Use energy to win independence, rather than independence to win energy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The problem with the idea of cause and effect is that what is deemed the cause is an effect.” –  Mokokoma Mokhonoana

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Scotland doesn’t need independence to start owning our own energy.

It feels like 2025 has come full circle for us at Common Weal. January started for us with an announcement from the Scottish Government that it was “not possible” to bring Scottish renewable energy into public ownership – an announcement made after the publication of a poll showing that more than 80% of people in Scotland favoured them doing so. We responded with a briefing paper called “How to own Scottish energy” which laid out the logic behind their announcement, why that logic was flawed and how they could bring energy into public ownership despite their own objections.

In short, the Government’s stance is based on an extremely narrow reading of the Scotland Act which actively prohibits the Scottish Government or Scottish Ministers from owning electricity generating, storage or transmission assets. Under this reading, there cannot be a “National Electricity Company” designed and owned in the same way as some public corporations in Scotland like CalMac or ScotRail.

However, we showed in our paper that various options were not blocked by this prohibition. For example, a Minister-owned “National Heat Company” could be designed to build and own district heat networks to keep us all warm (the prohibition is specifically about electricity, not other forms of energy). The Government could also build a National Energy Company and hand ownership over to a consortium of Scotland’s 32 Local Authorities. Or each Council could own their own energy companies. Or the Government could back the creation of a private energy company that is mutually owned by every adult resident of Scotland. Or, instead of complaining about the limits of devolution, they could be applying pressure on the UK Government to amend what is very clearly a completely obsolete prohibition in the Scotland Act (especially as a narrow reading of it also prohibits the Scottish Government from erecting solar panels on its own buildings).

Come forward now to December and the SNP have kicked off their 2026 election campaign with a new paper essentially saying the same thing as they did earlier this year except framing it around “we’ll do it, but only after independence”. On public ownership in particular, they aren’t advocating for the full-scale nationalisation of energy but their ambition appears to extend only to communities owning up to 20% of local renewable projects.

20% is far better than the current level of a rounding error above 0%, but it’s clear that even within devolution, the Scottish Government could do far more than it’s currently doing to support communities by giving them grants and loans to purchase stakes in developments, to pressure developers to sell or grant those stakes to communities as a condition of planning permission or the renewal of licences and to actively use opportunities like the “repowering” of developments, the end of their licence periods and break-clauses in contracts that would allow poorly performing developers to have their licences withdrawn and transferred to public bodies (in much the same way as the Government took ScotRail back from Abelio in 2022)

This doesn’t get the UK Government off the hook though.

Their recent announcement that some £28 billion will be added to consumer energy bills to pay for vital energy grid upgrades is going to stick in the craw of people whose energy bills are already too high. Worse will be that most of the profits of that investment will flow into multinational companies – including foreign public energy companies – with none returning to the consumers themselves. These investments, too, should be made on a staked ownership basis so that the people paying for them – us – should become shareholders in the investments and see a return on our investment. To make things perfectly clear, if the UK Government had announced that it was going to fully publicly own the assets built via this spending, then the added costs on your bill would be the same. In other words, the choice to publicly own the UK’s new energy assets will cost you the same as the choice to leave them in private hands.

“Can’t we use our public owned energy to help win back our independence, rather than claiming more weakly that we can use independence to win back our energy?”

The same will be true of assets in an independent Scotland – but given the Scottish Government’s “all in” approach to “inward investment” (something their plan published this week mentions more often than public ownership), I can completely see them making the same mistake and forcing us to pay for assets that someone else will profit from.

I freely admit that there are aspects of Scotland’s energy transition that are not in Scotland’s hands and which are not likely to be easily negotiated away as part of an adjustment to devolution such as Scottish consumers being forced to pay for extremely expensive and risky nuclear projects that even NESO (formerly, the National Grid) now says are not needed to meet Green energy targets but this does not let the Scottish Government off from making the changes it can make now rather than using the dangling carrot of independence as a means of delaying action. If anything, independence will come less from making a promise that might be fulfilled afterwards but by taking tangible actions now that push devolution to the limit and then saying to voters “if you want more, you know what to do”.

If it truly is, as the Scottish Government says, Scotland’s Energy – then shouldn’t we take back as much as we can now as use that as leverage to win the rest? Can’t we use our public owned energy to help win back our independence, rather than claiming more weakly that we can use independence to win back our energy?

Communities have been priced out of owning Scotland

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain…There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.” – Chief Seattle, Chief Seattle’s Speech (1854)

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Two new reports show that the rate of land transfers to community ownership in Scotland has dropped to the lowest level since the start of devolution and that a poll of the Scottish public shows near-unanimous support for more land reform over and above that which may be delivered by the recent Land Reform Bill.

The recently passed Land Reform Bill is simultaneously “the most radical land reform legislation in the history of devolution” (the Government’s characterisation of it) and so weak that even before it has achieved Royal Assent, 96% of people polled say it doesn’t go far enough and that they want more. Who the other 4% are is not known but they’re probably the kind of person who would answer in the negative to a question like “Are puppies cute?”

How these two statement can both be true and accurate is a reflection not of the strength of the 2025 Land Reform Bill but a reflection of the weakness of the previous round of land reform in 2016.

This Bill was designed to strengthen community right to buy rules laid down in yet still previous land reform attempts in 2015 and 2003, specifically granting Ministers the power to force a compulsory sale of sale to communities for the purposes of sustainable development even if the land owner wasn’t willing to sell or couldn’t be identified.

A few years ago, I wrote an analysis of a report published looking at the rate of transfers of land to Scottish communities since the start of devolution. The results were stark. It found that despite the 2016 round of reforms being specifically aimed at making community land transfers easier, there were serious other barriers looming. In particular, the assets being transferred were getting smaller and smaller even though the overall number of transfers were still proceeding steadily. What this meant is that where before a community might have been able to enact a community buyout of the entire estate on which they lived or their local wind farm, communities were instead only buying out perhaps their village hall or even just the old phone box to turn into a medical station or pop-up craft store.

I’m not berating some of these initiatives as they are undoubtedly a good thing. I’m not even trying to suggest that communities lack ambition in their purchases. I’m saying that they are being blocked from realising their ambition by land prices surges that are making it impossible to purchase land.

One of the aspects of the latest Bill is that communities must be notified ahead of a large land sale and must be given time to put together a purchase bid. But if the price is still so high that they cannot put together the cash regardless of time, then the notice is merely an insult added to the injury.

Move forwards three years to now and that community land report has been refreshed and brought up to date. Unfortunately, the results are even worse now. In the years between 2000 and 2023, an average of 7,023 hectares of land were transferred to community ownership each year. In 2024, just 8.46 hectares were transferred to community ownership. This is the lowest rate of transfer in a single year since 2000.

Worse, the total number of transfers has fallen off a cliff too. From a peak of 80 transfers in 2021, Scotland only transferred 23 parcels of land to communities in 2024.

Now, that peak of 80 in 2021 does show some evidence of delays caused by Covid in 2020 but even then, while the country was in total lockdown for much of that year, 43 transfers were made covering 423 hectares. In 2020, during the worst global pandemic of a lifetime, Scotland managed to transfer to community ownership 50 times as much land as it was able to do in 2024.

