Green responsibilities ignored by local gov employees

New research has revealed that a fifth of local authority employees say they feel no responsibility to act in an environmentally friendly way in the workplace.

Carried out by Metro Rod, the research found that the majority of local government employees felt that responsibility for their organisation’s environmental impact fell solely to the senior leadership team, with the lack of accountability being further highlighted by the different attitudes that respondents demonstrated towards environmental issues at home compared to the workplace.

Although 75 per cent of local authority employees reported engaging in environmentally friendly practices in the workplace, such as recycling, the figure is significantly lower than the 88 per cent who engaged in the same practices at home. The decrease is the equivalent of 130,000 of the UK’s one million local authority employees not acting in an environmentally responsible way at work despite doing so at home.  

Metro Rod attributes some of the blame to a lack of training for local authority employees on the environmental impact that they can have via their actions in the workplace. Only two per cent of respondents reported having received any environmental impact training – the lowest across all industry sectors surveyed – while 63 per cent reported not being involved in shaping their organisation’s environmental policies, the highest result of any industry sector.