Municipalities need billions more for climate policy until 2030 | climate

This should give the cabinet “a stick behind the door” if municipalities do not perform their climate tasks well enough, the Public Administration Council (ROB) wrote in an advice to outgoing climate minister Rob Jetten on Thursday.

In 2020, the ROB issued similar advice, which showed that municipalities need hundreds of millions per year to properly manage the sustainability of homes. They have to spend a lot of money to, for example, install heating networks or help citizens with insulation.

After the previous advice, the government indeed made extra money available to help municipalities implement climate policy. But that extra contribution only runs until 2025, while municipalities and provinces will have to do a lot in the years that follow to continue to become more sustainable.

Moreover, they need more money than estimated in 2020, the ROB wrote on Thursday. This is due to the higher climate ambitions of the Rutte IV cabinet and the increased costs of implementing climate policy.

In the years 2025 to 2030, 5.9 billion euros are needed, consultancy firm Andersson Elffers Felix found out. That is 45 percent more than the previous advice showed. The government must now make it clear that these billions will indeed be made available until 2030, the council advises.

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To ensure that this money is spent in a useful manner, the central government must also gain much better insight into the progress that municipalities and provinces are making. Now that is often not clear at all, the ROB concludes. If progress is tracked centrally, this also makes it possible for the government to intervene if, for example, a municipality is not becoming more sustainable quickly enough.

For the forming parties, the ROB report represents a new piece of an already difficult financial puzzle. PVV, VVD, NSC and BBB have been warned that they must cut spending or collect more taxes. Otherwise, a significant budget deficit is likely to arise in the coming years. It is therefore not self-evident that extra money is available for municipalities’ climate policy.

In any case, sustainability is proving difficult in various municipalities. Amsterdam housing associations, for example, stopped connecting homes to heating networks after they were surprised by a sudden price increase from energy company Vattenfall.

Jetten is working on an emergency law to reduce the costs of district heating, but as a result Vattenfall is now complaining about too low returns. According to the company, it is therefore no longer worthwhile to install a heating network. The impasse means that it may take longer in some municipalities to get homes off gas.

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