Approaching 2026 With Hope

December 31, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters 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.

My last Common Weal Magazine article was my sum up of Common Weal’s year in policy for 2025. If you haven’t read that, go and recharge your beverage of choice (it’s a long article) and give it a read. I’m sure there were a couple of our successes this year that you’ve missed.

Next year will be one that starts off running. The Scottish elections are scheduled for May and that means for think tanks like us, a lot has to get done – thought perhaps not quite in the way that you might think.

The first couple of months will be busy as the Parliament rapidly runs through its “wash up” period. A feature of our democracy is that if any legislation hasn’t been finished and fully voted on by the time that Parliament shuts down for the election in March then it doesn’t roll over into the next Parliament. It “falls” and has to be started again from scratch. This goes just the same for a relatively inconsequential Member’s Bill as it does for a flagship manifesto promise from the Government, so there’s a lot of pressure from a lot of parties to get things done.

We’ve already seen a couple of bits of legislation that we’re interested in fall by the wayside (the attempt from Mercedes Vilalba to impose a maximum cap on land ownership is still technically a Member’s Bill but when the Government voted down an amendment to the Land Reform Bill that would have incorporated it, that pretty much ended hope of them supporting it as standalone legislation). We’re also still waiting to find out if Katy Clark’s Bill to extend Freedom of Information rights in Scotland will get time to finish its process and we’ll be applying pressure to try to make that happen.

We also see Bills pass and fail in somewhat strange ways. The Bill to specifically criminalise the theft of dogs passed this week – despite existing legislation covering the theft of property more generally both already covering dogs and imposing potentially harsher punishments for doing so, meaning that you could interpret the new legislation as posturing at best and the part-decriminalisation of theft at worst. Even as a cat-lover myself, I can’t help but wonder if this was the best use of limited Parliamentary time.

Meanwhile other Bills with arguably much larger social impacts have been dropped such as plans to accelerate the decarbonisation of home heating (albeit not in the way we’d prefer to see) or plans to cut speed limits on roads which absolutely would have saved lives.

All this is to say that the first couple of months trying to sort out what we can help get done (or help to avoid happening) is going to take up a fair bit of time in the first part of the year.

During the election period itself though, think tanks like ours can be remarkably quiet. Sure, you might see some of us as talking heads and pundits on various commentary outlets or perhaps even on election night itself (not that I’ve been invited yet – though I have done the 10pm-5am stint in a previous election) but in terms of policy and lobbying, all of the manifestos have been written and we have no idea who will and will not have a seat until the count happens.

After that, depending on how shaken up Parliament is, we’ll have our work cut out of us to introduce ourselves to the various new (and returning) Ministers and party spokespeople and to start laying out what we can do given the balance of parties. Who knows. We might well get a progressive alliance of parties looking for fresh ideas. We might get a collection of conservative (small-c) “old guard” who need to be strongly nudged along the way. We might well get a Parliament that is openly hostile to our views and needs to be opposed to prevent them from doing damage to the fabric of Scotland. Whichever way, there’ll certainly be a role for Common Weal and I hope you’ll continue to follow and support us on that journey.

Beyond that we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing. Our policy pipeline remains a long one and we have some major work upcoming on inequality, on education, on healthcare reform and on digital security as well as ongoing work from folk like our Care Reform Group and Energy Working Group who have been making real strides in changing legislation and regulation in Scotland and in the UK (for just the latest example, see our mention in the Committee evidence report on the Children’s Care Bill published this week where we’ve been advocating for the Scottish Government to keep its promise to remove profit from such care).

“But that we’re seeing the world darkening as a result of the drawing away from those invisible hands shows how powerful they actually were.”

This year has been a dark one. I’m personally extremely worried about the rise of militarism and the pulling away from the only things that will ever actually prevent wars before they start – the world appears to be collectively abandoning climate action, foreign aid, help for displaced peoples and peaceful diplomacy.

But there’s hope too. It’s hard to see the work that went into preventing a war that was never fought. Or to prevent the famine in which no-one starved. But that we’re seeing the world darkening as a result of the drawing away from those invisible hands shows how powerful they actually were. There’s hope that what is happening can therefore be undone and reversed – perhaps with the appreciation now of what could be.

For the smallest glimmer of that, this week I finished work that I’ve spend the last two years working on alongside SCIAF and Friends of the Earth Scotland in which we drew together a dozen people from across four continents for a consultation on how Scotland can make its Circular Economy strategy more powerful.

