Scotland is already losing out on green energy. Here’s what we can do

March 8, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“It’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.” – Kim Stanley Robinson

This blog post previously appeared in The National, for which I received a commission.
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photo of truss towers

Scotland has an extremely poor track record of benefiting from our own energy resources. The decline of the First Age of energy wealth – based on coal – can still be seen in the scars of deprivation it left behind especially in the Central Belt towns and villages around where I live and where mining was most intensive.

In the Second Age, our oil wealth was – as Gavin McCrone warned – downplayed and then squandered under successive UK Governments while leaving Scotland vulnerable to oil shocks and we’re now seeing how we’re being held liable for the costs (economic and social) of drawing down the sector as it absolutely must be drawn down as the world wrestles with the challenges of the climate emergency caused largely by that oil even as the rich owners of the assets reap the profits and continue to lobby to delay or prevent change.

The problem is that unlike almost every other country that found itself with large reserves of energy wealth, we collectively decided that Scotland shouldn’t own any of it.

Rather than building up a robust public-owned oil sector, the UK Government flogged off the rights to exploit the resources to the lowest bidder, even offering generous subsidies rather than taxing their profits. The downstream infrastructure was privatised too not just sucked vast amounts of wealth into the pockets of billionaires like Jim Radcliffe but also granting them vast political power and the ability to make hypocritical statements about immigration while living the high life in their own offshore tax haven.

The Third Age of Scottish energy is our Green Transition – built initially around our vast onshore and offshore wind resources but now increasingly diversifying into other areas like solar and battery storage.

We see here that Scotland is in the process of losing out once again when it comes to energy resources that, if anything, vastly outstrip anything the oil sector could have ever promised because, unlike oil, the sun and the wind will continue to deliver that energy long after the last barrel of oil is extracted from the ground.

It promised to finally bring some ongoing benefit to communities that would be hosting the generators but even that failed. Neither Scotland nor the UK showed interest in developing public ownership of the assets and the “community benefit” funds were set at the lowest possible level of £5,000 per MW of capacity for wind (not uprated for inflation) and zero for other forms of renewables. It is estimated that a community owned wind turbine generates around 34 times as much revenue for the local community as does a privately owned one that pays its £5,000/MW community benefit. There is some evidence emerging that even this paltry sum is not being met in many cases with The Ferret reporting a shortfall of about £50 million across Scotland’s community benefit funds.

Offshore is arguable worse with the debacle of the ScotWind auction selling off the options to develop one of the largest offshore wind projects in the world in an auction that, for reasons still not adequately explained, set a maximum price cap on bids and potentially cost Scotland anywhere between billions and tens of billions of pounds in upfront capital.

Most crucially of all, we don’t even make the renewable generators and batteries that we don’t own. Decades of climate-denying politicians telling people that we shouldn’t bother trying to avert climate change because China wasn’t doing anything conveniently ignored that China was, in fact, rapidly building up its industrial base and was starting to sell the generators to the world.

So Scotland now imports the materials to build wind turbines that are owned by multinational companies and foreign public energy companies that export their profits elsewhere and pay communities sometimes less than the bare minimum. We don’t even get cheaper energy for it because the UK’s grid and pricing structures are still based on assumptions laid down in the Coal Age.

So what of the Fourth Age of Scottish energy? The thing about the current generation of privately owned energy assets is that they will eventually need to be replaced, and fairly soon – perhaps in 25 years time. This gives us an opportunity to start planning now.

Scotland needs to start building up its domestic wind and solar manufacturing base. We need to use our excellent universities to develop the materials to ensure that those generators are built to Circular Economy standards (current generation fibreglass wind turbine blades are disposable and are sent to landfill after use). We also need to start aggressively bringing assets into Scottish public ownership. Every time a renewable energy lease is up for renewal, it should be transferred to a Scottish public energy company (nationally or locally owned). This can also happen when a site is up for “repowering” – when old, smaller turbines are replaced with larger, more powerful ones but which exceed the previous lease’s maximum capacity terms.

New renewable sites should have their leases signed aggressively in favour of public ownership too. Rather than 60 or 99 year leases that cover the lifespan of multiple generations of turbines, they should be set to as low as 10 years. Enough time for the private developer to recoup their investment but also enough time for the Scottish public sector to take over the site and also make a profit without merely being saddled with the liability of decommissioning as we’re doing with the oil sector.

If any of this is not possible within devolution (some of it certainly is) and the UK is not willing to allow it, then while we are doing what we can, the case must be made for independence so that we can finish the job.

