It was Sally who led the decision that Nottingham declare its ambition to be the UK’s first carbon neutral city, and to achieve this by 2028. She stepped down from the council in 2023 and has since been concentrating on environmental matters through her work with the Nottingham Climate Assembly and as vice chair of the Nottingham Green Partnership.

You can find information about Nottingham City Council – who your councillor is, the decisions the council make, along with public surveys and consultations – here.

I met Sally to talk about the plans to hold a Climate Assembly in the city, and the mini- assembly process that she and others have been working on.

Nottingham seems to have a reputation for being a city that has been leading on environmental issues over many years now.

That’s absolutely right. I remember having visitors from the Keralan government who wanted to learn about our electric buses; and the city council hosts the Net Zero hub for the Midlands, which stretches from Wales across to the North Sea. There is a lot of expertise here; and when we decided that we would aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2028 we knew this was going to be difficult and was reliant on getting Government support. It’s since become even more challenging. The decision to pull back on the pledge to electrify all vehicles had a negative impact; Covid had a negative impact because people stopped using public transport. But the ambition has made people sit up and take notice and want to be involved. Everyone is pulling in that direction.

When I first started as the environment portfolio holder, I found that meetings weren’t always as well attended as you might hope. Now, whenever people are asked to come together to talk about the challenges, you struggle to find a room big enough. There are people attending from the colleges and community gardens and transport, the environment agency, NHS trusts, companies, all sorts of different organisations. The reality of climate change is making more people understand the need to discuss the challenges we face.

Before I left the Council, I managed to persuade the Labour party to commit to a climate assembly in their manifesto. That was very important to me. But if you want an assembly and the recommendations that come from it to have any real clout then it has to be, what is called, sortitioned. This is a process whereby you assemble a genuinely representative sample of the population. Sortitioning is very important when you are dealing with issues that affect everyone, where people may have differing opinions and ideas on how to face a public challenge. The idea of a climate assembly is that it should represent all the voices of the city, to draw ideas from the most diverse range of citizens that we can.

This also means that any proposals that come out of the assembly can’t just be dismissed as the views of environmentalists, as another pressure group. I’ve heard this so many times; ‘they don’t represent the city; they’re just a bunch of green activists!’ If we run a properly sortitioned process, inviting people that represent all of its diversity and are coming at this question of climate change and carbon neutrality from a diverse range of perspectives, then the politicians have got to listen. And they will.

The sortitioning process, to get the representative sample in the room, is not easy and it’s expensive. You also need to financially support those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to participate, for example to cover caring costs and help people with transport. This means that we need to raise money for the assembly to happen; £160,000. The City Council are not in a financial position to provide that sort of money at the moment and so we’re working really hard to find the funds to make it happen. We have a Crowd Funder page and have £20,000 pledged from other donations, but we need a lot more.

South Yorkshire ran a Citizens’ Assembly on Climate, initiated by the Mayor. You can find out more about this, and read about the sortitioning process, in which one hundred people were selected from thirty thousand invitations here.

The Nottingham Green Partnership have agreed to sponsor the Assembly. This was formed in 1992 to bring together sector organisations, private companies, voluntary and charitable organisations, and others to work together to tackle the city’s environmental challenges and to minimise its environmental impact. There are around forty organisations involved now that meet quarterly, to talk about how we can achieve the 2028 carbon neutrality goal.

The organisation that are managing the overall project, who are doing most of the fundraising work, who are lobbying for money, and are spreading the word about what a climate assembly is, are the Nottingham Climate Assembly, which was formed in Nottingham in 2020. And key to this work has been the running of the climate mini-assemblies.

As their website states, ‘the organisation ‘exists to promote a democratic approach to Nottingham’s future well-being. Our aim is for everyone in the city to be involved in responding to the climate crisis we all face’.

Can you tell me what a mini-assembly is, and how it’s run?

They all vary in style and content but the idea is to get people taking about the climate and what they and their organisations or their neighbourhood can do to make a difference; as well as spreading the word about what the larger climate assembly would be and how it would work. We’ve held one with five people, one with thirty people and the rest have been somewhere in-between. What is important is that you are talking to different people with different perspectives and knowledge and experience. You are finding out what their priorities are, which also helps us understand the issues and themes that we would need to explore at a full assembly. We’ve had fourteen mini-assemblies so far, with the first one being held in September 2023 at the Green Festival.  

Each one of the mini-assemblies has a focus. For instance, we had one with Nottingham University Hospitals Trust staff about how the Trust could improve its sustainability. They were keen to talk about waste, about plastic use and transport. It was only a lunch time session but the Board had agreed to listen and several practical ideas and solutions came out of that.

There were four questions that this mini-assembly focussed on:

• How can the NUH Trust reduce its Carbon emissions?

• How can the NUH Trust improve sustainability in service delivery?

• How can the NUH Trust improve sustainability and reduce biodiversity loss in relation to buildings and assets?

• How can the NHS Trust promote Green Prescribing?

We have trained facilitators that run each session and Nottingham Climate Assembly organise facilitation training for those who want to come along and help in this process. Understanding how to facilitate a meeting to make sure things move swiftly and people understand what is happening and how they can contribute is really important. Each session is carefully structured and begins with an introduction that is shaped by the level of understanding of the challenge by the group and the context of the mini-assembly.

After the introduction you get people into smallish groups and there are ground rules around how long you should speak for, making sure people aren’t interrupted as they speak, being respectful, and how to indicate if you agree or like what people are saying. It’s a simple but effective way of running a conversation. You can have each group looking at a different issue but usually the groups will be tasked with exploring the same question, which is fundamentally around reducing carbon emissions within their context and specific environment.

Each group will have around half a dozen people, with a facilitator and a note-taker, and at the end of the session the facilitator will summarize the main points that the group have come up with and ask which are the three most important of these. This is often an interesting moment as people can become quite passionate when they are having to decide what they want to share. These are passed on to the main facilitator who attempts to identify any pattern or connections between what has been shared. It’s amazing how often the same ideas do begin to emerge. 

How long does a mini-assembly last?

That depends on the group. Extinction Rebellion held one where they invited lots of environmental organisations, pressure groups and lobbyists in the city to the Sumac centre in Forest Fields which lasted more or less a full day. There was a session in the morning that was addressing ideas and actions and a session in the afternoon looking at how people and groups could work together more effectively to put these into action. But most of the mini-assemblies have been shorter than that. If it’s run well, you can do a lot in an hour or two.  

You can learn more about that assembly, as well as all of the others mentioned in this article here.

So where else have mini-assemblies taken place?

The city council had one to explore what they could do to continue making progress to achieve the 2028 goal whilst understanding the financial constraints. We’ve had sessions at the Green Hustle and the Green Meadows Festival which have been more open, and run as drop-in sessions.