We’ll be reporting on that next year too but it was an empowering thing to see Scotland actively reach out to others beyond our borders to ask them how our policies on trade, manufacturing and waste management was affecting them and how we could improve ourselves. One of the attendees openly said that this might be the first time that a Global North Government has done consultation on domestic policy in this way and they hoped that it might become the inspiration for others to follow. I’m thankful to the Scottish Government for taking to our pitch with the enthusiasm that they did and for their support in making it happen.

And I’m grateful to all of our readers and supporters who keep us doing what we’re doing. Common Weal is an unusual think tank. We’re not beholden to a particular political party, or to government funding (while the Scottish Government funded the project I’ve just mentioned, neither I nor Common Weal took a fee or compensation from that pot – not even expenses), and our policy programme isn’t dictated to us by the demands of advertisers or funding bodies.

We’re supported by you and people like you. While this means that our funding is a fraction of what it could be (seriously, the First Minister earns more in a year than Common Weal as a whole does), it gives us the freedom to live our principles. If you’re not already a donor or if you know someone who might like to sign up and start supporting us, then please visit our donate page.

Other than that, my final message of the year is my hope that you all have a peaceful and happy winter break – however you may mark it – and that I’ll be back in the New Year rested, full of cheese and raring to go. I’ll see you there.

How to profit from not-for-profit care

December 24, 2025December 24, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Just because brokerages disclose a convoluted web of profiteering doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. It just means they are hiding these questionable practices in plain sight with a mountain of compliance language that no one will ever read.” – Christopher Manske

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters 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.

I would like you to imagine the following scenario: You are a company owner or shareholder. Like every ‘good’ Capitalist, you want to leverage your assets to make as much money as you can. The issue is that you work in a sector where making a profit has been deemed by the Government to be unacceptable and they have banned you from making one. How do you extract as much as you can?

As a bit of background, this thought experiment stems from the conclusions of our latest policy paper, Why and how the Scottish Government must end private provision of children’s care, which has found that private companies, including ostensibly ‘not-for-profit’ companies, that deliver children’s care services are extracting an average of £28,000 per child per year from care services. This includes an average of £9,000 per child per year from foster care specifically where, in Scotland, it is explicitly illegal to make a profit..

These findings have come off the back of the Scottish Government making a pledge to eliminate profit from children’s care and they themselves have described our findings as “shocking”, though they are sticking by their current action plan to merely “limit” profit in such care. The problem as we see it though is that there are various mechanisms open to companies to allow them to extract money from the system in ways that wouldn’t be counted as ‘profit’.

This is because ‘profit’ has very narrow meaning in this context. It’s just what a company has left over after all of its expenses are subtracted from its income. In a for-profit company, this is often distributed to owners and shareholders as a dividend (see my recent article on the financialisation of housing and why that is costing you an average of £67,000 in extra mortgage payments for an example of this in action).

It would be perfectly possible for the Scottish Government to ban the sharing of such dividends for children’s care services and to legislate that only not-for-profit companies can bid for care contracts. However, this is not enough to prevent people from making money from children’s care. To that end, we’ve concluded in our paper that the only way to avoid profit extraction from children’s care is to bring the whole sector into public ownership.

If we don’t, then we’ll just end up with ‘profit’ being shifted into some of the following means of making money without making a profit.

1. Pay yourself as much as you need

The simplest and easiest way of extracting money now that your company has been banned from giving you a dividend, is to simply pay you more. Whatever the company’s surplus was last year, you can just pay to yourself as a salary. There will be tax implications for this – you’ll be paying income tax instead of Capital Gains tax so, especially in Scotland, the tax on your earnings will be substantially higher than if you were paying yourself a dividend, but that might still be worth it.

We found examples of children’s care companies in Scotland where the Director was being paid almost £350,000 per year – and we’ve found similar examples in other ‘not-for-profit’ care sectors like social work. This is more than twice the annual salary of the Scottish First Minister. Note that these high levels of pay often do not filter down to the front-line care staff who are, in fact, often paid less than their public sector counterparts as well as losing out on benefits and rights such as better conditions or union representation. While it is important to ensure that expenditure matches income to avoid ‘profit’, it’s clear that some expenditures are more worthy than others…

This is one area that might still be an issue if the sector is brought into public ownership – a prominent current example is the dispute over the pay rises granted to Scottish Water executives. However, this is still a better idea than the current system allows for. Partially because the Scottish Water scandal is a scandal precisely because it is public owned.