The drop in 2024 represents a total reversal of the progress made from 2014 which saw a substantial and sustained rise in communities being able to buy the land under their feet. These results show that far from the 2016 Act accelerating land transfers, they have almost halted since then. 95% of all of the land in community ownership in Scotland was transferred to communities before the 2016 Act took effect.

“The latest round of Land Reform clearly won’t be enough to fix this problem and it’s clearly not enough to satisfy what is as close to a unanimous poll of the Scottish public as it is practically possible to find.”

I believe that the reason for this stagnation is the same as the one I noted in 2022. Scottish land prices are being inflated beyond any reasonable expectation by speculators going all in on buying up land for carbon offsetting, encouraged by a Scottish Government that is similarly all in on encouraging “foreign direct investment” as the sole tool of boosting Scottish GDP, regardless of the cost to our future economy or our present communities.

The thing is though, I wonder if the votes on the Land Reform Bill might have been different had this latest report been public knowledge before it passed. It would have been valuable leverage for those campaigning for strong powers of community buyouts in that Bill. It might well have led to amendments designed to counter this trend of people being priced off the land.

I wonder why the Government didn’t publish this report then or even allude to its findings via its own amendments. I’m fairly sure that they would have had advance knowledge of the findings of the report to some degree (I know this because I recently had a Freedom of Information request on another issue knocked back on the excuse that while the Government had the data, it was due to be published anyway within a couple of months – which it duly was). Yet little was said during the various debates around this Bill.

The latest round of Land Reform clearly won’t be enough to fix this problem and it’s clearly not enough to satisfy what is as close to a unanimous poll of the Scottish public as it is practically possible to find. This is clearly an issue that must be revisited in the next Parliament. We’ll be keeping a close eye on manifestos as they are published and, of course, we’ll continue to campaign (with your support) for real land reform so that Scotland can start working for All of Us, rather than just the very few who can afford to buy the land under our feet.

Covid lessons should have been learned in real time

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.” – Joanne Harris

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s Daily Briefing newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

A stock photo of vials of Covid-19 vaccines

Common Weal looks at the second report of the UK Covid Inquiry with some frustration. It’s not that we don’t agree with the findings, its that we were reporting on these issues in real time. There is no finding in this report that Common Weal did not raise at the time.

We believe there is a conclusion to be drawn from this; society needs more than a small political class talking to a small community of corporate and public sector leaders in private and a small media class in public. We need national debate to include many more voices and perspectives and for those to be taken seriously.

Let’s look at three of the key findings. First, that we were lax to begin the lockdown and poorly prepared for it when we did. This is something Common Weal identified early. We were warning that we should have moved to lock-down early in March 2020 and had already been raising fears the previous month.

By 16 March 2020 we were utterly bemused at the decision to allow 9,400 people to attend a Lewis Capaldi concert in Aberdeen less than a week before we were in full lockdown. We were issuing almost daily warnings in the week running up to lockdown. And then, when lockdown started, Common Weal warned that the UK Government was making a mess of it and that Scotland’s determination to stick to a ‘four nations’ approach was a mistake.

So when Scotland gradually started to diverge, we warned that it was too little too late. Again, as we approached the end of the first lockdown we warned that nothing like sufficient preparation had been made to suppress the virus once we were (partially) reopened.

But it is perhaps the second main conclusion that is most important here – the failure of testing. The difference between needing one lockdown and needing multiple lockdowns was the extent to which we could suppress the virus in the interim period via a testing regime. The entire first lockdown should have been focussed on developing a comprehensive approach. We warned this at the time.

Yet against all the global public health advice, the official Scottish Government position was that “testing is a distraction”. This was inexplicable and we were so concerned that Common Weal strayed out of our comfort zone to produce a public health policy paper in which we set out a testing regime we thought had the best chance of successfully suppressing Covid.

We published it as Ending Lockdown. The Scottish Government ignored it and so as the second lockdown approached we produced a more detailed version. Eventually a watered-down version of our proposals was belatedly put in place. We continue to believe that there remains a chance that the second lockdown could have been avoided altogether if a more rigorous approach was taken.

It is also worth noting that while Common Weal suggested that an elimination strategy was the only one that had actually worked (in New Zealand), it would take steps the Scottish Government would see as too radical to achieve that – closing roads outside airports, ports and the border and putting ‘testing borders’ in place.

For some reason the then First Minister thought it was possible to start talking about a strategy of elimination without taking any of these measures. That she did anyway certainly justifies the criticism of this stance in the report. It was vainglorious rather than credible.

And that leads to the third main conclusion – that there was a narrow and closed-off leadership approach which harmed policy creation, and that the First Minister spent too much time doing television briefings which should have been shared among other senior figures.

Again, this problem was quite clear at the time and something that we commented on a number of times but was not picked up in wider media debate. This resulted in a failure to scrutinise what was actually happening.

There are other issues we expect the Scottish inquiry to cover, including the cover-up of the first outbreak of Covid which took place in a large corporate hotel and policy of sending Covid-positive patients into care homes. Certainly there is no doubt that in Scotland we did not see the utter chaos and rampant corruption that we saw at Westminster, but this is a low bar.

While this report is welcome, we believe that there remains insufficient scrutiny of the extent to which civic Scotland stopped asking questions and stopped challenging decisions for months on end. Common Weal managed to derive policy positions which are now being vindicated from publicly available source material and we did it at the time. Nothing in the inquiry report published yesterday cannot be found from the content in the links above.

The problem is that the sense of national emergency, the political culture of the Sturgeon court, the legitimate universal fear and uncertainty that the lockdown induced and unhelpful and uninformed social media commentary combined to suspend politics and reduce scrutiny at a point where it was never more needed.

What is the lesson we should really learn from the pandemic? Don’t wait for lessons to be learned, pay attention at the time and ask difficult questions. It leads to better decisions. Then again, we did warn about this in the first week of lockdown…

Covid lessons should have been learned in real time

Repowering Scotland – A missed opportunity

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.” –  Emily Dickinson

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

A photo of construction works at Hagshaw Hill wind farm during an extension to the development

Image Source: Alan O’Dowd, Geograph

The Scottish Government has squandered an opportunity to nationalise Scotland’s oldest onshore wind farm and has hailed as a “success” a deal that will see the local community earn below the bare minimum in community benefits.

Hagshaw Hill in South Lanarkshire is a notable name in Scottish energy circles. In 1995 it became the site of Scotland’s first onshore wind farm, developed by Spanish-owned multinational company Iberdola under their subsidiary Scottish Power Renewables. It’s also visible from my village, so has formed part of the backdrop of my horizon for three quarters of my life.

Technology, as it is want to do, has moved on the previous thirty years and the turbines on the site have aged to the point of needing to be replaced. Rather than merely replace them like-for-like, however, the 26 turbines have been replaced by 14 new, larger and more efficient modern ones. The site promises to generate around five times as much energy as it previously did despite there being fewer turbines.

