Very recently, I read through the Community Energy Pathways UK guide and expert video coverage around it on the growing conversation about how community energy groups in the UK can partner with their respective local authorities to install solar panels on council roofs, in a way that brings benefits to both parties. But ever since, a few thoughts have not left me. I want to share two.
This feels close to home for me, given my own experience working within a local authority, and now working alongside many community groups and local authorities across the UK on three different strands: zero-carbon community-generated energy, nature-rich and resilient cities, and faith-based climate action. Different strands, but the same question keeps returning in every of our workshops and meeting: how can community groups work together with local authorities for shared sustainability and climate benefits?
Thought one: LA officers are stretched beyond capacity
One persistent problem I have heard about since I first worked within an LA is the reality of annual budget cuts and downsizing. I still have questions about how deep this runs as to whether the cuts are council-wide, or whether sustainability and climate teams are the teams being disproportionately squeezed. But whatever the shape of it, the consequence is the same: many LA officers I have interacted with are carrying more than any one person should carry, holding portfolios that used to be shared by two or three colleagues, and being asked to deliver climate ambitions with resources that keep shrinking.
This is not a criticism of the officers. It is a description of the environment they are being asked to work in. And it matters, because a well-intended community group knocking on the door of an overstretched officer is not a partnership but rather an over-pressured queue.
Thought two: cross-departmental functionalities are rarely in sync.
The second thought sits underneath the first, and I think it is the bigger structural problem. Many sustainability and climate initiatives drag unnecessarily or quietly stall behind schedule because the internal machinery of the local authority does not move together. The Legal, procurement, finance, insurance (which is now a very real concern for solar-on-roof projects), estates, planning teams: each of these functions has its own priorities, its own risk appetite, and its own timeline. And in most LAs I have observed, they are not meeting each other eye-to-eye in the same room early enough, or often enough, to keep a community-partnered project moving at the pace the climate emergency actually requires.
So the question I keep returning to, and want to put openly is: who has the convening power? Who inside a local authority, or inside a community group, can pull legal, procurement, finance, estates, planning and insurance teams into the same conversation, at the same time, and broker the relationships those functions need with the community group on the other side of the table? Who facilitates that? And where it is already happening, what made it possible? Is there a specific role, a political mandate, a trusted individual, a community partner willing to hold the space?
I am genuinely asking because there are projects and initiatives across the country currently dragging behind because these questions remain unanswered and every month of delay is a month of climate action we cannot get back.
If you are a local authority officer, a councillor, a community energy lead/expert, or someone who has watched a partnership work so well, your input here would be highly appreciated. Where have you seen convening done well, and who did it?
Tag someone in your network who has the answer — this is a conversation we all need.
Sharing this openly because I do not think any one of us has the full answer but together, we might.