We can be green and grow was the ‘bothism’, as Mark Ritson would say, at the heart of the latest Hertfordshire Futures debate focusing on developing a more sustainable economy.

By Lucy Gravatt

Like the rest of the UK, Hertfordshire needs to see economic growth but not growth at any cost. This is a clear national policy priority, and it is critical if we are to pay for the services and the infrastructures that we need.  But economic growth also needs to be sustainable in environmental and ecological terms.

Nature too must be given space to recover. According to the Herts & Middlesex Wildlife Trust, 20% of the 7,500 species assessed in Hertfordshire in 1970 were either extinct or threatened by 2020.  There are just 13 ha of heathland left in the county, and despite an increase in woodland coverage, a lack of management means that 35% of the species that live in woodland have been lost.  But on the positive side, Hertfordshire is the custodian of around 10% of the WORLD’s chalk streams. So we have a real duty of care.

First in the hotseat was Neil Hayes, CEO, Hertfordshire Futures, who was asked by panel host Matt Deegan how Hertfordshire can manage the tensions between growing the economy and achieving sustainability ambitions.

Neil said: “As with any challenges, you have to face these head on. It’s not an either/or. We can have both. Hertfordshire already has the components of a clean growth sector and some fantastic clean growth businesses here such as BRE, Rothamsted and other research and academic institutions. So how can we support this sector to grow and also encourage businesses to not just become more sustainable but also more efficient? There is no inherent contradiction here - you can go on a sustainability journey and also improve your bottom line.”

Ian Pigott is Managing Partner of Thrales End Farm and Business Centre, a family farm just outside of Harpenden which has successfully diversified to provide offices, meeting rooms and storage space for small businesses from sole traders to 30-person teams.

Ian said that while economic considerations are vitally important, using the analogy ‘you can’t farm green if you are farming in the red’, they had a duty to do right by the environment.

He said: “If we mine the environment, mine the soil that we as a family have farmed for generations and generations, but then recognise that what we have always done is having a detrimental effect on the environment, then we have to change our practices. We have also taken a view that isn’t just for the next five or 10 years but is for the next generation. And that might mean you go through periods of economic stagnation, but working with the likes of Rothamsted we have seen our soil organic quality double which we didn’t think possible.”

He also acknowledged the vital role farmers and landowners play in looking after the natural environment but they could not be expected to look after these fragile ecosystems and habitats without some public support.

"If we mine the environment, mine the soil that we as a family have farmed for generations and generations, but then recognise that what we have always done is having a detrimental effect on the environment then we have to change our practices."
Ian Pigott, Managing Partner of Thrales End Farm and Business Centre

Kerry Doble, Chief Sustainability Officer, Lintbells talked about how she had taken the pet supplement company on its sustainability journey. This involved achieving B Corps certification setting the highest quality environmental and social standards.

Kerry said: “We have talked about green businesses – I have never looked at ourselves and thought, we are a green business. We are a business that is trying to do some good. And in order to do that it was really important to me that we looked at the operational effectiveness and the efficiency of our business and understand how we can make changes in order to do better. Not all of those changes were mind blowing. We never went after B Corp to get a stamp to show to the world how good we are. We went after it because we believed in what it stood for.”

Chris Hulatt, Co-Founder, Octopus Group, said that green issues were not at the forefront of the business when it started with the first renewables coming in around 2011. At that time solar panels were starting to take off. Now Octopus Energy have helped build solar and wind farms not just in the UK but much further afield. He said that renewable expertise is a real UK success story with businesses such as RES, the world’s largest independent renewable energy company, spreading that Hertfordshire expertise across the world.

He said: “To me the opportunity in renewables is both large scale, such as off-shore wind where the UK is a market leader, and community scale renewables, where I think the future is.”

Asked where we could do better Chris said it was about joining up opportunities for training, such as the thousands of heat pump engineers that will be required in the future and supporting businesses thinking hard about what they might look like in a few years’ time.

Shifting onto a sustainable footing makes good business sense too. Ian Pigott said that each and every one of the businesses on his farm were all trying to find ways to make their operations more sustainable because they realise it is what incentivises their teams and their customers as well.

Closing the session Matt Deegan asked each of the panellists what advice they would give to businesses embarking on their sustainability journey. ‘Start somewhere!’ said Kerry. What a good place to end. 

Watch the recording here:

This is the second in the Hertfordshire Futures webinar series aimed at exploring the key themes of the developing economic strategy which will go out for consultation in Spring. If you missed the first one, Get Hertfordshire Working, you can ready the PR summary and watch it again here.