This process of replacing an existing wind farm with newer, larger turbines is known as “repowering” and Scotland is embarking on a wave of these projects as the first generations of renewable generators reach their end of life. This is in parallel with the ongoing expansions of new generation sites that will secure our transition to a fully renewably powered nation.

However, the Scottish Government has dropped the ball in at least two major ways when it comes to this site and it does not bode well if this shapes the precedent of the ones to follow.

First, is the level of community benefit paid by the company to local people whose environment is effectively being rented for the purpose of electricity generation. The villages surrounding the site – Douglas, Lesmahagow and Coalburn (my own Kirkmuirhill is just outwith the catchment area) – will see their shared community benefit increase as it is linked to the maximum power capacity. They will now receive around £400,000 per year.

Which sounds like a lot and it is a substantial uplift from the approximately £15,000 per year they were receiving up till now, but it works out at only £5000 per MW of turbine capacity. This is the bare minimum level of community benefit that the Scottish Government has recommended for many years now. If the level had merely been uplifted to account for inflation since it was first introduced, then it would now be closer to £7,500 per MW per year or closer to £600,000 per year for the communities – enough to fund at least half a dozen community development officers or to retrofit and insulate half a dozen houses every year to lift the most deprived people in what can be a substantially deprived area out of fuel poverty forever.

In our response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on community benefits we stated that the £5000/MW number was far too low – this point has been acknowledged and accepted by Ministers when I’ve spoken to them about it – and that it’s no longer appropriate in general anyway. A sum based on the maximum MW capacity of a generator doesn’t take into account the capacity factor of the generator (the amount of actual energy it generates on average over a year.

For wind, this can be around 30%. For solar panels, it can be 10-20%) and nor does it take into account financial factors like the cost to build and maintain the generator or the price of electricity (when the price of electricity goes up, wind turbine owners make more profit and the community pays higher energy bills but the community benefit payments stay the same).

Instead, we called for the local community to be granted an ownership stake in the turbines – say, 10% – instead of making benefit payments. This idea has had some traction within the Scottish Government and the previous First Minister Humza Yousaf appeared to be particularly keen on it but the current administration appears to have both ignored that idea and has apparently ignored their own consultation on reforms to the benefit scheme.

This error will cost the communities around Hagshaw Hill several hundred thousand pounds per year – at least – for the next several decades meaning that millions of pounds that could have been invested in the area – an area that was shattered by the loss of coal mining at the end of the last onshore energy boom – will instead likely be granted as dividends to shareholders including US asset management firm BlackRock, the Norwegian Pension Fund and Qatar’s National Wealth Fund.

“Scotland could, in effect, renationalise all of our energy for free.”

The second error lies in the “repowering” itself. Many wind farms in Scotland are leased for a specified length of time. In this case, the old turbines were previously granted a 30 year lease and the new turbines have been granted the same. This is not always the case – it’s not unusual for operators of wind farms to be granted a 60 or 99 year lease with the anticipation that the lease would cover several generations of turbines. Additionally, the leases often specify a maximum capacity per turbine as part of the contract (this is to satisfy planning permission limits based on the visibility of the turbines). If a developer wishes to extend the use of the site beyond the term limit OR if they wish to repower the site above the capacity limit, then they are required to apply for a new lease contract.

In this case, the contract was simply given back to Scottish Power but it would have been perfectly legal for the Scottish Government to use the moment of repowering to hand the operational contract instead to a Scottish publicly owned energy company. Even if that company had to contract Scottish Power to build the new turbines for them, this would have allowed Scotland to bring the entire farm into public ownership, not merely the 10% that they could have (but didn’t) grant to the community.

This could be done with every renewable site in Scotland – both on- and offshore. Over the course of 30 years or whenever new technology makes it feasible to replace an older generator, Scotland could progressively transition out private energy sector into a public one. The kicker is it wouldn’t cost you, the Scottish taxpayer and energy consumer, a single penny more than it is going to cost you to not renationalise our energy. The turbines are still being replaced and the cost of the replacement will still form a chunk of your energy bill regardless of who owns the turbines. Scotland could, in effect, renationalise all of our energy for free.

Unfortunately, the Scottish Government has chosen to not do this. The official position is still that Scotland doesn’t have the power to bring onshore wind energy into public ownership (despite Orkney Council doing just that within the past month). This too will cost Scotland dearly, not just in terms of the lost opportunity bring vital sectors into public ownership, but also in terms of the loss of ability to use the profits to improve the lives of people who live under the turbines and to take the edge off the bills of everyone in Scotland who pays for the energy generated here but can only watch as the profits from those bills leave for Spain, the US, Norway, Qatar and elsewhere.

Thirty years ago, Scotland began a renewables energy transition that led to us making the same mistakes as we did with coal and oil. Now, as the turbine spins back around and we begin the second phase of that transition, it appears that we’re making the same mistakes all over again.

When banks own housebuilders, house prices go up

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.” – Mark Twain

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

The way we build houses in the UK could be costing you an average of almost £67,000. This could be fixed by making housebuilding a public infrastructure project rather than a means for very rich shareholders to transfer your wealth to themselves.

Volume housebuilder Taylor Wimpy released its annual report for 2024 yesterday and the details in it, which look excellent from the viewpoint of a corporate shareholder, reveal much that is broken with the UK’s housing sector.

The first important number in their report is the number of houses completed. Taylor Wimpy is one of the UK’s largest volume housebuilders – likely to be in the top three this year in terms of completed projects – yet built only 10,593 houses in 2024 – a substantial reduction over the previous three years (though they claim to be on track for about 14,000 this year).

The second is their claimed operating pre-tax profit of £416 million. The word “profit” is a very fluid term in the world of corporate accountancy as it’s relatively easy for companies to move money around via “one time charges”, inflated director bonuses or “loans” to subsidiaries or parent companies, so a better number to judge a company like this is the money it granted to its shareholders as a dividend as this represents money extracted from the company and not reinvested in any way (not even in the form of the labour of those hypothetical overpaid directors). The dividend for shareholders in 2024 was £339 million.

This means that the houses built by Taylor Wimpy in 2024 generated a dividend to shareholders of an average of almost exactly £32,000 per house. This is how much lower house prices could have been had the company not been in the business of extracting profits via dividends. Had the company been a not-for-profit business entirely, then its houses could each have been almost £40,000 cheaper.

It gets worse for you, the house-buyer, because it’s very likely that you’d be taking out a mortgage to buy that house and you’ll be required to pay interest to the bank on that loan. £40,000 added to a 25 year mortgage at 4.5% interest will result in you paying back £66,700 over that time. To say again, this isn’t the cost to you for paying for anything to do with the construction of the house itself. This is the cost to you for paying interest on the additional loan you took out to pay for the profits of the company, most of which were paid out as dividends to the company’s shareholders.

And who are those shareholders? Our old friends, US based asset managers BlackRock and Vanguard Group are near the top of the heap, owning about 15% of the company between them. Several of the other owners are banks like HSBC and Barclays. This means that if you have a Barclays mortgage, then part of the interest you are paying on your mortgage is being used to service the loan you took out to pay the dividend they gave to themselves to inflate the price of your house.

