Still getting heating policy wrong
The Scottish Government is creating a system which will punish the little guy but let the big guy off the hook. It really ought to be the other way round.
To those of you who read my last column and were thinking I’d been on the happy pills, don’t worry, normal service has resumed.
In that column I mentioned another bit of legislation that was sprung on us the same day we let the Home Energy Efficiency Technical Suitability Assessment cat out of the bag. We weren’t given advance warning, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out why.
The Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards for the Privately Rented Sector (PRS MEES) proposals are the latest attempt by the Scottish Government to require people to upgrade their properties, starting with landlords.
In principle, the evidence for the impacts of climate change is so stark that the most uncharitable response would be that this is a tough pill that we have to swallow, and in places where it has worked it has been incredibly effective – California’s adoption of similar legislation in the late 1990s is credited with saving the state from an energy crisis.
Furthermore, the Scottish Government has long, and rightly, been trying to tackle the problems caused by unscrupulous and absentee landlords, and mandatory standards would be one way of forcing them to improve their properties or release them back to the market.
But. There’s always a but. First of all, all current energy efficiency policies are built on Energy Performance Certificates, an approach so flawed that the last time the Scottish Government attempted to bring in mandatory improvements our Energy Working Group pledged free expert witness support to householders wishing to take the government to court. At of the time of writing, that pledge still stands.
From what we’ve seen of the proposals for reforming EPCs, they’re a welcome and pretty big step in the right direction but they don’t quite go far enough. If, combined with these reforms, HEETSA were to replace EPCs as the method for determining minimum upgrades, that would be enough for us to withdraw our pledge. However, the timelines for the introduction of MEES and HEETSA are near identical, assuming both survive the next election. This leaves us in a bit of a Mexican standoff.
And then there’s the problem of the Scottish Government doing its usual thing of taking a blanket approach. As things stand, MEES will treat small and accidental landlords in the same way as large, absentee, and overseas landlords.
“Neither Holyrood nor Westminster has the cojones to take on the rich and invisible”
You can see where this is going. The little people who simply can’t afford the bills will get hit, the absentees will soak up the paltry fines and continue to be absent, and the overseas lot will be laughing all the way from Dubai. And maybe Angus Robertson will pop round to reassure them that the government has no intention of upsetting foreign landowners.
That’s your solution to the obvious question of how to pay for this. Both MEES and HEETSA could be paid for several times over by taxing the living daylights out of those who own our land whilst contributing bugger all to our economy. Throw in a bit of means testing alongside sufficient financial support and HEETSA would make MEES an equitable proposition.
Or we just reclaim those properties, fix them, and sell them on at a profit to UK-based taxpayers. Either route gets us (near enough) to the same place, and I’m not very fussy when it comes to reclaiming our assets.
But neither Holyrood nor Westminster has the cojones to take on the rich and invisible. Labour’s pledge to tackle non-dom tax avoiders has gone very quiet, and the SNP will hide behind the reserved powers excuse. The Lib Dems haven’t got the influence, the Scottish Tories are a tail that won’t wag the dog, the Scottish Greens lost any credibility they had left the moment Lorna Slater became the poster woman for selling off our land for carbon offsetting, and Reform ARE the rich.
Where we go from here is now anyone’s guess. We’ll know for certain where we are with EPCs around the end of this summer, but we’re not expecting any big surprises, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We also know that the Heat in Buildings Bill is intended to come back and be passed before the election, so expect more fun and games unless there’s been massive changes in the mere months the Scottish Government has had to clean up that mess. And we have two whole years to defend HEETSA whilst squaring all this with reasoned arguments for and against MEES.
They really don’t like making life easy for us.
So, I’ll end with an occasional request to ask you to spare a few beans or order some merch if you support what we do – if only to buy more Haribo for Craig.