2025 - Common Weal’s Year in Policy
Craig runs through Common Weal’s policy library to show off everything we’ve published this year, just in case you’ve missed a paper or two and would like to see them.
Image Source: Moritz Knöringer, Unsplash
We’ve made it through another year. Eleven years of Common Weal’s life as one of Scotland’s most productive think tanks and nine years of me being a part of that journey. I want to use my last magazine article of the year to thank everyone for their support and everything else you’ve all done to help us get to where we are.
As usual, we’ve been incredibly busy this year and have had substantial impacts on Scottish politics so I’d like to also use this column to take you through the publications to our Policy Library in 2025 and tell you a little about each paper, just in case you missed a couple at the time.
How to Own Scottish Energy
2025 started with a major impact for us at Common Weal. Early in January a poll was released showing overwhelming support from the Scottish public for bringing Scotland’s energy assets into public ownership. The Scottish Government responded by saying it wasn’t possible to do this due to the constraints of devolution. We found this claim to be disingenuous and inaccurate so countered with a short policy paper of our own outline six different ways that the Scottish Government could bring energy into public ownership including via supporting a network of local energy companies (a single National Electricity Company owned by Ministers being the only thing actually impossible under devolution) or a “National Mutual” – a private company where the only allowable shareholders are residents of Scotland with each one of us being given a single non-transferable share in the company.
For what was a short briefing paper, this has become one of the most impactful that we’ve ever written and it has been referenced by others almost every month this year as energy news keeps piling up. This makes it doubly disappointing that the Government itself still hasn’t taken particular note of it – choosing instead to base its energy strategy effectively on doubling down on foreign investment and promising to maybe do some more community ownership after independence.
Consultation on Radio Telecom Services
In 300,000 households across the UK, including 100,000 Scottish households, the energy systems for some homes is regulated by radio transmissions – particularly, electric water heater systems that used radio timing signals to heat storage tanks overnight during cheaper tariff periods. As the UK moves into more modern control systems like smart meters, these older systems are becoming redundant and obsolete. However, the announced decision to turn off all of the transmitters before people had a chance to replace them. We highlighted the risks to this approach which could have left people without power as systems that were off during the shutdown might be locked off with no way to turn them on or, worse, could be locked on with no way to shut them off.
Our campaign was successful, with the UK Government eventually stepping in just before the switch-off date with a new plan involving a phased shutdown with better monitoring and support for households that could be affected.
Vision for Scotland’s Public EV Charging Network
In mid-March we responded to the Scottish Government’s call for views on their strategy for public charging points for electric vehicles.
Our view is quite strong on this. The Government’s proposal to withhold public funding from the rollout of charging points and to rely entirely on the private sector will not work as the private sector will always only focus on the more profitable areas of Scotland – towns and cities – to the exclusion of rural Scotland where, arguably, the public network must be even more robust. The inability to ensure reliable charging is proving to be a major barrier to the uptake of electric vehicles (particularly for households where reliance on on-street parking over private driveways effectively precludes at-home charging).
We still push for more and better public transport (it is far easier to build a charging network for electric buses and even for community owned for-hire cars than it is for privately owned cars) but for those remaining private cars, the Government must take steps to ensure the infrastructure enables as rapid a transition as possible.
The Crisis in Foster Care
Common Weal’s Care Reform Group have continued their amazing work this year – undaunted despite the loss of our campaign for a National Care Service – by focusing on vital reforms to the care sector that we can enact while we’re waiting on the NCS to be redesigned and to come back onto the political agenda. In this case, our policy paper on reform to the foster care sector which found that children are suffering from multiple failures and crises mounting up. These include falling numbers of carers, increasingly complex jobs being placed on the carers who remain and a lack of data tracking the actual needs of children that is hampering attempts to see to those needs. The paper lays out seven recommendations for the Government on how to reform the foster care system.
Community Benefits from Net Zero Energy Developments
Returning to energy policy, in June the Scottish Government turned attention to the issue of community benefits from renewable energy. At the moment, there is no binding requirement for renewable energy developments to provide community benefit funding to communities near to development sites but there is a non-binding expectation that their do so. However, the recommended level of benefit set to £5,000/MW of wind turbine capacity is very badly outdated. For a start, it only applies to wind (allowing developers of solar and battery systems to offer communities rates as low as 1% of this figure) and it hasn’t even been updated to reflect current prices (had it been uprated by inflation each year, it would currently stand at around £7,500/MW).
Furthermore, our response also highlights other problems with calculating an “appropriate” level of community benefit such that our conclusion is that the best solution is to switch instead to offering community ownership of developments instead of a community benefit fund. The Scottish Government’s latest energy strategy accepts this model, however they have also maintained that they will not enact it until after independence despite already controlling enough devolved power to start the process now.
Successful Consultation with the Global South
Scotland spends a lot of time discussing what it can and can’t do within the context of devolved politics but less time talking about our impact on the world as a result of those policies. However, this has changed for the better with the Scottish Government accepting that its policies on the Circular Economy would have global impacts. The economy as it stands is extremely linear. Resources are extracted and manufactured into goods for Scottish consumers (with the extraction and manufacturing often taking place in the Global South, leaving those communities with the pollution of production), they are used – often once – and then discarded as waste. Even “recycled” waste is again often dumped on the Global South who have to contend with the pollution of the waste and recycling process. Thus while Global North countries benefit from the goods, the South feels the impact and negative consequences of those goods.