If Scotland had a National Housebuilding Company as we’ve advocated for the best part of the last decade, then we could be building houses at as close to not-for-profit as possible and could reinvest any surpluses into other public infrastructure to make the places around our houses and the services we need in our community more resilient.

If we built the houses to the plan proposed in Good Houses for All, then they would be constructed at a far higher quality than the conventional timber frame “diddy boxes” (our Board Director and premier architect Malcolm Fraser’s not-so-affectionate name for them) favoured by the volume development sector and would force remaining private developers to drastically improve the quality of their constructions (doing so wouldn’t even reduce their profits because such buildings are now cost-competitive with the diddy-boxes and then create further savings in terms of energy costs).

“If the whole of the UK brought in a Land Tax equivalent to our suggested baseline value of 0.63%, then Taylor Wimpy would owe an additional £2.14 million per year on its banked land”

A final point to note in their report is the amount of landbanking they do. Landbanks are when a company buys up land but then does not build on it for an extended period of time (or sometimes never, or the land itself becomes a commodity to be traded between companies). The report states that the company currently owns £3.4 billion worth of land spread across 79,000 “short term plots” and 139,000 plots in their “strategic pipeline”. They also purchased more plots last year than their number of completions so the total size of their landbank has increased. Given their completion rate over the past few years, they could stop buying land for around 20 years without risking running out.

Decreasing the supply of land without putting it to the intended use of housebuilding is a major factor not just in inflating the price of land but also actively preventing land from being used for building either by other volume developers, by Local Authorities or even by enterprising self-builders. Scotland should consider bringing in a Land Tax to charge companies for the land they own and should consider an additional surcharge on the land tax to account for vacant or landbanked land (which would encourage developers to build so that they can get the land off their books). If the whole of the UK brought in a Land Tax equivalent to our suggested baseline value of 0.63%, then Taylor Wimpy would owe an additional £21.4 million per year on its banked land – still a small fraction of its overall profits.

The way we build houses in this country is badly broken and has resulted in volume developers constructing cheap, cold, damp houses that are not fit for the purpose of living because the purpose of the houses is to extract wealth and deliver it to shareholders. Until we move to fix that and to end the financialisation of housing, we’ll all keep paying a very real and very substantial price for the roof over our head.

The Scottish Government wants to avoid reforming Council Tax

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me” – Oliver Wendell. Holmes

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

A stock photo of a street in Glasgow emphasising a row of above-shop flats

Image Source: Unsplash

In the run up to the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary Elections, the SNP published their election manifesto with a promise to hold in depth discussions about reforming local taxation, culminating in a Citizens’ Assembly on the subject. After they were returned to Government, they embedded that idea in the 2021 Programme for Government and explicitly elevated the idea that Council Tax reform would be part of this discussion from an idea to an promise.

I remember this being an exciting time in Scottish politics. I was still riding the high from being an expert witness in the Scottish Climate Assembly (and didn’t yet know how badly the Government would let them down). After multiple years of failure to reform or replace one of Scotland’s most badly broken taxes, this was finally a change for politicians to admit that they were part of the problem, to step out of the way and to let citizens tell them what to do instead.

It was never going to be that simple. Despite the success of the Climate Assembly to produce radical ideas – or because of that success in the face of the politicians’ unwillingness to relinquish power and implement those ideas – the promise of a Citizens’ Assembly before the 2026 election dragged on. It was never formally dropped, but Nicola Sturgeon’s Government did not appear to take any action towards setting it up.

When she resigned in 2023, time was tight for the Humza Yousaf Government to pick up the policy. One lesson from the Climate Assembly was that they can take a year to plan, several months to undertake and then a year to properly analyse the results. By his tenure, there was still time to create the Assembly but he’d be passing the job of actually reforming Council Tax to the next Parliament.

And then he, too, resigned. Without once to my knowledge even mentioning the Assembly and not doing much at all to reform local tax by other means (other than his disastrous ad hoc announcement of a freeze to rates during a local government revenue crisis).

And now, in the waning days of the Parliament and with zero time to implement anything new at all, John Swinney’s Government still hasn’t formally cancelled that 2021 manifesto promise but they have clearly decided that they’ll break it.

Instead of a Citizens’ Assembly, his Government has put out a very standard public consultation on some options that they’ve considered around reforming Council Tax while also stating that even if they accept one of them after next year’s election that we shouldn’t expect any actual change to the tax any time within even the next Parliament. We’ll submit our formal response to that consultation and you can too here, but I wanted to use my column this week to discuss their proposed options.

The first thing to say is that they’ve effectively ruled out replacing Council Tax entirely.

The Scottish Government has presented four proposals for reform of Council Tax. This first is the most minimal change possible, though it’s one that has been advocated for as long overdue. The current Council Tax isn’t based on what your house is worth now but what it was worth in 1991. Keeping the current rates and bands but revaluing houses to ensure they are all in the correct and appropriate band would fix problems that have crept in over 30 years of rampant but uneven house price speculation (I’ve seen houses worth £30,000 and worth £300,000 both marked as Band D for Council Tax).

This has been designed to be “revenue neutral” with the current system and as such doesn’t do much to cut taxes for people already in appropriate and low bands or to raise taxes for those appropriately in high bands. It does fix the problem of possibly half of Scotland being in the wrong tax band but this effectively means a lot of upheaval to the system for comparatively little actual gain – even where that gain is necessary.

Two intermediate steps are to change the current 8 Band system to a 12 Band system with one aimed at keeping taxes more or less the same for folk in lower band houses and adding addition bands for the extremely wealthy at the top and the other being more “progressive” by reducing tax rates slightly for lower bands and and increasing it for upper bands.

And finally, there is a 14 band system that looks much like the 12 band “progressive” proposal but with a slightly greater cut for lower bands and a slightly higher increase for upper bands.

The problem with all of these proposals is that the banding system for Council Tax is inherently unfair. Not just in its present form where a house worth 10 or 100 times more than a cheap, Band A house will still only pay about 3.5 times more in Council Tax, but even if the bands were reformed or extended as the Government has proposed here, that problem will always exist.

The very rich who live in houses in the top band will always pay less than their fair share of tax and that means that those in the poorest households will always pay more than their fair share. Even the 14 band system would only apply a maximum differential rate of about eight times as much Council Tax for a house sitting near the bottom of the highest band (starting at £1.83 million) compared to one sitting at the top of the lowest band (£65,000).

This means that a house worth more than 28 times another will only pay about eight times as much tax. What the Government is claiming is a more progressive tax proposal than the current system is still nonetheless deeply regressive and its claim of being “revenue neutral” still means, in effect, the poor are paying a massive tax subsidy to the rich.

“Nine out of ten houses in Scotland are worth less than £400,000.”

Instead, we argue for a proportionate Property Tax similar to the one used in many countries in Europe where the property tax is based on a percentage of the current value of the house – doing away with bands entirely (One could argue to make things even more proportional and add surcharges on very expensive houses in the same way that we don’t pay a flat income tax rate but a progressive one based on how high our salary is – but let’s make the case for a flat percentage tax first, then we can discuss going further). This removes the inherent problem of banding. A house worth ten times as much will always pay ten times as much tax.

