THE council has said that they are not sure whether they will meet their climate change emergency target by 2025.

Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council declared a Climate Emergency in 2019 and is working to make Basingstoke and Deane a net-zero carbon borough by 2030.

The council aims for its entire property portfolio to be net carbon neutral in its own operations by the end of 2025, which involves carrying out audits on properties.

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In a cabinet meeting held last Tuesday (February 8) Cllr Mark Ruffell, cabinet member for the natural environment and climate improvement said he is unable to say whether they will reach the 2025 target, after questions were raised by the Labour group.

He said: “We have as part of our climate change strategy four objectives and one of them is dealing with trying to get our property by 2025 to carbon-neutral.

“This is one of the hardest parts, but it is one of my top priorities. For this to take place what I did was make sure that we have the council's housing stock audited and that auditing is taking place in stages.

“They will then be producing the costs of achieving carbon-neutral, but I can’t tell you what the costs are going to be at this current moment. The ambition is that a little later this year we will be able to put in place a strategy to say what will be done and when and we will be able to say if we will be able to meet the target by 2025 but we don’t know if we will.

“Now is the crucial time to find out if we can achieve it.”

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Cllr Grant Donohoe shared his concerns.

He said: “On the property management and trying to move towards net-zero we have got well what I would say is not an ambitious target to get there by 2025 and looking through this document it looks like it's going to be very difficult to do that.

“Some of the items on the management of buildings where we are looking to try and get those buildings towards net-zero say ‘to be confirmed following an audit’ but we don’t have a time scale for it yet.”

Cllr Ruffell said he is confident “all will be shared later this year”.

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