All of this will take time to set up which is why we need to start preparing the ground now. I don’t want to be here in 25 years talking being asked to comment on why we’re importing the next generation of technology and exporting the profits again. If we want to sit under a tree in 2050, maybe the best time to plant it is today.

It’s a lack of will, not consensus, that prevents Council Tax reform

March 7, 2026March 7, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.” – William Golding

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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a significant intervention into the upcoming Scottish election, saying that the next Parliament must stop cringing away from reforming Council Tax.

The Scottish Government’s current position is that they can’t make that change because there’s no political consensus for what comes next. This is a disingenuous take, given the chances they’ve squandered or deliberately suppressed in order to manufacture that situation.

Everyone, even the Scottish Government, agrees that the Council Tax is fatally broken. No other tax is based on valuations that were set a third of a century ago (imagine suggesting that your income tax should be based on what your salary was in 1991). No other tax so badly misvalues so many houses (imagine there was a 50:50 chance that your income tax code wasn’t even based on the job your doing right now). Almost not other tax gives such a high tax break to so few at the expense of so many. It absolutely must change and should have changed 30 years ago.

There have been several alternatives to the Council Tax that have been mooted over the years. Some have been better than others. But to my mind at this point there really are only two possible positions in the debate.

On one side, there are those who advocate for a fair and proportionate Property Tax that applies the tax based on a percentage of the present value of a home. Our own proposal to this effect models – for the purposes of making the argument – a flat percentage rate across all homes but there’s absolutely no reason why that rate can’t be varied by Local Authorities, surcharges for multiple ownership or even, as our friends at Future Economy Scotland have mooted this week, why there couldn’t be a progressive element for very high value homes.

The key point to this though is that if your neighbour who differs from you only in that they own a house that costs ten times as much as yours does, then it is fair and just that they pay ten times as much Property Tax than you do.

On the other side of the argument there is everyone else – who, regardless of what they are putting forward in terms of a reform plan – fundamentally believe that the top 10% of property owners in Scotland should have their lifestyles subsidised by the rest of us – even those of us who are going increasingly into debt just trying to keep a roof over our heads.

That sounds harsh, but let me explain.

If you believe in a banded Council Tax similar to the current one or perhaps modified by the proposals in the recent Scottish Government consultation (or their plan for a mansion tax that came out of nowhere while that consultation was still live) then houses in the top band will always and by definition win a tax cut. Even under the “mansion tax” proposal, a £20 million house will pay the same Council Tax as a £2 million house. This is not fair.

Under our proportionate Property Tax and even under its nation-wide flat rate of 0.63% (or £630 per year on a £100,000 house) we found that despite bringing in the same amount of total revenue, almost everyone whose house cost less than £400,000 would get a tax cut. The same would also be true if any of the Government’s consultation options were adopted and then we decided to move to out Property Tax later. The banded system simply doesn’t work and ALWAYS leads to a subsidy for the rich.

The same is also true for replacing Council Tax with an income tax (a position the SNP had in 2007 and some other parties still have). Wealth inequality is far higher than income inequality and property speculation is itself a major driver of that wealth inequality. Failing to tax wealth would release the brakes even further on property speculation and allow those who bought houses when they were cheap to profit even more when they sell them (The myth of the aged widow with no income living alone in their mansion with no-where else to go is largely that and would be better solved with individual discounts or exemptions and providing more appropriate housing they could move to).

But if, after that, the political parties still can’t agree to reform Council Tax in the only way they should then they should have stopped being the problem. In the run up to the 2021 election, the SNP made a manifesto promise to hold a Citizens Assembly on local tax reform, including Council Tax reform. They failed to deliver on that promise. That Assembly could have created the consensus that Robison is using as a shield against inaction – which is probably why they failed to deliver.

As I point out when I wrote about this last time, the major weakness of the idea of a Citizens Assembly is that politicians fundamentally don’t want them to work. For them to work, the politician has to step out of the way. They have to accept that the Assembly is happening because they weren’t able to do their job. They have to give the power to make the decision to the citizens who form the assembly and then they have to agree – ahead of time and not just if the final answer suits them – to carry out the instructions given to them by the Assembly.

If Shona Robison or her successor wishes to claim that the reason they can’t reform Council Tax is because of a lack of consensus then it is incumbent on them to create that consensus. If they can’t do it themselves, then they need to accept that they are part of the cause of that lack of consensus and should step out of the way.