One of the arguments against property taxation as opposed to taxing income is the “ability to pay”. It’s often held up that there will be asset rich, income poor people stereotyped as a lonely widow living in her mansion after the kids leave the family home. The truth is that while I’m sure that there will be people in a situation like that, there are better mitigations available than holding the rest of the country back from reforming and replacing an outdated tax system.

The consultation document itself considers a couple of these such as phasing in the tax over several years to make it easier for people to adjust their finances to copy with any increases or allowing people to defer the tax for several years – perhaps until the sale of the house or the death of the owner, though this may result in people having to face a large lump sum tax bill when that time comes.

Another option, one that we may suggest in our response, might be to limit the increase someone pays due to the transition to some percentage of their income or to expand Council Tax discounts to cover people in that situation. Over time though, this would become less of a problem. House prices in general will adjust to reflect their tax bill and houses that are currently overvalued may reduce in price as a result of a high tax burden attached to them (something that wouldn’t happen if we abolished property taxes for a local income tax as some have suggested).

A final point to make in this column is the fact that people don’t really understand just how unequal property wealth actually is in Scotland. This can be seen in the Daily Express’s claim that the Scottish Government’s proposal would mean a tax of up to £6,600 on “hard working families”, without mentioning that this is what would be paid only in the biggest change proposed (the 14 band system) and this rate would only apply to the most expensive houses worth more than £1.83 million.

Very few “hard working families” in Scotland live in £1.8 million houses. In fact, thanks to this consultation, we now know how many households live in worth £1.83 million or more. This band would cover just 0.02% of houses in Scotland – fewer than 15,000 out of Scotland’s more than 2.6 million homes.

In fact, as you can see in our Graph of the Week this week, we can plot the various government proposals (in this case we’ve just plotted the most and least progressive of the four) in comparison to how much more or less people would pay in Council Tax compared to a fair Property Tax. If we moved to our Property Tax then a small house in Band A could see its tax bill halve, while a £2 million mansion would see a substantial increase of £6,000 or more. The “breakeven” point between the current Council Tax (and, in fact, all four of the Government’s proposed reforms) is a house worth £400,000 that is or should be in Band F.

This threshold is at about the 90% percentile of house prices. Nine out of ten houses in Scotland are worth less than £400,000. That means that nine out of ten households in Scotland are currently paying more than their fair share of Council Tax and would benefit from a fair percentage based Property Tax. It also means that all four of the Government’s proposed Council Tax reforms would tweak but would not remove this inequality.

The Scottish Government is, in effect, continuing to protect Scotland’s top 10% of property owners at the expense of everybody else. This is a key lesson that we will be including in our response to the consultation and I hope you will too.

The Council Tax is outdated, unfair and needs to change. The argument of that fact was won more than a quarter of a century ago. That the Government accepts the need for a progressive and fair tax but still cannot bring itself to propose one is a dereliction of duty. That they’ve broken a manifesto commitment to let the people come up with a solution instead is a democratic scandal.

And that they’ve stated that even if they win the next election, they’re not going to implement the solution in the next Parliament just means that this consultation looks like it’s much more about delaying change for another decade rather than righting the wrongs of the lack of change so far.

We can do better than this, especially when the solutions are already clear and understandable. Please submit a response to this consultation and do make clear to your local MSPs that you want to see Council Tax fixed properly, fairly and for the ultimate benefit of All of Us.

Information is still not free enough

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Truth never damages a cause that is just.” – Mahatma Gandhi

This blog post is an extended version of an article that previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Long time followers will know of my personal conviction that democracy cannot exist without transparency. There is a long list of issues that this impacts. If we can’t see what Government is talking about. Who is talking to them. What money is being spent where. Where that money is coming from. How policies are being formed. How their impact is being measured. If any of these things are happening only behind closed doors, then we cannot properly hold Government to account or ensure that they are meeting their promises.

The current legislation around Freedom of Information in Scotland is decent but it is also out of date and needs reform and expansion. It was one of the first Bills passed by the recommenced Scottish Parliament, but it has been creaking at the seams for some time.

In 2019, the Post-Legislative Scrutiny Committee in the Scottish Parliament picked up the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act – known in shorthand as FOISA – and decided to see where it could be updated. We were keen supporters of this process and you can see me give evidence to the committee here. Several areas of reform were identified including a major one where the increasing use of private companies and ‘arms-length’ bodies to deliver public services may be weakening the effect of our Freedom of Information.

One prominent and oft-cited example is that if a Local Authority owns a care home, then you have the ability to submit an FOI request to get information about the care home. However, if the Local Authority sells off that care home to a private company and then hires them to provide care services then you might find that you can’t submit the same kinds of FOI requests. You might also not be able to submit certain requests to the Local Authority such as a request to see the terms of the contract they signed to ensure that they’re not overpaying the private company for care as an FOI request of that kind can be blocked due to ‘commercial sensitivity’.

In this way, privatisation could well be used as a shield against freedom of information. If a corrupt or ill-willed public body wished to conceal something it was doing from view, then they could simply privatise it. The committee determined that there was therefore merit in the idea that the transparency should follow the public money, not the public bodies. That is, if a private company is using public money to deliver a service then it should be just as subject to Freedom of Information as if that service was being delivered ‘in house’ by a public body.

Unfortunately, the Scottish Government decided in the end to not do anything with the Committee’s recommendation to rectify this problem which prompted Labour backbench MSP Katy Clark to submit a Members’ Bill calling for reform of the legislation to strengthen FOI powers in this area. You can listen to my interview with her on the Bill in Episode 138 of the Common Weal Policy Podcast when she was just at the start of the process of introducing the Bill.

A consultation into her Bill has just concluded but we have submitted our response to it largely agreeing with its aims but calling for it to go further in a few areas.

One of these areas is in the concept of ‘proactive disclosure’. Right now, there is a great deal of information being held by Government that you could have put out into the public domain if you submitted an FOI request for it but, until someone does, it will remain secret. This is a problem. Public information should be public and not subject to the whim of someone, somewhere coming up with the appropriate question.

For example, perhaps you want to check to see if someone in particular has been lobbying the Scottish Government and might be doing it in a way that it doesn’t appear on the Lobbying Register. Emails are not Registered Lobbying in the same way that a face-to-face conversation is.

If an organisation doesn’t want you to know that they’ve been lobbying Government Minsters then keeping the conversations to email and phone calls is a decent way of doing it because you need to have some idea that they ARE lobbying Government before you can submit an FOI. Under the current Lobbying Register legislation, even if an organisation would WANT to disclose that information, they are not allowed to.

But let’s say you do have that idea and you decide that you do want to find out what Dr Craig Dalzell, Head of Policy & Research at Common Weal has been saying in email communications with Angus Robertson about the Scottish Government’s Independence White Papers, for example. That’s a perfect valid FOI request and those emails will be released. [I have no idea who submitted that FOI by the way, but it was a good one! Especially as it confirmed that Robertson knocked back Common Weal’s offer to advise on said White Papers given that we had already done the work for them]

Continue reading →

Scotland is still breaching your right to environmental justice

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

Image Credit: Tim van der Kuip, Unsplash

Who do you phone if your rights have been breached?

Who goes to jail for breaching them?

