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 Rather than merely replace them like-for-like, however, the 26 turbines have been replaced by 14 new, larger and more efficient modern ones.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.

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.

Who do you phone if your rights have been breached?

Who goes to jail for breaching them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The theory behind carbon offsetting is as follows. You conduct an activity that emits greenhouse gases to the equivalent of one tonne of carbon dioxide. This could be one tonne of carbon dioxide. Or it could be 40kg of methane, or 44 grams of sulphur hexafluoride (used as a tracer gas and as an insulator in high voltage electrical equipment).

Let’s say it was caused by your private jet flight.

A private jet flight can emit about one tonne of carbon dioxide per passenger over the course of a 1,000 km flight from Edinburgh to London and back, compared to about a quarter of that for a commercial flight and about 3.5% of that for a train journey.

Now, you’ve been getting a lot of flack for your private jet flights and the climate damage they cause but you’re not willing to actually stop taking them, so you decide to add a little surcharge to the cost of your flight to buy one “carbon credit”. This is effectively a certificate that adds to a pot of money somewhere. Nations are supposed to issue only so many of these certificates in a year and to decrease the amount the issue each year – forcing people who can’t buy a certificate to reduce emissions instead.

Someone, somewhere else, decides to do something climate friendly that will pull one tonne of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away where it can’t cause climate damage. Maybe they plant a tree. When they do, they get awarded a carbon credit from the pot of money, along with the money you paid for the credit certificate – subsidising their tree planting.

So, the theory goes, the emissions caused by your private jet flight are sucked out of the atmosphere by the tree and everything is carbon neutral or “Net Zero”. Scotland in particular has gone all in on encouraging these projects to the point that where the large estates that dominate Scotland were once used for shooting grouse and deer they are increasingly used by billionaires and private equity funds to harvest carbon credits instead.

The real world is a lot more complicated than that and involves all kinds of financial fineagling including the global trade of certificates so that nations who are reducing emissions faster (or who never emitted as much as richer nations did) can sell their “excess” credits as well as trade in future credits that haven’t been issued yet but everyone is sure they one day will which doesn’t sound like a financial bubble in the making at all.

The financial side of the carbon credit sector is worthy of its own article but I want to talk this week about the carbon absorption side of things. A new study has just been published that looked at 25 years of carbon removal projects – ranging from “low tech” solutions like tree planting to “high tech” solutions like directly removing CO2 from the air and pumping it into caves or old oil wells.

They found multiple problems with the entire carbon credit industry that render the whole idea nearly worthless. These range from “double counting” issues (If I plant a tree that absorbs one tonne of carbon dioxide I get to claim I’m reducing my own emissions by one tonne but if I sell a carbon credit to you then you also get to claim that you are reducing your emissions be one tonne – both can’t be true), through timing issues (your private jet flight starts causing climate damage from the moment you take it, but my tree could take several years to reabsorb the emissions so that they stop causing damage), through failures in the projects (if a wildfire – perhaps one caused by your private jet flight – burns down my forest, then it can no longer absorb the carbon you emitted), through the permanence of the capture of carbon even if the scheme works (If the tree eventually dies and rots, or if the carbon you stored in the cave eventually leaks out, then it just ends up back in the atmosphere again over a timescale ranging from a few decades to a couple of thousand years where the original fossil fuels had stored that carbon for hundreds of millions of year).

All in, they found that the actual amount of carbon actually captured under carbon credit schemes over the past 25 years could be as little as a tenth of what was advertised.

This all goes to show the scam that is the “carbon credit” model of climate change mitigation. Very rich people are paying money basically as an environmental equivalent of medieval church indulgences to salve their soul as they continue to disproportionately wreck the planet and then often the same rich people and the corporations they own are extracting that money in carbon credits for schemes that do nothing to actually reduce the harm they caused.

Meanwhile, the Government is chasing a “Net Zero” climate target that basically only says “we promise to keep harming the planet until 2045, and then we’ll stop but we won’t fix the damage we’ve caused” while selling out any hope of actual land reform because of all of the carbon credit money sloshing around driving up land prices beyond the hopes of communities to own the ground under their feet.

And now we know that even as they do that, the pollution won’t stop and the “mitigations” don’t work.

The Scottish Government must take the warnings of this paper to heed and adjust their climate strategy accordingly. No more carbon credits can be sold for the purpose of “offsetting” current emissions, only for removing carbon already present due to historic emissions.

Current emissions must be reduced urgently, taxed appropriately and regulated away. Investments must be ramped up to reduce and eliminate demand for pollution fuels and products. Where carbon capture still has its place, regulations must be tightened and compliance enforced – it does us absolutely no good if we base our climate strategy on “a new forest will balance emissions in 2046” if the forest burns down in 2044 with no time to replace it.

In 2019, Common Weal published our Common Home Plan which showed how Scotland could achieve True Zero carbon emissions and actively start to repair the damage we’ve caused to the planet. The Government still has time to take on this blueprint, albeit it will now be harder and more expensive to enact because to the delays, but even then it will still be cheaper than missing those climate targets because we let the billionaires keep pollution on the promise that they’d fix it later – which we now know, they never could.