The debate on Council Tax reform has gone on far too long. Everyone agrees that things need to change. No-one, it appears, wants to be the one to take the responsibility of making that change happen. This isn’t good enough. I’ll be watching the party manifestos closely in the coming weeks. If any of my local candidates can’t tell me what their party is going to do about this failure of responsibility that leads to 90% of people in Scotland effectively subsidising the top 10%, then I’m going to have to ask them who I should vote for instead of them.

The new National Housing Agency must serve people, not profit

February 6, 2026 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“The Master said, “If your conduct is determined solely by considerations of profit you will arouse great resentment.” – Confucius

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.

Common Weal has been campaigning for the best part of a decade on overhauling and improving the Scottish housing sector. While we haven’t been named in the announcements, the SNP’s new proposal to launch a National Housing Agency should they return to Government after the elections is a policy taken straight out of our strategic roadmap which called for what we termed a Scottish National Housing Company.

It is far too easy for Governments to talk big about housing but to do little. Even in previous election campaigns, it has been considered sufficient for a political party to just look at the raw number of houses being built in Scotland and to either say that they would build X thousand homes (where X is a larger number than their rival party is promising to build, or that the previous government actually built) without paying much attention to other vital factors such as where the houses are built, what standards they are built to, how much they’ll cost, what kind of tenure will be offered to residents or who will profit from the construction of the buildings (particularly if policies come with significant amounts of public money attached). This number goes up and down with the political winds but rarely is it based on anything other than that kind of political party promise. It’s almost certainly never based on whether or not that number of houses is ‘enough’ to satisfy immediate and long term demand.

In these respects, the Government has been taking some welcome steps particularly with policies around rent controls and energy efficiency standards (though we still have significant disagreements around how far those proposals should go – the current rent control plan all-but guarantees above inflation rent increases and the energy efficiency standards appear to be being significantly watered down from the “PassivHaus equivalent for all new homes” originally promised).

But a more strategic approach to housing is still needed beyond piecemeal interventions and broad frameworks so in this respect, that the Government has adopted our Housing Agency is something to be celebrated.

The devil is in the details however and Common Weal is now gearing up to develop our proposals and to try to ensure that the Government adopts them in full.

In our original plan, the Housing Agency would be a direct construction body – public owned and employing the people who actually build our houses.

Direct construction bypasses the biggest limitation of every housing policy that has come before. Private housing developers aren’t in the business of building ‘enough’ houses. A basic rule of economics is that price is determined by supply vs demand. Scarcity results in higher prices. This means that developers can charge higher prices by not building homes as quickly as they could or by “banking” land they own to prevent another developer from buying it and building (see my article in In Common last November which breaks down why this and other factors increases the price of an average UK home by around £67,000).

We also can’t keep building houses purely to chase the highest possible price when it comes to tenures. We’ve heard a lot about “affordable homes” in recent years despite no real definition of what that actually means beyond developers being forced to sell a few homes in each block of houses a little bit cheaper than they otherwise would (even when “a little bit cheaper” is still very much unaffordable for many).

A strategic plan led by a National Housing Agency would not be concerned about quick profits and so could build houses with a longer term view. Housing for social rent especially should be built to a standard that minimises ongoing costs like heating and maintenance thus makes living in the houses cheaper for social tenants. (See my 2020 policy paper Good Houses for All for more details on how that would work).

This would benefit Local Authorities in the long term as once the construction costs of the houses are paid off in 25 or even 50 years time, the ongoing rents will still provide a safe and steady income for decades to come. By contrast, the cheap and flimsy houses being built today are being put up by developers who don’t particularly care if the house outlives its mortgage – if it doesn’t, they’ll happily sell you another one.

This is the important point about the role of a National Housing Agency. It cannot be a mechanism for laundering public money into private developers. It absolutely must be a force that outcompetes or plays a different game from the private developers. It must disrupt the market to the point that people would actively seek out a high quality, efficient and cheap to live in Agency house rather than a private developer “Diddy Box”, especially one being offered at exorbitant private rents because the only people able to actually buy them are private equity funded landlords.

Houses should not be an inflatable capital asset designed to enrich the already wealthy and to suck wealth out of the pockets of everyone else. Houses should, first and foremost, be a home. This is the measure of the ambition that the National Housing Agency should be aiming to achieve. Common Weal is very happy to see this policy enter the politician discussion space. We stand ready to help whichever Government comes out of the elections this year to build the Agency we need so that it can build the homes that all of us deserve.

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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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

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.