These are questions that are far more serious than most of us realise. Without adequate justice when your rights are breached, you cannot prevent them from being breached again.

A report by the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe has found that for the last fifteen years, Scotland has breached our rights to accessible economic justice – rights protected by the Aarhus Convention. You can read the full report here.

What this means is that if your right to a clean and safe environment is breached then Scotland is failing in its duty to ensure that your right to challenge the perpetrator in court and to receive “fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive” justice has been diminished. In particular, while the report does mention that Scotland has complied with the Convention in certain areas (such as by accepting a reasonable definition of the term “prohibitively expensive” and in protecting claimants against onerously inflating legal costs, especially during appeals), there are still areas lacking compliance such as complications around how court fees can inflate overall costs above reasonable limits and how legal aid is often inadequate for funding complex environmental legal cases which restricts who can argue for their rights only to those who can afford it.

This all may seem like it’s a step removed from the actual breach of your right to a clean environment but it’s not really. The two are effectively one and the same. If you cannot take someone to court and receive justice if they breach your environmental rights then they can breach those rights without fear of any consequences. Which almost certainly means that they will have a strong incentive to breach those rights. This will be particularly important if the Ecocide Bill currently moving through Parliament does not pass before the end of the session in late March and is allowed to fall as it would signal to polluters that Scotland will quite happily allow the worst of them to commit the worst kinds of environmental harm and there would be little that we could do to take them to court.

The report found that Scotland was failing in several areas to restore our rights to justice which is a strong indictment against a Government that once held itself up as one of the world leaders in tackling the climate emergency (before, of course, cancelling its legally binding climate targets as a means of avoiding breaking the law and possibly facing the kinds of justice that the Aarhus Convention is supposed to protect access to).

The Scottish Government also dropped its Human Rights Bill which would have fully brought the right to a healthy environment into Scots Law. Part of the reason why it failed was that as a devolved nation, Scotland cannot formally sign up to international treaties. We can, however, legislate Scots Law so that we “act as if” we are members of those treaties and simply align our domestic law to them whether we’ve signed them or not. However, it was found that the Scottish Government cannot use devolved law to compel the UK Government to “act as if” it has aligned with a treaty that it has not signed. In effect, devolution means that the Scottish Government cannot use Scots Law to prevent the UK Government from breaching human rights in Scotland that the Scottish Government thinks you should have but the UK Government thinks that you should not have.

It gets worse at a UK level however. Where the Scottish Government is “merely” failing in its legal duties to protect our access to environmental justice, the UK Government is actively holding those rights in contempt and is threatening to withdraw from Aarhus altogether precisely to avoid legal challenges to policies and decisions that would harm the environment. In this, it joins a worryingly large club of countries who stood together a decade ago to declare a climate emergency but who have since backslid into climate denial and attempts to accelerate the destruction of our biosphere while claiming that doing so would “bring energy bills down” when, in fact, it will do the precise opposite.

We’ve encountered the fight for rights to mean something before. During our long and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to bring about a Scottish National Care Service we argued against the Scottish Government’s approach which was to simply declare that everyone had a right to care. Their rights-based approach, we argued, was not doomed because the rights they sought to grant were bad – we steadfastly campaigned for Anne’s Law and the right for folk in care homes to receive essential visitors – but because the approach itself was flawed.

“In short, who do you call when someone breaches your human rights? ”

Instead, we argued for the “Four R’s” of rights, responsibilities, resources and relationships.

First, we needed to define the right that was being granted or was being deemed worthy of protection. In this we agreed with the Scottish Government.

But next we need to see who is responsible for delivering or protecting those rights and who is responsible when those rights are breached – in short, who goes to jail if your right to acceptable care is broken? The carer who harmed or neglected you? The private care agency that didn’t train them properly as a means of creaming off a bit more profit? The Local Authority that hired the agency instead of delivering care as a publicly-owned service? Or the Scottish Government Minister who cut Local Authority budgets and forced them to pick a cheaper option?

That last question ties in with resources. Not just the resources to prevent your rights from being broken but also the resources required to restore them when they are or to seek justice to ensure that your broken rights can be repaired.

And finally, relationships. This is particularly acute in care where it is too often delivered almost like a faceless and decidedly uncaring procedure – A rotating list of carers visiting for 15 minutes a day, checking tasks off a list, leaving, then a different person coming the following day. But when it comes to rights it also means ensuring that you understand your relationship to your rights, that you know when they have been broken or someone is threatening to break them and that you know what to do in response. In short, who do you call when someone breaches your human rights?

Now apply those principles to your right to a healthy environment and your right to environmental justice. You can quickly see how, in Scotland, we fall short of the standards of the Aarhus Convention especially given that so many of the critiques of Scotland’s shortcomings were focused on things like inadequate resourcing of legal aid.

The Scottish Government must double down its efforts to comply with international environmental justice law just as it must do so with the fights for environmental justice themselves. They must also take the fight to Westminster to prevent the UK Government from breaching our rights. In an era where we are seeing climate justice being eroded almost as fast as the climate itself, we must protect hard-won rights no matter who tries to breach them. Once they’re gone, they won’t come back and we might even be actively prevented from fighting for their return.

What ‘real security’ means in light of recent cyberattacks

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“People used to talk about the American Dream. Now they talk about the Azure uptime guarantee.” – Daniel Vincent Kramer

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

purple and blue light digital wallpaper

(Image Source: Unsplash)

[Note: This article was published a few days before the AWS outage that caused havoc throughout multiple digital services – including banks and security devices – on Monday 20th October. This incident was accidental, but serves to highlight the potential impact of a deliberate shutdown of such services.]

If you asked the previous US Government what “security” meant, they might have said “defence”.

If you ask the current Trump US Government what it means, they’ll tell you that “defence” is a “woke” word and that we should be talking about “war” instead.

If you ask the only marginally less belligerent UK Government that question, they’ll still answer by pointing at the same tools – that “security” means nukes, jets and the diversion of the equivalent of half of the NHS’s budget into building even more nukes, jets and other weapons of war.

Meanwhile, this year, multiple important companies not just in the UK but globally and ranging from manufacturers to retail stores have been knocked almost completely out of production by cyberattacks.

There’s no suggestion that the various attacks are related or are the result of a single, hostile state actor but there’s little reason to imagine that they couldn’t be and largely irrelevant whether they are or not.

Our economy has become vastly more complex and interlinked than it was in the past and has simultaneously become more fragile in the face of unexpected shutdowns.

So in a rare moment of aligning with an organ of the British intelligence sector, I share the concerns of the National Cyber-Security Centre when they say that British businesses have to start doing more to secure their IT systems and to create plans for how to keep running if something happens – potentially with plans to run systems without networked computers or with pen-and-paper backups if required.

This should be standard practice in all businesses and not just those vulnerable to cybersecurity incidents. My colleague Robin was recently caught in one of Scotland’s worst power blackouts in several years when – it seems – workers cut a critical power and telecoms cable resulting in several villages being cut off from the modern world for several days.

This included substantial risk factors like the possibility of someone falling ill and being unable to call for emergency services or even to alert the local health clinic.

