Chris Martin reports on ‘An Evening on the Environment and Energy with Al Carns, MP’

Cotteridge Quakers and St Francis Church hosted a successful evening with the new MP for Selly Oak and Veterans Minister, Al Carns at Cotteridge Meeting House on Friday 31st January.  Al Carns also visited the former warden’s bungalow to see the work being done to make it ready to welcome an Afghan refugee family under the UK Government resettlement scheme.  The MP said he would like to meet the family when they moved in.  He was also given a short overview of the sustainability and insulation improvements both to the bungalow and meeting house itself. 

The evening was a ‘Listening Panel’ event from the perspective of Al Carns and his office.  The format was different to the previous listening panel on anti-social behaviour and crime, reflecting the way in which the evening was hosted and chaired by Cotteridge Quakers and St Francis Church.  The agenda had been discussed and agreed with the MP’s constituency office beforehand and included three contributions before the MP spoke. First, Rev Richard Wharton, St Francis Church, explained how his church’s eco-work was one of the churches Five Marks of Mission – “to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth.”  Chris Martin then spoke about the amount of wasted heat due to poorly insulated houses in Birmingham and about work that had been done at Cotteridge meeting house to improve its energy efficiency.  Finally, Cllr Mary Locke spoke on ‘Warm Homes Free of Debt’ about the situation that residents in Stirchley faced, when they had to decide between keeping warm and having food.

In response Al Carns emphasised that he was a government minister and set out the Government’s position on how the energy generation and distribution industries would be transformed to become based on renewable energy.  He stressed the need for energy security as well as the limits to the availability of minerals that many of the new technologies depended on. 

This was then followed by a lively Q & A session with the 50 or so people present. There were questions on the third runway at Heathrow, oil and gas drilling licenses in the North Sea and the state of housing in Birmingham.  It’s difficult to capture in a few words the feelings of energy and concern that were present in the full room.  In my view the value of the evening was in building relationships with Al Carns and his team, three of whom were also present, and opening the door to future similar conversations.  I felt that Al Carns and his team left with the feeling that the churches in Cotteridge and Bournville were groups that he needed to engage with.

During the evening there had been some discussion of the role that faith communities play in Birmingham, and Al Carns had mentioned the need he felt for Birmingham to better at projecting its strength and articulating the ‘Jewels in its Crown’.  In his concluding remarks as co-chair, Chris said that the way that faith communities work together in Birmingham is one of the city’s jewels.  The faith communities played a pivotal role in providing vaccination centres and food distribution during the Covid pandemic.  They did tremendous work behind the scenes in August in preventing riots in the city as experienced in other parts of the country.  Now showing how faith communities can work together on the climate and environment is another new and critical strand of ‘faith in action’ in Birmingham.