The Challenge: Reaching Businesses
One of the key challenges many councils face is reaching local businesses, and getting time in business leaders' diaries to join support programmes they are offering. Businesses often don't associate their local council with providing them with support, or are unaware it exists. This can be a barrier to sign-ups that even well-designed programmes can struggle to overcome.
However, for many local authorities, who have set carbon reduction targets across their region, local businesses are central to meeting them. Supporting business growth and resilience, including on climate, sits at the heart of many councils' economic development strategies.
So how are councils making it work? The most effective approaches share a common thread: they make it easy for businesses to say yes, and they deliver really good outcomes with low time commitment.
A Spectrum of Support
UK Councils run an extensive range of programmes to deliver for local businesses. These vary considerably in depth, cost, and scalability:
- Website information
- Personalised support through digital tools
- Workshops and training sessions
- Accelerators and Training Programmes
- Energy Audits
- Consultancy and one-to-one support
Website information
Relatively low cost to create, host and update. Particularly well suited to highlighting locally relevant information, such as access to grants or other local support. The challenge with generic website information, both local or national, is that it may not feel relevant enough for local businesses to act upon.
Personalised support through digital tools
For example, footprint calculators or Giki Actions climate action plan builders. Fully scalable, and can provide relevant, detailed information that applies to a specific business's goals and needs. This approach can also be complemented by additional human support where businesses prefer it.
Workshops and training sessions
Excellent for reaching groups of businesses, whether focused on a specific sector, goal, or outcome. Downsides can include cost and difficulty in getting participants.
Accelerators and Training Programmes
Carbon Literacy is popular in local government. Accelerators that run across weeks or months are also used by some councils to provide deeper support. These more involved programmes can be hard to scale, due to the significant time commitment required to participate.
Energy Audits
Valuable in providing very bespoke information for businesses on potential for energy reduction. Particularly useful for higher-emitting sites, such as factories or manufacturing. Due to their bespoke nature, energy audits have a higher price tag, require more time, and so are harder to deliver at scale.
Consultancy and one-to-one support
Some programmes offer direct consultancy for individual businesses. The depth of support can be valuable, and overall programme outcomes depends on factors including time commitment required from the business and the quality of the service provided. Typically used to reach relatively small numbers due to cost and consultant capacity.
No single approach is right for all businesses. Optionality and flexibility are crucial, as businesses have different needs, different sizes, and different ways of working. Whatever the programme, evidencing impacts is critical, to help inform what has worked and to plan future delivery.
What Good Looks Like: Three Approaches
Across councils that are making progress, a few consistent principles emerge. Here are three examples that illustrate them.
Combining Programmes for Momentum: West Yorkshire
West Yorkshire Council provides a combination of programmes spanning grant support and advice delivered from an in-house team of experts. They combined this with a workshop using Giki Actions to re-mobilise dozens of businesses to build and implement their climate action plans — demonstrating how digital tools can sit alongside, rather than replace, existing provision.
Delivering at Scale: Staffordshire
The Business and Environment Network (SBEN), run by Staffordshire County Council, provides an extensive range of support to over 1,000 local businesses: workshops, energy audits, expert consultant support, a local green suppliers directory, and an online carbon footprint calculator. When Giki Actions ran two workshops with them to help businesses build their climate action plans, both were oversubscribed — a signal of both strong demand and effective outreach.
Delivering with Flexibility: Wealden and South Downs National Park
In projects with both Wealden and South Downs National Park, support was delivered through a mix of group sessions and one-to-one guidance. Some businesses built their climate action plans independently using Giki Actions; others needed group events; others required individual support. The lesson: flexibility isn't a nice-to-have, it is a key driver in overall success rates.
Four Things That Make Programmes Work
Across these examples, and the wider landscape of council business support, four factors consistently determine whether a programme reaches businesses and drives action:
- Deliver high value for minimal time commitment. Businesses are busy. Programmes that respect that, whether through a 60-minute online session or a self-serve digital tool, frequently outperform those that ask for a high level of time or work commitment.
- Build connections through trusted intermediaries. Businesses often don't associate their local council with business support. Local business groups and chambers of commerce are often a better route in due to their relationships and trust.
- Remove barriers to participation. This is easier to achieve through digital provision, which businesses can use independently, at a time that works for them. Flexibility in format, group, one-to-one, or self-serve, matters too as different people and businesses each have different needs.
- Keep the framing relevant. Net Zero and related terms have become politically loaded in some contexts. Ensuring programmes deliver genuine business value, on costs, resilience, and competitiveness, gives them broad appeal and impact, regardless of how the climate framing lands.
Conclusion
Councils run an extensive range of programmes to support local businesses on climate. The challenges are real, reaching businesses, and earning time in their diaries, is hard. But the councils making the most progress aren't necessarily those with the biggest budgets. They're the ones that make it easy for businesses to say yes: personalised where possible, scalable where needed, and always designed around how businesses actually work.
Digital tools have an increasingly important role here, not as a replacement for human support, but as a way to extend its reach and create scalable, high impact programmes. And as councils look to evidence the impact of their programmes, the data generated by those tools becomes valuable in its own right: understanding which actions businesses have already taken to decarbonise, and what they are prioritising next.