I’m also reminded of a story someone told me during the early phases of the pandemic. They worked in a public leisure centre and when things started to kick off they realised that their centre would likely become a hub for emergency measures so asked their manager where the disaster planning folder was. The reply they got was “What folder? We don’t have one.”

That centre ended up being used for vaccine deployment but they were also made aware that there were plans to use them as an emergency school (to help spread pupils out), as an emergency health centre (to reduce pressures on the NHS) and, if things got really bad, as an emergency morgue.

What my contact tried to explain to officials was that they could well do any of those but trying to do all of them – as seemed to be the plan at the time – would mean working out how to keep not-yet-vaccinated people away from people sick with Covid at the same time as not forcing school kids to walk past lines of body bags on their way to class.

All while a barebones staff of mostly furloughed, mostly low wage, and increasingly traumatised staff were trying their best just to get by.

The whole thing was a mess of lack of planning for what should have been a foreseeable disaster. In 2019 we knew that a future pandemic was inevitable at some point but the lessons from previous pandemics and pandemic wargame exercises had not and still have not been fully implemented. We warned about this in our 2020 policy paper Warning Lights.

Since then, the foreseeable disasters like pandemics, climate change or malicious hackers have been joined by another one – a hostile government that actively controls our tech sector. We’ve seen some hints of this in the form of the UK’s response to Chinese technology in things like our digital networks (I know of Scottish Local Authorities who are actively replacing such systems at the moment) but the USA is becoming just as large a threat.

It is no longer an unthinkable hypothesis that an unstable President like Donald Trump could have a bad morning and order US companies to spy on British networks or to just lock companies or governments out of Apple, Google and Microsoft and nor is the prospect of an unaccountable billionaire like Elon Musk amplifying hate across social networks, advocating for the violent overthrow of our democratic institutions and threatening to simply shut down access to his own networking devices if he doesn’t get his way.

We need to follow the EU’s example of drastically reducing our dependence on America for tech like the software we use to operate our Government.

The Scottish Government has to start thinking seriously about what real security means in the 21st century. For me, it means resilience as much as anything else. It means ensuring that Scotland can cover our fundamental economy without relying on a partner who may now be unreliable.

Scotland grows enough food to feed everyone here (We grow enough barley alone to meet the calorie needs of 9 million people – it’s just that most of it becomes whisky and most of the rest goes into animal fodder).

We produce enough energy to cover domestic needs sustainably (though we’re not nearly self-sufficient enough in manufacturing the means to harness that energy and far too much of our production is owned by foreign companies).

There are few countries in the world in a better and more stable geopolitical position (other than the targets strapped to our backs in the form of British nukes hosted here).

The rest becomes an issue of ensuring that things remain secure and that we are resilient when breaches do occur so that things don’t grind to an absolute halt.

If I was designing a Scottish defence sector, one of the major departments would be a team of penetration testers whose job it would be to hack Scottish companies then fix the holes they find.

What is important is that once those basics are covered, we see that the actual threats to us are much diminished compared to what the shrill warmongers of the headlines want us to believe and that those that remain certainly can’t be solved by diverting money from health and welfare budgets to build jets to carry US nukes that we now see would be more part of the problem than part of the solution.

Perhaps instead of bolstering Departments for War, we can start to think about what a world that works for peace could look like. It starts by working out how we’d cope if things go wrong and then working out how to make sure they don’t.

SNP Members back Common Weal’s public energy strategy (again)

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It’s that simple.” – Michael Hureaux-Perez

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

The SNP members at their conference this month backed a major energy motion supported by the SNP Trade Union Group (TUG). This motion was developed in consultation with the STUC and with energy experts including myself and deeply integrates several aspects of Common Weal’s proposals for reform of the Scottish energy sector – including by moving forwards plans to bring energy into Scottish public ownership.

The motion was passed by acclaim and without objection meaning that this is now the fourth time that the SNP members have voted for an energy motion including public ownership at their national conference – each time achieving overwhelming or unanimous support. You can watch the presentation of the motion starting from the 1 hour 10 minute mark here.

The motion itself (pictured above) focusses on six key areas which are worth explaining in some detail.

1. Achieving Equity Stakes

Something that Common Weal has long advocated for is for the Government to stop just handing money to very large, often already very rich, companies in the form of tax breaks, loans or outright grants is no longer appropriate for a renewable energy sector that has for many years now demonstrated the ability to make a profit without public subsidy. At the same time, we’ve been shouting for some time about the obscenely high level of foreign ownership in the Scottish economy – particularly within the fundamental economy like energy.

Instead of just throwing money at the sector, the Scottish Government should demand equity – ownership shares – in return for public money and should even demand a public equity share as a precondition for planning permission or the granting of option rights in projects like the successors to ScotWind. Denmark recently did precisely this, calling for a minimum 20% public stake in offshore renewable projects.

This is, of course, a bit easier for Denmark as they have several publicly owned energy companies who, by definition, meet that stake simply by doing their job. Scotland – starting from the position of not having a public energy company – may have to take a position similar to that of GB Energy, being a kind of silent investment partner who merely provide the money and take the profits rather than taking an active role in developing the project.

However this should be merely a first step where small stakes are used as a training ground to build up the experience needed for the Scottish energy company to start joining projects as a co-developer, start to bid for projects on their own and then to move to a “no bid” process whereby the Scottish energy company simply start running all new Scottish energy projects by default.

The second part of the proposal is important for the initial “silent investor” stages. It would not do for the Scottish Government to be effectively investing in and buying ownership stakes in companies who treat their workers unfairly, so this provision would be an additional incentive for companies that if they want the support of Government then they have to meet a minimum standard of workers’ rights.

This is the approach the Scottish Government took to distinguish themselves from the UK with their “Green Freeports” which does show that the Fair Work principles are themselves not strong enough and might be of limited actual impact, but they do still represent a floor below which Government-supported jobs should not fall.

2. Appropriate ownership limits and break clauses

One of the things we discovered when researching for our second ScotWind paper was the discovery that the lease terms for offshore wind projects can stretch into multiple decades despite the turbines themselves reaching “breakeven” and starting to make a profit sometimes after only five or seven years or so. The “NR4” round of offshore wind in England promised a 60 year lease period for wind turbines.

With a normal lifespan of 20 to 30 years, this means that the lease would cover the operational lifespan of two or three generations of such turbines and if the five year payback period is achieved, then the lease could generate up to 50 years worth of energy profits.

Our default position is that until Scotland has the capacity to manufacture and install turbines ourselves then it’s fine to hire a developer to do it for us and perfectly acceptable for them to expect to recoup their investment and make a reasonable profit but that after a lease period that is as short as practical (say, ten years), ownership of the turbine should then be transferred to Scottish public ownership.

There is a caveat here. If the turbines have a 20 year lifespan, then nationalising them on year 19 would effectively just mean letting the corporations take all the profits and then socialising the decommissioning costs (much like what has happened with the Scottish oil sector).

In addition to a short lease there should also be strict break clauses whereby if the developer does not meet minimum standards such as on workers’ rights or if they break promises to invest in local supply chains or otherwise no longer meet reasonable standards as an operator in Scotland then the Government should activate a break clause in the contract, pull the lease in and give it to a Scottish public operator – this is precisely what the Government did in 2021 to nationalise ScotRail.

