, utilising the principles of:

  • providing a safe space for members to reflect, exchange and curate knowledge
  • creating a pathway to develop policy and programmes
  • forming a peer network of mutual support
  • ensuring participants agree the key messages and share the learning across the sector in a sensitive, appropriate, and timely manner to support local areas nationally
  • providing participants with expert insight into potential policy and provision, that could be put in place to tackle the challenges and opportunities
  • allowing every attendee an allotted amount of time to present an issue and seek questions and input from the group. Aimed at developing the individual and groups’ thinking that is relevant to all, builds shared learning and best practice
  • an openness to share and develop best practice across the authorities
  • creating a time and place to regularly collaborate and tackle each other’s challenges
  • working together towards the goal of decarbonising transport and ultimately build a better transport future that delivers positive social outcomes.

If you have any questions, please check out the FAQs, and if you cannot find the answer, please email [email protected]  

The programme is now in the delivery phase and the learning from the programme was shared at our 'Decarbonising transport' webinar – read our blog about this event.

The following is useful learning and highlights from the programme:

Case studies from our Pass the Planet campaign and our work on decarbonising transport, will give you a flavour of the work that the LGA has covered so far on this topic.

Highlighted pages

Climate change resources