Keith Baker tallies up the UK Budget and recent UK and Scottish Government energy policies and lays out what needs to happen next.
As the on-going industrial action at my university is successfully making it rather difficult to get much done, I thought I’d follow up on our Budget Day Daily Briefing on energy bills and fuel poverty.
One of the day’s headline announcements was the removal of standing charges for gas connections. This was a simple move that many will welcome, but it’s also political theatre. Removing this standing charge won’t do anything to help those households who aren’t connected to the gas grid, which across Scotland is roughly one in five households. However, it rises to around a third of households in the highlands and islands, where we find the highest numbers of households reliant on LPG, oil, biomass, and solid fuels for heating, and the highest levels of fuel poverty. This is further exacerbated by how much fuel they can store, and the higher costs in winter for those who can’t afford to buy as much as they can store when prices are cheaper in the summer months.
Households not using mains gas or electricity for the primary heating systems aren’t eligible for the Warm Home Discount either, but LPG and oil users can claim £300-£600 from the Scottish Emergency Heating Oil Scheme, so I’ll give the SNP a point over Labour for this. And there’s a little bit more good news as the SNP intend to adopt the same council tax bung announced for English households.
“Common Weal’s fingerprints are all over these policies. EPC reform is something I and various colleagues have been arguing for for many years”
However, what Scotland still lacks is a clear plan for transitioning these households to cheap, renewable supplies. Common Weal set out such a plan way back in 2019, in our ‘Carbon-free, Poverty-free’ policy paper. In this paper, we set out our support the development of bioLPG as a transition fuel, which would both immediately and substantially reduce energy costs and emissions, and help reduce the amount of waste we’re still sending to landfills. BioLPG is ‘plug and play’ – if you have an oil or LPG system, you can use it without modifying your heating system - and costs per unit heat delivered are competitive with air source heat pumps. It’s not quite renewable, but let’s not pretend that we’d somehow be able to deliver deep retrofits and install renewable energy technologies on all these properties in anywhere near the time we could scale up bioLPG production and give these householders some relief.
Despite being backed by a major energy supplier (Calor, who gave us every bit of information we asked for as well as complete editorial control over the output), the SNP ignored us. Point deducted.
In the same paper, we also further developed our proposals for accelerating the roll out of district heating in Scotland, and particularly in suitable rural communities where local, sustainable, biomass supply chains could be established, and which would deliver knock-on benefits to local communities and the environment.
This work also built on our two previous papers, ‘Powering Our Ambitions’ and ‘Just Warmth’, which set out our proposals for developing a public energy company (or companies) and a Scottish Energy Development Agency. Despite being very popular with voters on both sides of the independence divide, both the SNP and Scottish Greens abandoned their support for public ownership of energy generation. Of the major parties, this has left Labour as the sole supporter of these policies, and in Wales they’ve gone ahead with establishing Ynni Cymru. Point to Labour in Scotland, a point deducted from the SNP, two points deducted from the Scots Greens as they should know better, and rosettes to Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru.
But now let’s look to retrofit and energy efficiency. Here, Labour is hell bent on a policy that basically amounts to ‘slap air source heat pumps on everything’ - OK, and batteries and solar too, but Octopus have been doing most of that work for them. Again, not such a bad solution for large parts of England and anyone with a suitable property that’s already up to a decent standard of maintenance and energy efficiency, but that’s just over half of Scottish properties.
Here, we are seeing a divergence, and hearing that the Minister in charge, Stephen Gethins, is actively looking for ways of doing things differently and better. Sure, the Scottish Government made a complete hash of the original Heat in Buildings Bill (another point lost to the Scottish Greens as Patrick Harvie was the Junior Minister responsible for the debacle), but now it’s coming back, and the current signs are promising.
Although the proof will be in the pudding, the new bill comes with the backdrop of the reforms to Energy Performance Certificates (not enough, but a big step in the right direction), and the development of the Heat and Energy Efficiency Technical Suitability Assessment (HEETSA), and the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards for the Privately Rented Sector (PRS MEES).
Common Weal’s fingerprints are all over these policies. EPC reform is something I and various colleagues have been arguing for for many years, and was the subject of the first paper Ron Mould and I wrote when we joined Common Weal in 2018. Until recently, we had no choice but to oppose minimum energy efficiency standards, but thanks to the EPC reforms and HEETSA we can now support them on condition that these are delivered as is currently being proposed. Furthermore, whilst pushing back of EPC reforms to 2028 adds another two years of uncertainty, it puts all three policies in lockstep, so we can at least be hopeful that there’s finally some joined up policymaking going on.
But before we award too many points to the SNP, it’s worth noting that many of those behind HEETSA are either actively working for Common Weal, are known supporters, or are active in other organisations with whom we share much common ground (not least, the Scottish Ecological Design Association). And as a kicker, HEETSA’s ‘no regrets’ principle was something Robin wrote about almost half a decade ago.
And this is all a bit late. If the long-term weather forecast is vaguely accurate, we’re heading towards a winter of extreme weather and potentially plummeting temperatures. Again, those who will be hit hardest are the households who’ll benefit the least from this budget.
To deliberately mix metaphors, Labour has pulled a sticking plaster out of a hat, and Burnham’s charismatic approach to dancing around the cost-of-living crisis is cutting through with voters. He might not be picking up enough Scots votes to worry the SNP, but the more seats he can rely on in England the less he needs to rely on support up here. And this is how we get to a place where Westminster can safely ignore the plight of many of Scotland’s poorest and most vulnerable householders.
For this, we need Swinney and co to step up to the plate. We need a bullet proof Heat in Buildings Bill, and a Scottish budget that gives it the resources it’ll need to deliver the goods. We’ll be watching closely and hoping that what emerges is something we can support, because for those households in rural and island Scotland, there’s not much hope coming from Burnham.