Manchester City Council is tipped to set green targets for developers on their public-private partnership projects.
The sustainability agenda has been placed high up on the council’s agenda, following the authority’s announcement last year that it wants to become a zero carbon city by 2038 – over a decade earlier than the national target of 2050.
Louise Wyman (pictured), the council’s new strategic director of growth and development, told EG that one of the things she wants to focus on during her time at the council is to look at improving its strategic development partnerships, which could include creating green targets.
“We have existing partnerships, but I think we can add a bit more structure to that and also think [about] what we want to get out of the partnerships,” Wyman said.
However, Wyman said she was encouraged by efforts made in the industry so far, adding: “Progressive property companies already want to drive [the] sustainability agenda, in some cases they are ahead of us in our thinking, research and R&D.”
Wyman said while existing partnerships have already set targets around job generation, affordable housing provision, and quality of design, the sustainability agenda is becoming “increasingly important”.
“In a partnership arrangement, [we] spend time asking what matters [to property companies], what matters to us as the public sector and how we drive that together,” she said. “Having clear ambitions, having targets that we can all work towards, is part of that.”
The council is also looking “in a lot of depth” at retrofitting homes in Manchester to make them energy efficient.
“It will be a steady programme and will need a lot of investment from sources other than the council,” said Wyman.
“We will need to bring partners with us, and we’re having those conversations with a lot of the development community who are also committed to zero carbon, as well as the energy generation sector.”
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