SNP Members back Common Weal’s public energy strategy (again)

October 17, 2025October 26, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. As with the banking sector, they play games with the lives of millions, hysterically reject any kind of government intervention when the profits are rolling in, but are quick to pass the bill for the cleanup and the far-reaching consequences of these avoidable tragedies to the public when things go wrong. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It’s that simple.” – Michael Hureaux-Perez

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The SNP members at their conference this month backed a major energy motion supported by the SNP Trade Union Group (TUG). This motion was developed in consultation with the STUC and with energy experts including myself and deeply integrates several aspects of Common Weal’s proposals for reform of the Scottish energy sector – including by moving forwards plans to bring energy into Scottish public ownership.

The motion was passed by acclaim and without objection meaning that this is now the fourth time that the SNP members have voted for an energy motion including public ownership at their national conference – each time achieving overwhelming or unanimous support. You can watch the presentation of the motion starting from the 1 hour 10 minute mark here.

The motion itself (pictured above) focusses on six key areas which are worth explaining in some detail.

1. Achieving Equity Stakes

Something that Common Weal has long advocated for is for the Government to stop just handing money to very large, often already very rich, companies in the form of tax breaks, loans or outright grants is no longer appropriate for a renewable energy sector that has for many years now demonstrated the ability to make a profit without public subsidy. At the same time, we’ve been shouting for some time about the obscenely high level of foreign ownership in the Scottish economy – particularly within the fundamental economy like energy.

Instead of just throwing money at the sector, the Scottish Government should demand equity – ownership shares – in return for public money and should even demand a public equity share as a precondition for planning permission or the granting of option rights in projects like the successors to ScotWind. Denmark recently did precisely this, calling for a minimum 20% public stake in offshore renewable projects.

This is, of course, a bit easier for Denmark as they have several publicly owned energy companies who, by definition, meet that stake simply by doing their job. Scotland – starting from the position of not having a public energy company – may have to take a position similar to that of GB Energy, being a kind of silent investment partner who merely provide the money and take the profits rather than taking an active role in developing the project.

However this should be merely a first step where small stakes are used as a training ground to build up the experience needed for the Scottish energy company to start joining projects as a co-developer, start to bid for projects on their own and then to move to a “no bid” process whereby the Scottish energy company simply start running all new Scottish energy projects by default.

The second part of the proposal is important for the initial “silent investor” stages. It would not do for the Scottish Government to be effectively investing in and buying ownership stakes in companies who treat their workers unfairly, so this provision would be an additional incentive for companies that if they want the support of Government then they have to meet a minimum standard of workers’ rights.

This is the approach the Scottish Government took to distinguish themselves from the UK with their “Green Freeports” which does show that the Fair Work principles are themselves not strong enough and might be of limited actual impact, but they do still represent a floor below which Government-supported jobs should not fall.

2. Appropriate ownership limits and break clauses

One of the things we discovered when researching for our second ScotWind paper was the discovery that the lease terms for offshore wind projects can stretch into multiple decades despite the turbines themselves reaching “breakeven” and starting to make a profit sometimes after only five or seven years or so. The “NR4” round of offshore wind in England promised a 60 year lease period for wind turbines.

With a normal lifespan of 20 to 30 years, this means that the lease would cover the operational lifespan of two or three generations of such turbines and if the five year payback period is achieved, then the lease could generate up to 50 years worth of energy profits.

Our default position is that until Scotland has the capacity to manufacture and install turbines ourselves then it’s fine to hire a developer to do it for us and perfectly acceptable for them to expect to recoup their investment and make a reasonable profit but that after a lease period that is as short as practical (say, ten years), ownership of the turbine should then be transferred to Scottish public ownership.

There is a caveat here. If the turbines have a 20 year lifespan, then nationalising them on year 19 would effectively just mean letting the corporations take all the profits and then socialising the decommissioning costs (much like what has happened with the Scottish oil sector).

In addition to a short lease there should also be strict break clauses whereby if the developer does not meet minimum standards such as on workers’ rights or if they break promises to invest in local supply chains or otherwise no longer meet reasonable standards as an operator in Scotland then the Government should activate a break clause in the contract, pull the lease in and give it to a Scottish public operator – this is precisely what the Government did in 2021 to nationalise ScotRail.

This is also how Scotland effectively nationalises all of our renewable energy for no cost to the electricity consumer. All we need to do is ensure that the current generation of generators are brought into public hands soon enough that they can pay for their replacements. This doesn’t just need to happen at a national scale with large developments like ScotWind. This can scale down to the community level where communities should be able to take over small onshore wind and solar farms.

