Gary Neville: environmental thought leader

Trewin Restorick argues the Manchester United defender's much-mocked " Tele-Tubby eco-home" could represent an important watershed for green building

Despite being a Plymouth Argyle supporter I still have a deep passion for football and enjoyed watching the pantomime spat between Carlos Tevez and Gary Neville before the Manchester derby last Wednesday.

We have been discussing with a group of leaders at Sky how we could use the huge appeal of football to communicate environmental messages to fans. These discussions quickly hit a fairly major stumbling block due to the high consumption and non-sustainable lifestyles of most footballers. Getting them and their clubs to talk about low carbon lifestyles would be massively hypocritical and pointless.

I was amazed and delighted therefore to hear that Gary Neville has decided to commission what has been described as the first zero-carbon house in the North West. It will be embedded in the Lancashire hills and then covered with a grass roof making only its low stone walls visible. Apparently Gary Neville also drives a Toyota Prius to the training ground.

I was one of the people Al Gore trained in the UK to deliver his Inconvenient Truth slideshow, among the other people being trained was Sir Alex Ferguson. Perhaps he is quietly starting a new low carbon revolution at Old Trafford. It is a real pity that rather than endorse and support Gary Neville's efforts virtually all the media laughingly compared his new pad to the home of the Tele-Tubbies.

Scientific assault

The prolonged and undoubtedly coordinated attack on the science behind climate change continues unabated, not helped it must be said by the attitude of the scientific community.

The acknowledgement by the IPCC that it got it wrong about the speed of glacial melt in the Himalayas is obviously damaging as is UEA's continuing mismanagement of the leaked emails.

Despite this sniping the Government's Chief Scientific advisor reiterated that the basic science behind climate change is completely robust, although he did urge scientists to be more transparent about uncertainties.

I find the whole debate deeply depressing. From all the evidence I have seen it is clear that we are carrying out a global experiment with our atmosphere and nobody is really certain what the outcomes will be.

Now I am not one to avoid taking risks and believe that a calculated gamble adds spice to life, but last time I checked I think that we only had one atmosphere and you can't get a replacement in the Argos catalogue. Why anyone in their right mind would wish to carry on with this experiment, especially when changing it is within our knowledge and capabilities is beyond me.

I am sure that the half-a million householders who the Environment Agency believe will be at significant risk of flooding by 2035, might be asking why we are not taking this issue more seriously. As well as the huge disruption flooding causes it is also incredibly expensive. The Environment Agency has calculated that the cost of flood defence will double to £1bn per year, and the cost to each household hit by flooding will be in the region of £20,000-£30,000.

Charity partnership

On Thursday I gave a short presentation at one of Business in the Community’s Seeing is Believing events. These are designed to bring corporate leaders together to see first-hand what other companies are doing. I was outlining our charity partnership with EDF Energy.

We were chosen as one of EDF Energy's two charity partners following a selection process including a presentation to a panel featuring employee representatives. This is something that a growing number of companies are doing and we were involved in another presentation at an insurance company on Tuesday.

When it works well, the relationship between a charity and a large company can be of enormous benefit to both parties. With EDF Energy we can help them with their employee engagement projects, we can create added impetus to their environmental activities and we can help them build stronger links with their local communities.

In return, EDF Energy helps us to reach far more people, we can learn from the things that EDF Energy do well and the relationship helps us to better understand what wider changes are required to help companies do more to reduce carbon.

Financial year-end

Many years ago I had the dubious privilege of working for a local authority and know the sudden pressure to start spending money that suddenly appears at the end of the financial year. Judging by the sudden rash of local authority tenders that have appeared this pressure seems to remain, despite the difficult economic circumstances.

Many of the intended outcomes from these tenders are impossible to achieve in the timeframe allocated and the delivery deadlines verge on the ludicrous. Changing the year-end financial pressures would be one of the best ways to improve public sector performance and provide better value for money, yet it does not seem to be on the agenda for any political party.

Trewin Restorick is chief executive of environmental charity and advisory body Global Action Plan

This article first appeared on his weekly blog Trewin Says