Common Weal, alongside SCIAF and Friends of the Earth Scotland, approached the Scottish Government with a framework to allow for better consultation of our domestic polices where it would impact the South to allow us to adjust policy based on that consultation. Very few countries have ever tried this approach to policy-making so we were very encouraged that the Government has funded a pilot study across a series of workshops. Results will be published next year but I can say now that being in a virtual room with people from a dozen countries spread across four continents was an exciting and humbling experience and has already generated results and insights that we could not have gained without listening to the people who are affected by our decisions. May this be the start of a much larger process of a new way of making policy.
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Consultation
The UK Government appears poised to sell out all of us to the bubble that is “AI”. In this consultation they asked effectively for AI companies to be given a blanket exemption to copyright laws with the promise that artists might be able to “opt out” of their work being absorbed by the companies or that they might, individually, be able to negotiate a licence to use their work. Never mind that in order to do either, you must have some idea that the company has or might take your work.
We argued instead that copyright law must be upheld and that companies who unfairly or illegally breach copyright should be treated the same as “music pirates” were in the early 2000s. Further, companies must fully disclose all of the data they used to train their models and must publish proof that they obtained the licence to use those works. This should apply to companies who train their AI outwith the UK but wish to sell their AI products within the UK.
Copyright issues aside, AI already represents an existential risk to organisations like ours. Before, if someone used a search engine to ask a question like “What is Common Weal’s policy on rent controls?” they would have been given a link to our policy paper. The reader may they like what they saw so much that they decide to donate to us. Now though, asking an AI chatbot the same question has the bot return a body of text that may or may not accurately reflect our position on rent controls (if it doesn’t, we then suffer reputational harm that we cannot predict or control) and may or may not link to our paper. The searcher may well be satisfied enough with the bot’s summary that they do not click through to that link and do not see our donate button. Meanwhile, the owner of the chatbot has almost certainly served up targeted advertising to the user. Hence, not only have these companies stolen our work (all of our papers are free but licenced only for non-commercial purposes), they have earned revenue from doing so AND have denied us vital revenue too.
Other Consultations
We can’t respond to every public consultation published that affects work that we do. We can’t even do that if we just limit ourselves to Scottish Government consultations (and so ignore UK Government consultations, consultations on Members Bills, or those undertaken by quangos like OfGem or from major private sector bodies). But we do try to respond to as much as we can. Even when we do, we aren’t always able to publish all of them to our library so there will be a few that you’ve missed. One notable one was our response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on profit in children’s care where, as we noted in our Daily Briefing this week, Common Weal was the lone voice supporting the principle that the correct amount of profit in children’s care should be zero and that the Scottish Government’s attempt to merely “limit” profit in care was not enough to meet their statement in The Promise that any profit at all was unacceptable. We did, however, expand upon this response in our full policy paper on profit in children’s care already mentioned above.
Another important set of consultations that we’ve looked at this year have been the Scottish Government’s consultations on improving home energy efficiency and minimum energy standards for rented properties. Dr Keith Baker from our Energy Working Group (and a Member of our Board) has been leading on this project and has been instrumental in advising the Scottish Government and developing the underlying regulations as well as having been a key driver of getting the Government this point via his championing of the principle, adopted by the Government in 2022, that newbuild houses in Scotland should meet an equivalent of the PassivHaus standard.
Also in energy, Gordon Morgan has been leading on consultation responses towards the UK Government on proposed reforms to the electricity sector, including championing “zonal pricing” that would make it much easier to develop Scottish renewables by encouraging energy intensive industries to site near to power generation rather than building vast networks of cables to move electricity down south (of course, the UK Government’s response to this campaign is that the marginal electricity price increases that people in London would face are a much bigger problem than the much larger subsidies currently being paid by consumers in Scotland to prop up a system that was designed for the age of coal).
Work Featured Elsewhere
We’re always very pleased to see our work referenced by others. I can’t list everything we’ve seen but I’d particularly highlight the many times that we’ve been mentioned in letters to newspapers from contributors, places like Byline Times, Skotia and elsewhere who have frequently referenced us or who have featured us on their podcasts. We recently had a mention at the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures (At the 34:40 mark here) where our paper on early years care was highlighted.
Quite notably, our work on the scandal that was the ScotWind auction (see our papers here and here) were extensively referenced in a report from Future Economy Scotland (see here) and achieved widespread media coverage as a result.
Our Magazine and Daily Briefings
This year marked a shift for Common Weal. With over a decade of policy development under our belt now, we decided to shift just a little away from publishing full papers to our policy library (and even then, with eight publications posted, we’re still one of the most productive think tanks in Scotland and certainly the most productive of our size) and more towards getting the word out about them. To that end, we’ve been focussing a lot of our work on our our Daily Briefings, our weekly magazine, (both of which you can subscribe to here) our In Common column in The National (which you can subscribe to here) and our other means of reaching out to you.
But we’d like to know if we’re getting it right or what else we can do to help you. Are you finding these briefings and newsletters useful and interesting? Are we covering the right stories or are we missing ones that you’d like us to cover? Is there anything else we can do to get information to you and to help you to spread it to others? Please click the contact button below and let us know.
And Finally
I’d like to once again thank everyone who has helped Common Weal do what we do. As I go into my tenth year working for the org, I remain so very proud of the work that I and my colleagues have done and I’m very proud of the changes that have happened in Scotland that almost certainly would not have happened without Common Weal pushing for them. And none of that would have happened without you, our readers and our supporters, to keep us going.
In a few days, I’ll be clocking off for a complete break over the winter holidays where I plan to spend too much time huddled against the dark, playing board games, being extorted for treats by the Policy Podcats and eating far, far too much cheese.
So until I’m back in January and we launch into the election season, I hope you all have a a wonderful end of the year, and I’ll see you again in 2026.