That a community in Scotland recently failed to take over their local wind farm because a Scottish public body didn’t even consider the possibility of this shows how badly out of step Scottish policy is with the will of the people right now (I’m told that the community in question is now in the process of trying to buy out the land under the turbines so that they’ll get the rent from that and will control the next round of leases in the future – good luck to them).

3. Local supply and retrofitting

There is a massive mismatch between the Scottish Government’s energy supply policy and their energy demand policy (such that the latter exists). We all recognise that the climate emergency means that we need to use resources more efficiently. We also recognise that the vast majority of fuel poverty is caused by the fact that we need so much fuel to heat our homes. New buildings could be (but aren’t being) built so that they use an absolute minimum of energy (a properly built Passive House can use less energy to heat in a year than yours does in a winter month).

Transport policy could also be built to minimise energy use via much greater use of public transport for the vast majority of people. That traffic jam your stuck in where every car has an average of 1.1 people inside it is just about the least efficient way of moving people that could possibly be devised. Turning that traffic jam from a queue of fossil fuel burning cars into one of electric cars might be cleaner, but it’ll still double Scotland’s current electricity demand (inefficient heating would double it again).

So this part of the motion aims to double down on efforts to retrofit buildings and to boost local supply of materials to do so (for instance, the vast majority of sustainable insulation made from things like cellulose is imported into Scotland despite so much of our land being covered by monoculture sitka spruce plantations)

This week in one of our daily briefings (sign up here to get a short article on a news story that caught our eye every weekday) was on the story that one of the UK’s insulation projects had failed so badly that 98% of homes covered by it need to get it ripped out and redone. We outlined how to do this kind of work better not by relying on throwing money at companies and then not checking their work but by establishing the task as a public works infrastructure project to properly coordinate it and make it cheaper and more efficient to do. This plan has won favour at previous SNP conferences but, as with so many of our plans for public infrastructure, has been ignored by the leadership.

4. Establish an energy company

The SNP membership has supported a Scottish public energy company since we started lobbying for it in 2017. The SNP leadership has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards that support too. The first Scottish Government plan for a Scottish electricity retail company fell afoul of a UK energy market that overwhelmingly favours large cartels over small providers and, as we warned at the time, an energy company that lacked its own generators and other assets would be entirely at the mercy of global energy price spikes. That proposal was dragged along without the reforms we warned would be needed until it was scrapped in 2021.

Earlier this year, another push from members to get the policy back on the books was blocked by the Government under the excuse that it couldn’t be enacted under the limits of devolution. We responded with a paper laying out six ways that Scotland could own Scottish energy assets under devolution – including via a network of municipal energy companies or via a National Mutual model where Scottish residents are shareholders in the company instead of Scottish Ministers (which is the actual thing that the Scotland Act blocks).

“The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.”

This paper forms the heart of this part of the motion and we’re very happy that the SNP conference unanimously supported it. It is now clear SNP policy that Scotland should publicly own Scottish energy assets via whichever means that Devolution allows. I would favour either the Mutual model where the company is collectively owned by all of the people of Scotland or, failing that, by a National Energy Company collectively owned by the 32 Local Authorities.

Either way, the NEC should be combined with a mandate for the NEC to actively support municipal and community energy companies – co-investing with them in Public/Public Partnerships to help them bootstrap each other up to the point where the larger scale proposals outlined above like taking over existing developments at end-of-lease or outright developing ScotWind-scale projects becomes viable.

What is clear now is that the Scottish Government has run out of excuses. Their refusal to adopt a policy of publicly owning Scottish energy has not more legislative barriers left and now flies directly in the face of the will of their own party. I would expect to see their upcoming election manifesto reflect this will and, should the SNP be part of the Government after the elections, I expect to see proposals to bring about the NEC laid down and developed with all possible speed.

5. Invest in training and a Just Transition Jobs Register

The Just Transition is not going well. Despite the best efforts of polluting megacorporations to try to ride their climate emergency through just a few more quarterly shareholder targets, people are leaving the sector in Scotland either through choice or – as the closure of Grangemouth has highlighted – through the choice of others. However, we’re not seeing these skilled workers move into the renewables sectors at anywhere near the rate we need.

A policy passed at SNP conference a few years ago was the idea of a Just Transition Jobs Register. This would track how many people where being employed in the fossil fuel sectors and in the renewables sectors, would measure how many people were moving from the former to the latter each year and would actively seek to improve pathways to increase that flow. When the policy initially passed it was, again, completely ignored by the party leadership so its inclusion here in another motion must serve to highlight its importance.

