AGAIN, children have given that extra push for adults to take action. Children can be passionate in caring for where they live.

Two young girls gave Crediton Town Council’s Town Strategy Committte that push when they spoke at the meeting on Tuesday evening.

The girls said they were worried about "what the grown ups are doing with our world", that they had been learning at school about the effect of palm oil, how it was grown, how it has 50 different names when it gets to the shops.

They had written to shops about plastics and have new recycling collection points at Landscore Primary School to take the plastics Mid Devon District Council does not take.

Carbon emissions was their third point. The girls wanted to know what the town council could do to help, were these issues councillors cared about and could it do more to reduce use of plastic in Crediton. They asked: "What can you do to make Crediton a more planet-friendly town?"

The answer was that councillors did care very much, that they had been brewing on an idea which the girls had helped crystallise.

After much discussion, the girls were told to tell their school that the town council had decided to take a lead in promoting all the girls asked about, so would be setting up a dedicated group at the next meeting.

This was a follow-on from Cllr Paul Vincent who had asked if the town council should do more about the environment.

Members agreed his proposal that the town council should "take a role in encouraging local residents to respond to the rising issues of climate change and sustainability by setting up a Crediton Climate Change and Sustainability Initiative”.

Cllr Vincent said he believed the town council should respond to the rising public demand for government, of which town council was a part, to deliver sustainable objectives "as a central and key part of our responsibilities”.

He said that what had been left to individual households now needed to be adopted by local authorities. He said Crediton Town Council had already gone a long way in integrating sustainability into the Local Plan.

"What I am suggesting is that we now actively involve every household in playing its own part," he said, although acknowledging that the town council did not have the legal power to enforce this.

He suggested developing suitable objectives achievable on a household level; publishing these and encouraging residents to become involved, and recognising and rewarding achievements each year.

On behalf of Sustainable Crediton, Mrs Dee Ross was invited to speak saying it would encourage any further projects, hoping people could all work together on this.

Cllr Tim Matthews spoke about Glastonbury objecting to the roll out of 5G there saying its town council "had a responsibility to protect its people from harmful emissions".

He said often bus stops were used to put such as the 5G masts on top and bus stops was something town council did have control over.

He added that this technology had been banned in Israel, California and Brussels.

Cllr Frank Letch pointed out that Devon had "quite a high recycling rate" but that in Crediton he had noticed there were places where no recycling boxes were put out for collection but plenty of black bags.

"As a council we could go paper-less, we are almost there, paper copies are so wasteful usually being binned after a meeting," he said.

The Town Clerk, Mrs Clare Dalley, said one town council had declared a climate emergency.

This was what Crediton should do said Cllr John Downes adding that things had changed enormously even in his lifetime with such as milk then in glass bottles. Cllr Liz Brookes-Hocking reported that Devon County Council had set up a Devon Climate Emergency Response Plan working towards a Devon-wide carbon reduction plan.

She said how the town council’s traffic study was looking at ways to slow traffic, that she had spoken a long time ago with the town’s primary schools on reducing the amount of traffic.

The Clerk said she was trying not to use products that had palm oil in them and that at present the town council was using a green energy provider.

The Town Strategy Committee will be discussing how it can achieve this at its July meeting.