This is also how Scotland effectively nationalises all of our renewable energy for no cost to the electricity consumer. All we need to do is ensure that the current generation of generators are brought into public hands soon enough that they can pay for their replacements. This doesn’t just need to happen at a national scale with large developments like ScotWind. This can scale down to the community level where communities should be able to take over small onshore wind and solar farms.

That a community in Scotland recently failed to take over their local wind farm because a Scottish public body didn’t even consider the possibility of this shows how badly out of step Scottish policy is with the will of the people right now (I’m told that the community in question is now in the process of trying to buy out the land under the turbines so that they’ll get the rent from that and will control the next round of leases in the future – good luck to them).

3. Local supply and retrofitting

There is a massive mismatch between the Scottish Government’s energy supply policy and their energy demand policy (such that the latter exists). We all recognise that the climate emergency means that we need to use resources more efficiently. We also recognise that the vast majority of fuel poverty is caused by the fact that we need so much fuel to heat our homes. New buildings could be (but aren’t being) built so that they use an absolute minimum of energy (a properly built Passive House can use less energy to heat in a year than yours does in a winter month).

Transport policy could also be built to minimise energy use via much greater use of public transport for the vast majority of people. That traffic jam your stuck in where every car has an average of 1.1 people inside it is just about the least efficient way of moving people that could possibly be devised. Turning that traffic jam from a queue of fossil fuel burning cars into one of electric cars might be cleaner, but it’ll still double Scotland’s current electricity demand (inefficient heating would double it again).

So this part of the motion aims to double down on efforts to retrofit buildings and to boost local supply of materials to do so (for instance, the vast majority of sustainable insulation made from things like cellulose is imported into Scotland despite so much of our land being covered by monoculture sitka spruce plantations)

This week in one of our daily briefings (sign up here to get a short article on a news story that caught our eye every weekday) was on the story that one of the UK’s insulation projects had failed so badly that 98% of homes covered by it need to get it ripped out and redone. We outlined how to do this kind of work better not by relying on throwing money at companies and then not checking their work but by establishing the task as a public works infrastructure project to properly coordinate it and make it cheaper and more efficient to do. This plan has won favour at previous SNP conferences but, as with so many of our plans for public infrastructure, has been ignored by the leadership.

4. Establish an energy company

The SNP membership has supported a Scottish public energy company since we started lobbying for it in 2017. The SNP leadership has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards that support too. The first Scottish Government plan for a Scottish electricity retail company fell afoul of a UK energy market that overwhelmingly favours large cartels over small providers and, as we warned at the time, an energy company that lacked its own generators and other assets would be entirely at the mercy of global energy price spikes. That proposal was dragged along without the reforms we warned would be needed until it was scrapped in 2021.

Earlier this year, another push from members to get the policy back on the books was blocked by the Government under the excuse that it couldn’t be enacted under the limits of devolution. We responded with a paper laying out six ways that Scotland could own Scottish energy assets under devolution – including via a network of municipal energy companies or via a National Mutual model where Scottish residents are shareholders in the company instead of Scottish Ministers (which is the actual thing that the Scotland Act blocks).

“The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.”

This paper forms the heart of this part of the motion and we’re very happy that the SNP conference unanimously supported it. It is now clear SNP policy that Scotland should publicly own Scottish energy assets via whichever means that Devolution allows. I would favour either the Mutual model where the company is collectively owned by all of the people of Scotland or, failing that, by a National Energy Company collectively owned by the 32 Local Authorities.

Either way, the NEC should be combined with a mandate for the NEC to actively support municipal and community energy companies – co-investing with them in Public/Public Partnerships to help them bootstrap each other up to the point where the larger scale proposals outlined above like taking over existing developments at end-of-lease or outright developing ScotWind-scale projects becomes viable.

What is clear now is that the Scottish Government has run out of excuses. Their refusal to adopt a policy of publicly owning Scottish energy has not more legislative barriers left and now flies directly in the face of the will of their own party. I would expect to see their upcoming election manifesto reflect this will and, should the SNP be part of the Government after the elections, I expect to see proposals to bring about the NEC laid down and developed with all possible speed.

5. Invest in training and a Just Transition Jobs Register

The Just Transition is not going well. Despite the best efforts of polluting megacorporations to try to ride their climate emergency through just a few more quarterly shareholder targets, people are leaving the sector in Scotland either through choice or – as the closure of Grangemouth has highlighted – through the choice of others. However, we’re not seeing these skilled workers move into the renewables sectors at anywhere near the rate we need.

A policy passed at SNP conference a few years ago was the idea of a Just Transition Jobs Register. This would track how many people where being employed in the fossil fuel sectors and in the renewables sectors, would measure how many people were moving from the former to the latter each year and would actively seek to improve pathways to increase that flow. When the policy initially passed it was, again, completely ignored by the party leadership so its inclusion here in another motion must serve to highlight its importance.

6. Putting Communities and Workers First

Where the Just Transition is happening it’s too often being seen as a thing to do to workers, not as a thing for and by workers. I’ve seen corporate “Just Transition” plans that were entirely designed to transition the /company/ to a more sustainable footing but did so by replacing older workers with new apprentices rather than retraining existing staff. Meanwhile, studies like the one done by Platform in 2020 show that workers in the affected sectors already have very good ideas about how they’d like to see a transition happen while highlighting their concerns that they lack the power to do it.

Communities have similar ideas but also lack power. There are growing concerns about the flood of renewable developments in and around communities or the rise of electrical pylons designed to shunt energy past communities who are suffering from fuel poverty while not receiving any of the benefits of hosting the infrastructure. Even a plan such as ensuring that solar panels are built on houses and brownfield sites before taking away amenity space or Common Grazing land from locals would go a long way to helping people buy into the transition rather than turning against it because they see their environment transformed only to benefit companies and landowners.Conclusion

This motion represents a major victor for Common Weal’s influence within Scotland’s political circles but it’s an even bigger one for SNP members who have voted, again, for policies like this despite the party leadership trying to tell them that it couldn’t be done. The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.

This isn’t merely an issue confined to the SNP, however. The other progressive parties in Scotland are all overwhelmingly in favour of policies like this too. It would be a Courageous Decision (in the Yes Minister sense) for leadership to continue to ignore not just the will of a majority of Scottish voters on this issue but the unanimous decision of their own party’s membership at their own conference.

Which hasn’t stopped them up till now – and therein lies the issue even with motions like this. There is still a vast gulf between “what members instruct their party to do” and “what the party actually does” with very little in the way of accountability or oversight to bridge that gap.

This is a problem in all political parties and may be a fundamental problem with political parties that limit their ability to manage a democratic government. The solutions to that are probably a topic for another time, but until then I encourage the members who supported this motion to make their voices heard. Do what you can to ensure that its principles make it into the upcoming manifesto. Do what you can to ensure that your local candidates support those principles. And make sure that they understand that your support of their election is dependent on them listening to their members.

And the message to other parties: If the SNP won’t do this despite that election, who will? Perhaps you?