6. Putting Communities and Workers First

Where the Just Transition is happening it’s too often being seen as a thing to do to workers, not as a thing for and by workers. I’ve seen corporate “Just Transition” plans that were entirely designed to transition the /company/ to a more sustainable footing but did so by replacing older workers with new apprentices rather than retraining existing staff. Meanwhile, studies like the one done by Platform in 2020 show that workers in the affected sectors already have very good ideas about how they’d like to see a transition happen while highlighting their concerns that they lack the power to do it.

Communities have similar ideas but also lack power. There are growing concerns about the flood of renewable developments in and around communities or the rise of electrical pylons designed to shunt energy past communities who are suffering from fuel poverty while not receiving any of the benefits of hosting the infrastructure. Even a plan such as ensuring that solar panels are built on houses and brownfield sites before taking away amenity space or Common Grazing land from locals would go a long way to helping people buy into the transition rather than turning against it because they see their environment transformed only to benefit companies and landowners.Conclusion

This motion represents a major victor for Common Weal’s influence within Scotland’s political circles but it’s an even bigger one for SNP members who have voted, again, for policies like this despite the party leadership trying to tell them that it couldn’t be done. The excuse that Scotland simply has to let “Foreign Direct Investment” suck our country dry, again, isn’t washing any more.

This isn’t merely an issue confined to the SNP, however. The other progressive parties in Scotland are all overwhelmingly in favour of policies like this too. It would be a Courageous Decision (in the Yes Minister sense) for leadership to continue to ignore not just the will of a majority of Scottish voters on this issue but the unanimous decision of their own party’s membership at their own conference.

Which hasn’t stopped them up till now – and therein lies the issue even with motions like this. There is still a vast gulf between “what members instruct their party to do” and “what the party actually does” with very little in the way of accountability or oversight to bridge that gap.

This is a problem in all political parties and may be a fundamental problem with political parties that limit their ability to manage a democratic government. The solutions to that are probably a topic for another time, but until then I encourage the members who supported this motion to make their voices heard. Do what you can to ensure that its principles make it into the upcoming manifesto. Do what you can to ensure that your local candidates support those principles. And make sure that they understand that your support of their election is dependent on them listening to their members.

And the message to other parties: If the SNP won’t do this despite that election, who will? Perhaps you?

Same Spin Everywhere

August 21, 2025August 31, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.” – Hank Green

(The wind farm site discussed in this article will interpose between this ridge and the mountains in the background)

I was up in Skye this week to give one of my regular talks to activists and campaign groups around Scotland. It’s one of the aspects of my role at Common Weal that I enjoy the most and get the most out of even though it often means a lot of travelling. I’m very grateful to my hosts for not just organising the meeting but also putting me up for the night.

The evening was organised by the Breakish Windfarm Action Group who are currently concerned by plans to build a large windfarm development on a visually prominent part of the island. The estate owner, Lady Lucilla Noble, stands to profit massively from the site as will the Swedish developers Arise while tenant farmers are likely to see their livelihoods disrupted and restricted on what has been up till now land held as Common Grazings. They asked me to give a broader overview of how and why this is happening in Scotland and I duly prepared a presentation based around our proposals for how Scotland can publicly own our energy generation despite the Scottish Government’s excuse that “it’s reserved”. Shortest possible version: It’s only reserved if we want Government Ministers to own the energy. If we allow Local Authorities or communities to own it, it’s perfectly possible. It could even be funded in the same way. The only “downside” is that the Scottish Government wouldn’t get to control it. See Common Weal’s policy paper “How to own Scottish energy” for more details.

What I heard during the night though had both myself and my partner shaking our heads in disbelief. The story in Skye is that a landowner has contracted with a foreign company to extract vast profit from the resources of Scotland over the objections of the local community, without adequately compensating or benefiting said community, while obfuscating the planning process and making it is difficult as possible for the community to “properly” object as processes such as environmental studies and public inquiries cost tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds to complete – trivial amounts for the corporations but far beyond the reach of ordinary people to compete with. Everyone involved fully expects that even if the community is able to punch above its weight in terms of negotiating and bargaining power, Scottish Ministers will just override any objections because the Government’s primary goals are to make the Scottish GDP line go up by means of encouraging “inwards investment” – if doing that pushes climate goals too, then they suppose that’s fine too.

