Letter 3 — To Cllr Jonathan Pryor
How will you keep Leeds’ climate commitments central to your portfolio, ensuring that transport and economic decisions remain guided by the city’s net-zero goals? And what further leadership could the Council show to reconnect these daily choices with the scale of the emergency we face?
Keeping climate ambition visible in Leeds
Date: 15 October 2025
Recipient: Cllr Jonathan Pryor, Deputy Leader of Leeds City Council and Executive Member for Economy, Transport and Sustainable Development
I am writing as part of One Letter a Day: a year-long public project to rekindle honest, grounded conversations about the climate crisis, beginning here in Leeds.
Over the next twelve months, I plan to write daily to people in positions of influence (councillors, MPs, business leaders and public figures) to explore how we might act meaningfully on the climate emergency at every level. Each exchange is published online to foster open, fact-based dialogue rather than private correspondence. My first two letters were to Cllr Goodall and Cllr Rafique.
As Deputy Leader of Leeds City Council and Executive Member for Economy, Transport and Sustainable Development, your portfolio sits at the heart of how the city turns climate ambition into visible change. As a daily cyclist myself, I have followed your work on the Burley Street and Park Lane active-travel improvements. Making sustainable transport safer and more accessible is an encouraging step in a city still shaped by car dependency.
Yet beyond individual projects, the wider conversation about the climate emergency seems to have slipped from public view. Nationally, priorities are shifting toward short-term economic and geopolitical pressures, while locally, the long-term challenge of decarbonising how we move, build and grow risks being reframed as a set of isolated initiatives.
So my question is this:
How will you keep Leeds’ climate commitments central to your portfolio, ensuring that transport and economic decisions remain guided by the city’s net-zero goals? And what further leadership could the Council show to reconnect these daily choices with the scale of the emergency we face?
I would greatly value your reflections and, if possible, a short reply that I can share alongside this letter to deepen the civic conversation over the coming year.
With thanks and respect,
Vivien Badaut
Headingley / Hyde Park resident
📨 Reply from Cllr Pryor
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Tomorrow’s letter will continue this dialogue on how Leeds can align everyday policy with climate reality.