Màiri McAllan has returned to the Scottish Government after a well deserved period of patient parental leave though has left her former post as Cabinet Secretary for Energy and has been tasked with fixing Scotland’s housing crisis. As a writer of policies on both topics I don’t exactly envy the position but I can at least lay out some of the options I and my colleagues in Common Weal have published over the years on the topic. Housing is about more than homes – as anyone can attest if they have ever objected to a planning application for a new suburban sprawl on the basis that it would add extra pressure to services such as GPs, schools and other public services without adding to provision – but about building a sense of place, of community and about meeting a fundamental human need for shelter. The task is far larger than I can do justice in these few lines of text but I shall offer Màiri four ideas to help fix housing in Scotland.

Actual Land Reform

You cannot build a home without having the land to build on it. This is a particularly acute problem in rural Scotland where despite having the space to build we often cannot access the land due to it being held by mega-estates and is simply not for sale or when it is, the price to buy is being speculated beyond control. We need a land tax and other mechanisms like Mercedes Vilalba’s proposal to cap maximum land ownership. One of the most powerful ideas though would be to allow Councils to buy land at “existing use value”. That is the value of land as it currently is, not an inflated value based on its “potential” for housing or other uses.

Build “Enough” Social Housing

The central reason why Britain’s housing “market” is broken is because we run housing as a market. Thatcher broke the previous system by selling off social housing and making it impossible for Councils to replace them. Social housing should never be the last option before homelessness but the first choice for housing for many. My paper Good Houses for All shows how the borrowing powers of Councils and the Scottish National Investment Bank could build essentially unlimited homes for social rent (Councils aren’t limited in borrowing powers like Holyrood is, so long as the rents are sufficient to pay back the loan). They could be built to the highest possible energy standards to outbid the private sector in both price and quality. And they shouldn’t be built to an arbitrary target of “more houses than the previous government” but based on actual need. Councils should have a waiting list of people who want one of these homes and be resourced to deliver them by a certain date. If we do this, the private sector will be forced to cut rents and increase quality…or their landlords will decide that they can no longer exploit people for a profit and will have to sell.

Fill Vacant Housing

“But what happens to the houses if the landlords sell?” Scotland already has more vacant homes than we have homeless households. Many of those homes are not being sold, but are still being clung on to as a speculative investment because prices are rising higher than costs. We also have even more vacant housing than appears in those statistics because many High Street shops in Scotland have housing units above them that are vacant but are classified as “commercial use” rather than residential. Look above the ground floor in many places in the centre of Glasgow and you’ll start to see them.

Policies like increasing Council Tax multipliers on empty homes and Màiri’s announcement this week of extra vacant housing officers will go a long way towards fixing this. Councils should also be resourced to allow them to use their Compulsory Purchase powers more aggressively – particularly to support them to purchase vacant homes not at “market rate” but at a fair rate that will include consideration of the costs to repair and retrofit the housing up to the standards expected of newbuilds – this will often be far cheaper than building new and therefore will contribute to the solution to the crisis in a much more resource efficient way.

Increase rental building standards

For the housing that remains in private rental hands, we need to continue the work already being done around tenants’ rights, rent controls and quality standards. As hinted above, many private rented houses in Scotland fall far short of energy efficiency and other environmental standards and urgently need retrofitted. France is rolling out a scheme whereby it will be illegal to rent properties that fall below a certain EPC rating and the minimum rating will keep rising every few years. Scotland should do the same. Before those retrofits happen, many of these properties also need to be repaired first (there’s little point in installing solar panels on a leaking roof). The aggressive recapture of housing for social rent mentioned above could also be done with private rented homes that still have sitting tenants if the landlord wishes to sell or is deemed no longer adequately responsible in their management of housing, converting them to social rents and offering a rent-controlled lifetime tenancy to the tenant along with an improving their homes.

Conclusion

The housing emergency in Scotland is perhaps second only to the climate emergency that Màiri was familiar with in her previous brief. The two are, in fact, interrelated and can’t be solved separately. What won’t solve it is shovelling more money into the maws of private developers under the guise of “affordable housing” that is barely either. It’s not going to solved by a single tweak anywhere or even if we only do everything on this list but every step we take will lead to more people living more affordably and more securely in a country that can more than afford to provide that but for too long hasn’t by design.

My memories of this time five years ago remain stark. I remember the conversations with folk in the office about getting increasingly worried that the government wasn’t taking things as seriously as they should. Watching the number of Covid cases in Scotland rise (though we would find out later that it had arrived in Scotland some weeks earlier than we were told then but the Government chose to cover that information up). And I remember on the morning of Thursday 12th March deciding that I, personally, didn’t want to risk travelling into the office that day. I never returned to that room for work – the “no non-essential contact” order went out on Monday 16th and by then I was already set up to work from home (I recognise the privilege that my partner and I both had in that both of our jobs could be worked from home AND we both had homes that could be worked from, even if trying to avoid simultaneous Zoom calls from the same living room was a challenge). I was next back in our by then closed office almost a year later to recover the corpses of some plants and to pack up the remaining office supplies I had left there.

My partner and I played things as safe as we thought we could. I remember one last shopping trip around the 20th of March deliberately buying non-perishables because I could feel the lockdown coming. That was a harrowing trip. Crowds of panicking shoppers coughing over each other and doing almost the opposite of following any kind of then non-binding government advice.

I’m pretty sure it was that trip that exposed me to Covid for the first time as I didn’t leave the house between then and falling ill. I started feeling the symptoms on the 25th of March, just two days after the first full lockdown. Of course while my symptoms matched those of that first wave almost perfectly (the only one I didn’t get was the fever) I’ll never know if I actually had Covid. We weren’t testing people unless they were sick enough to go to hospital. Testing others, we would be told a week later, was a “distraction”.