Public services are necessary to create a green economy

This post is by Maeve Cohen, project lead at The Social Guarantee.

Championing public services in the name of social justice is vital. That’s no secret. But what’s less well understood is that improving and expanding public services directly reduces carbon emissions. This happens in the following ways.

They emit less carbonMost obviously this can be done through public transport. Green, efficient and accessible buses, trams and trains, which everyone can use, emit significantly less per person than individual cars.

Another example is housing. Social housing providers are much better at insulating and upgrading homes to reduce both carbon emissions and heating bills. Nearly two thirds of housing association run homes have an EPC rating of C or above, compared with just over one third of privately owned homes.

In healthcare, the US system is largely privately provided and produces twice the carbon emissions per person than the NHS, and up to three and a half times as many than the mainly publicly owned healthcare systems in European countries.

Public services can put the environment before profitPublic bodies serve the public and not shareholders. Therefore, they can take a more holistic view than private companies and prioritise environmental targets over profit. When large, they can co-ordinate and deliver more sustainable practices across everything they do.

A 2021 report by Unison looked at how the UK could decarbonise its public services. It found the NHS was streets ahead of other, privatised public services such as water and homecare. This is because it has set ambitious and comprehensive targets due to good communication across its trusts and integrated care systems. The plans not only cover the emissions for which the NHS is directly responsible, but also those it can influence through its supply chains. This level of co-ordination is impossible when services are delivered by many different private providers who, at best, are less able to collaborate as effectively and, at worst, directly compete with each other.

They influence behaviourDue to their scale and significance, public service providers have the power to influence the behaviour of many people. They influence those who provide them with goods and services: for example, hospitals can buy catering services only from companies that use sustainably produced food. They influence people who use their services, such as housing providers who can reduce the energy people use by insulating homes and providing smart meters. And they influence their many employees, for example, by providing cycle-to-work schemes or ensuring workers’ pension funds are invested in sustainable industries.

They change how we produce and buy thingsClimate change is caused by the carbon emitted when we produce and buy goods and services. To address climate change we need to buy and produce less or produce things differently.

For many, it is not possible to live a good life and buy and use less of essentials such as housing, healthcare and transport. In fact, increasing numbers of people currently don’t have access to enough of these things. If it is not possible to buy less of these things, we must change how they are produced.

Producing and delivering essentials in the form of public services is more sustainable. By shifting the production of life’s essentials from private companies to public bodies, it is possible to reduce carbon emissions while still ensuring people have access to the things they need to live a good life.

They offer good jobs everywherePublic services are everywhere. Many of them, particularly the ones that involve human relationships, such as care and education, automatically have lower climate impacts than other industries. Whereas services that emit more carbon, such as transport, housing and energy, have well established routes to becoming more sustainable. Investing in expanding and decarbonising these sectors would provide decent, greener jobs up and down the country, generate more tax revenue to plough into further investment, improve people’s lives and reduce climate impacts at the same time.

People care about public services (more than they do about the environment)Although the environment scores highly in surveys as a public concern, the state of public services, such as healthcare and housing, are often higher on the list. Arguments for strengthening and expanding them can act as a strong counterweight to the claims that environmental policies affect ordinary people negatively.

For this reason, building a political narrative around the fact that high quality public services also reduce carbon emissions should be a priority. Good public services are an absolute prerequisite for successful climate policy. We can’t deal with climate change without them.

Environmental organisations should do more to integrate the goal of more and better public services into their work and politicians should recognise how green policies and social policies work with, not against, each other.