This is precisely the same story that is happening in my village at the moment where a French company is negotiating with a local land owner to build a massive solar farm and battery park. Just about the only thing that differs are the names of some of the people (and even then only some of them because it turns out that Ross Lambie, one of the local councillors for the ward I live in and who sits on our local Planning Committee is an absentee landlord bidding to use some land he owns in Skye to host a temporary housing for the construction workers being shipped in to install the turbines).

We’re not the only two communities facing this. Scotland is awash with largely foreign capital flooding places with applications for developments that even at their best won’t benefit communities nearly as much as they should (the £5,000 per Megawatt of community benefit funding that some of these developments offer is a shadow of the 30 to 100 times as much local revenue retained by full community ownership). Local planning offices report being completely overwhelmed trying to properly scrutinise applications and that goes double for areas with active community councils where volunteer councillors are expected to scrutinise highly technical documents without the resources to do so. Scottish Ministers are far too prone to allow projects to move up to the Energy Consents Unit to ensure that they can make the decisions – overriding local democracy as they do so – but this just concentrates the problem further. The ECU is similarly overwhelmed with more than 4,500 projects having been passed to them since December 2018. An average of almost two new applications per day. Ministers cannot not be expected to properly scrutinise these projects even if this was their only full time job.

And what happens if a dodgy developer does, by chance or fortune, get their application denied or made conditional to the point that they decide the profit margins aren’t high enough? Well, they just resubmit the application and try again or move on to the next community and hope they can’t pay as much attention. Communities need to be lucky every time. Corporations only need to get lucky once.
I’m not against renewable energy as a rule. We need more of it. What I’m asking for is for the Scottish Government to start abiding by its own party-approved policies. We need a Scottish Energy Development Agency (SEDA) to start producing a proper strategic map of Scotland. A map not just of where Scotland’s renewable resources are but where our actual demand is too. The overflow of development without coordination (compounded by frankly idiotic policies from Westminster such as blocking policies like Zonal Pricing) is leading to millions of pounds of consumer’s money being paid to energy generators in constraint payments. Wind turbines already generate profit almost for free once they’re built – the only way to make them more profitable for the multinationals and foreign public energy companies who own them is for them to make the profit without even generating the energy.

In addition to the SEDA we urgently need the Scottish Government to stop its opposition to public ownership of energy and to start allowing Scottish communities to be the owners of these developments.
Communities have been left alone to fight each application individually when it turns out that they are all facing the same spin everywhere. I am very happy to see that communities are increasingly banding together such as the 9CC group in Ayrshire or the recent conference of Community Councils in Inverness, but it’s clear that these groups themselves need support to start talking together, across Local Authority lines. Maybe that’s what it’ll take for Ministers to start paying proper attention. Maybe the next conference has to happen outside Holyrood itself.

The injustice of situations like where I live or in Skye or in hundreds of other communities is going to seriously harm public support for the renewable transition that we need. I’m not against renewable energy. I am against being screwed over by the people who own them. I’m against the injustice of communities not being given a stake in that transition and being told that their voice is irrelevant or a nuisance. But if my experience this week in Skye tells me anything, it’s that communities are ready to make that voice exactly as loud as it needs to be, especially as the elections approach. I hope Ministers will be listening. Or that their replacements might be.

You Have Options Too: An Open Letter to John Swinney

July 20, 2025July 27, 2025 / Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.” – Vandana Shiva

This blog post previously appeared in The National.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

wind turbines on snowy mountain under clear blue sky during daytime

DEAR First Minister John Swinney,

The UK is running away from the hard choices on energy. Its dismissal of ideas like zonal pricing – currently the only scheme yet presented that would allow the UK to maximise renewable energy generation, minimise infrastructure costs like pylons and to reduce fuel poverty while giving communities more incentive to take control of their own local energy generation – has been rightly criticised by you last week in a statement where you called out the UK for not doing enough on energy policy.

It was concerning to note, though, that your critique wasn’t backed up by much on what you want the UK to actually do instead. Even as you complained about the UK “ruling out all options to bring down energy bills” by abandoning zonal pricing, I’m not clear if you support it or would bring it in if you had the power to do so.

We all know that Scotland’s devolved powers in energy are limited and that, right now, you couldn’t do something like this, but also missing from your critique was what you plan to do with the powers you do have.

Scotland’s own devolved energy strategy has been woefully lacking in recent years – from the sell-off of ScotWind at bargain basement prices, through dropping climate targets that were designed to push action ever forwards, to flogging off (sorry, “encouraging foreign direct investment in”) every piece of our renewable energy sector to multinational companies and foreign public energy companies to ensure that everyone in the world can profit from Scotland’s energy except us.