This means that such pay is democratically accountable and Ministers can be challenged for their oversight and the executive salaries are all public knowledge rather than being hidden or woven through opaque company accounts (in our report we couldn’t track down the executive pay of more than a couple of companies because some simply do not disclose it). Also though, Scottish Water has a near-monopoly on service provision in Scotland because it is public owned. In the care sector it’s not just the Director of one company whose salary is under question but multiple companies all working all across the care sector.

2. Lease yourself to yourself

If your care company is banned from making a profit then you can split that company into two. The ‘not-for-profit’ company that actually provides the care services might be banned from making a profit but the for-profit company that is also owned by you is the one who owns the building that the not-for-profit uses. This company charges a lease to the not-for-profit for the use of the building that just so happens to be high enough to eat their operating surplus.

‘Management Fees’ are another way of making these kinds of transfers from a subsidiary to a parent company and come with the added benefit of not being tied to a physical asset like a building and thus there’s no risk of someone noticing that you’re charging far higher rents than would be expected in the local market.

This is also a common tactic amongst multinational companies who want to shift money into tax havens or ‘tax friendly’ institutions. Coffee company Starbucks is well known for buying its coffee beans via a subsidiary company in Switzerland and charges its UK and other branches just enough for those beans to conveniently make sure that their UK outlets never make a ‘profit’ and thus pay little tax in the UK.

3. Give out a loan, and make them pay it back

One of the touted advantages of being owned by a larger company is that they can bring investment cash your way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible to get. Of course, investments always demand a return and the money your parent company loans to your subsidiary (remember, in this scheme you own both companies) should be paid back… with interest.

Even better, because this is an internal company loan rather than one via a regulated bank, you can charge whatever level of interest that you like and easily tailor the repayments to ensure that the not-for-profit company never makes a profit. If you ever wonder why profitable companies end up completely loaded with debt just a few years after being bought out by a global equity fund, this is very likely what has happened.

4. Receive a loan, and keep it.

It doesn’t need to be the parent company passing debt down, of course. This kind of financial transaction can happen the other way too. If the not-for-profit finds itself with a substantial surplus that it can’t get rid of before tax day, then it can loan that cash to the parent company or its Directors (e.g. you). The difference here is that you don’t charge above market rates for this upwards loan.

Maybe you don’t charge any interest at all. Maybe you don’t even expect the parent company to repay the loan ever. Sure, it’ll appear on the parent company’s books as a debt and that could be a problem in certain circumstances but there’s an easy way to deal with that. Simply wind up the not-for-profit company and the debt can be written off and the parent keeps the cash.

How to avoid profit in children’s care

The Scottish Government’s response to our paper was that the figures involved – £28k profit per child, per year – are “shocking” but also that they are not going to deviate from their paradoxical position that while any profit in children’s care is unacceptable, they are merely going to legislate to “limit” it.

As I hope we’ve seen here, that isn’t going to be enough. Even if the ‘limit’ on companies making a ‘profit’ from children’s care is set to zero, it won’t prevent those companies from extracting money from care or – by dint of paying workers as little as they can get away with – from carers. The only solution we can see is to bring the entire children’s care sector – both residential care and fostering – into public control.

This would, of course, be easier if we had a National Care Service to oversee the whole process but the failure of that Bill this year means we’ll need to take a more roundabout way of doing things. We still support an NCS and want to see it created in the next Parliament but children and carers can’t wait till then when we have opportunities now.

The next stage for our work on this will be to try to work out how much it will cost to bring that care into public ownership. We’re stymied by lack of data in this respect but early figures indicate that it might not be as huge of a problem as some fear – possibly on the scale of tens of millions of pounds rather than hundreds of millions. In this respect, it’s probably not dissimilar to our per capita estimates for nationalising all care in Scotland. After all, once we accept that it’s not acceptable to make a profit from caring for children, why should we treat adults any different?

Post-script – The Scottish Parliament’s report on the consultation on profit in children’s residential care can now be read here.

2025 – Common Weal’s Year in Policy

December 19, 2025December 30, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up for our newsletters 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.

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?

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.
By the time you’ve read this here, I’m already off for a break over the winter holidays where I’ve been spending 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.

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

December 11, 2025December 17, 2025 / 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

December 5, 2025December 5, 2025 / 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

November 23, 2025November 23, 2025 / 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.

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

November 14, 2025November 16, 2025 / 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.

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

November 13, 2025December 10, 2025 / 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

October 31, 2025November 9, 2025 / 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.

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

October 31, 2025November 3, 2025 / 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 →