What is SusMo?

SusMo is currently a sub-group of Moseley Neighbourhood Forum, whose mission statement is “supporting our community in cutting its CO2 emissions”. It was established following a successful public meeting (‘Save Energy & Save the Planet’) in June 2007, where Moseley residents agreed to take action to create and nurture sustainable lifestyles in the area. The first meeting followed swiftly, in July 2007, and the group have held at least one monthly meeting ever since.

Since late 2009, the group has largely been working on the British Gas Green Streets project, a scheme which puts British Gas resources to work on community-led sustainable energy projects.

Who are SusMo?

The group is slightly different from many other environmental groups, in that it was started by a group of active citizens with an interest in tackling climate change and living sustainably, as oppose to by established eco-activists.

SusMo is currently run by a team of six core members, who cover the posts of Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary, Project Co-ordinator and Publicity Co-ordinator, but other regular attendees are involved with the Green Streets project.

As a sub-group, SusMo has no formal constitution of its own, and meetings are classed as Moseley Forum meetings. SusMo’s monthly meetings are open to everyone, and the minutes are published on the Moseley Forum website. Most of the regular attendees are Moseley residents, but also include interested people from Kings Heath, Stirchley and Balsall Heath. Notably, SusMo has a good relationship with nearby groups Transition Kings Heath and Balsall Heath is Our Planet (BHIOP), and ensures that their members are kept in the loop regarding SusMo activities.

Green Streets

The Green Streets project is a British Gas initiative – they put up £2m to be invested into microgeneration, energy efficiency and behavioural change in the UK. Groups from around the country were invited to bid for part of the money, and SusMo tabled the winning bid in the West Midlands with their plans for Moseley. Consequently, £140,000 worth of energy-saving measures were granted to the area, to be designed and allocated by SusMo.

Microgeneration measures were proposed for St. Mary’s Church, the Masjid-e-Hamza Mosque, Moor Green allotments and Moseley CofE School, and a mixture of energy efficiency and microgeneration for 20 Moseley households (originally 10 from Moseley & District Housing Association, 5 from the church and 5 from the mosque). This provided a lot of scope for community engagement, and for getting different groups in the area to work together, as well as for the actual energy-saving objective. Moseley has a well-developed community network, and the monthly Farmers’ Market is a good place to talk to local people about ongoing community initiatives.

Achievements so far

The homes are at various stages of completion – those due to receive microgeneration measures will be getting their solar thermal and photovoltaic systems installed during the first quarter of 2011, with the first of these due to be completed in January. Most of the new condensing boilers were installed in the final quarter of 2010, as was the loft insulation and pipe lagging. SusMo has also ordered a stock of smaller items relating to energy efficiency and behavioural change –such as energy monitors, eco kettles, radiator panels and pipe lagging. These will be given out to community members in return for their signing up to the energy use measuring site iMeasure, joining the Sustainable Moseley ‘Carbon Club’, and recording their meter readings on a weekly basis.

All of the community buildings are now in the planning stages for the installation of photovoltaic arrays and a feed-in-tariff. St. Mary’s had plans prior to Green Streets to install such an array on the south-facing nave roof, but the money allocated to it by the project (£30,000), combined with SusMo’s capacity for getting people to write letters of support, spurred the project on. Consequently, at the start of the project, SusMo and the Green Streets partners felt that this would be the easiest project to get going, given that a lot of the groundwork had been done.

Problems

This has proved otherwise. While Moseley’s residents have been supportive of the project, there was a single letter of objection, from the Victorian Society. Their concerns, made from a conservation perspective (given the building’s Grade II listing and location in the centre of the Moseley conservation area), were echoed by many of the Councillors on the Planning Committee, and the application was narrowly declined in January: six for; seven against; with two abstentions. The decision has since gone to appeal, but for CofE churches, the permission of Diocesan Advisory Committee (DAC) is also required.

Conversely, there are unlikely to be any planning issues surrounding the other ventures – the allotment pavilion is out of sight, the school’s panel has great educational value and the mosque is not a listed building.

There have also been issues related to communication between SusMo and other related agencies. For example, the group has needed to engage with Birmingham City Council’s asset management team, as two of the community buildings belong to the council. However, getting in touch with the right people proved difficult – council staff didn’t know which person(s) held the drawings of the buildings, if the drawings even existed, and couldn’t suggest alternative lines of enquiry. There was an option to have new drawings produced, but that would have been taken from the Green Streets budget. The group are still pursuing a line of enquiry, but even that came about from asking a local architect as to whether he had any ideas on the matter. This has slowed the process down considerably, and has been frustrating to SusMo, the people associated with the buildings, and to British Gas.

It has also been hard for the group to manage such a large project using volunteers alone – there was no allocation for administration and volunteer expenses, so the group members have largely absorbed costs for development, promotion and marketing, and have given a lot of their own time to manage the nuts and bolts. This made SusMo unusual among the Green Streets winners, most of which involved larger, incorporated organisations. Given the chance again, the group would have made more of this in the earlier stages of the project – but it was not clear that costs wouldn’t be included.

The Future

The group is still waiting for the Chancellor of the Diocese to make his final decision on whether the project can proceed. He sees it very much as a test case, and is keen to take time to consider all the evidence.

SusMo has provided the Chancellor with all the evidence that the planners had access to, but has also provided additional insights regarding other churches that have gone down the same avenue. Notably, they have highlighted specific examples that involved churches with visible, sloping roofs (such as St. Peter’s in Brockley), and that are based in a conservation area – such as Beechen Cliff Methodist Church in Bath (the entire city has World Heritage Site status). The letter also included contact details for people involved with the projects, and for willing DAC representatives in those areas. This is to demonstrate that there is some precedent to what St. Mary’s is trying to achieve on a national scale, even if it is new ground for the region.

Once all the projects are set up, most of them have agreed to donate 10% of their feed-in-tariff money to a community energy fund, which can then be reinvested. With this in mind SusMo is considering how best to build on Green Streets after all the measures are implemented. They recently succeeded in getting a grant for £4500 from the Sustaining Environmental Action Fund, which will be used to hire two consultants, both of whom will help the volunteers how to turn SusMo into an independent group, with the specific goal of joining the CORE (Community Renewable Energy) network. With interesting citywide measures on the horizon in the area of sustainability (notably Birmingham Energy Savers), SusMo needs to make sure that such schemes are drawn to Moseley, encouraging them to build on Green Streets, and ultimately giving more people access to cheap, renewable energy and the chance to live in warm, energy efficient homes.

Links

Eco congregation: A tool for churches to address sustainability issues in all that they do; includes a list of churches with photovoltaic installations.

The Energy Saving Trust: a non-profit organisation which provides people with energy-saving advice, funded by the UK government and the private sector.