We can take another path, though. Scotland must ensure that we own our own renewable energy future and the way to do that is by bringing it into public ownership. Here are several ways that you could do it.

1) A National Energy Company

This is what most of us think of when we think about “Scottish public energy”, and it’s the model that the Welsh Government adopted under the name Ynni Cymru. This is a single national company, owned by the Scottish Government or by Scottish ministers (similar to Scottish Water), that would own, generate and sell energy to consumers.

There is a snag to this plan in that the Scotland Act currently prohibits the Scottish Government from “owning, generating, transmitting or storing” electricity, so if we want the National Energy Company to be based around supplying electricity, then the first thing that the Scottish Government could be doing is mounting a pressure campaign to amend the Act – it puts Scotland in the ridiculous position that it’s legal for the Welsh Government to own a wind turbine in Scotland but not the Scottish Government.

Until that campaign is successful, there is something you can do.

The Act quite specifically bans your Government from owning electricity generators. It does not ban other forms of energy. A National Heat Company based around deploying district heat networks could supply all but the most remote of Scottish households.

While this would be a large infrastructure project, it wouldn’t be larger than the one required to build the electricity pylons we need if we’re going to electrify heat instead and the pipes would have the advantage of being underground and out of sight while ultimately providing heat to homes in a cheap, more efficient and ultimately more future-proof way that the current setup of asking people to buy heat pumps and just hoping that the grid can cope with the demand.

2) Local Electricity Companies

So, First Minister, let’s say that you’re not a fan of campaigning for the devolution of more powers and really want Scotland to be generating electricity. You can’t create a National Electricity Company but you can encourage local authorities to set up their own Local Electricity Company.

Conceivably, the 32 councils could even jointly own one National Electricity Company – the Scotland Act merely bans the Scottish Government from owning the company.

In many ways, this would be an even better idea than the Scottish Government doing it. Government borrowing powers are far too limited and you’d need to campaign for more borrowing powers to get the scale of action required to build the infrastructure we need – but councils have a trick up their sleeves.

They are allowed to borrow basically as much money as they like so long as the investment the borrowing allows brings in enough of a return to pay back the loan. This is very likely how Shetland Council will finance its plan to connect the islands via tunnels – the construction would be paid for via tolls on traffic.

Energy, as we know, is very profitable indeed so there should be absolutely no issue with councils being able to pay back their loans and then to use the revenue from their energy generation to subsidise local households against fuel poverty and to support public services.

If we want to go even more local than this, then councils and perhaps the Scottish National Investment Bank could support communities to own their own energy.

We’ve seen multiple times that community ownership generates many times as much local wealth building – as well as skills and jobs – than the current model of private ownership plus paltry “community benefit funds”.

3) A National Mutual Energy Company

This is another national-scale energy company that the Scottish Government could launch but in this case wouldn’t own or control. Instead, the “National Mutual” would be owned by the people of Scotland.

In this model, every adult resident of Scotland would be issued one share in the company. They wouldn’t be able to sell it and they’d have to surrender it if they ever stop living in Scotland, but other than this, it would be much like owning a share in companies like Co-op.

The company would be run as any other commercial company and would be beholden not to the Government but to its shareholders – us. We’d jointly decide future energy strategy and even potentially have a say in how much of the company’s operating surpluses are invested in future developments or distributed to shareholders (again, us) as a dividend.

This model would be particularly suited to very large energy developments that cut across local authority or even national borders or to help develop offshore assets. Imagine ScotWind had been owned by the people of Scotland, instead of being flogged off to multinational companies in an auction that had a maximum bidding price attached.

Conclusion

First Minister, I applaud you for keeping up some sense of pressure on the UK Government on energy.

As we make the necessary transitions required of us under our obligations to end the climate emergency, this is one of the sectors of Scotland that will change the most. It’s vital that we get this transition right, or not only will Scotland see yet another generation of energy potential squandered in the same way that the coal and oil eras were, we’ll see Scottish households bear the weight of others profiting from that transition while we still experience crushing levels of poverty and economic vulnerability.

The UK Government may be ruling out all of their options on energy but that doesn’t mean that you need to do the same. We don’t need to wait until independence – as vital as it is – or to wait until Westminster gets its act together – which may or may not happen. We – you – have options too. It’s time to take them.

Yours, expectantly …