Scotland

If energy powers get devolved – what then?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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John Swinney has kicked of the election campaign with promise that should he be returned as First Minister then “on the first day” he’ll submit a Section 30 order to the UK Government to request the devolution of energy powers to Scotland.

I want to make something clear from the outset – Scotland should have more powers over energy and, given that Scotland holds a massively substantial share of the UK’s total renewable energy resources – the powers that do remain reserved should be jointly managed to a much greater degree than they are now.

The current bickering and grandstanding between governments combined with the, frankly, whining from either government that the other government is blocking progress as they see it serves none of us at a time when first the climate emergency and now escalating geopolitical turmoil is demanding that we get ourselves off of our dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. To that extent, a campaign for more devolved powers is not just welcome, but vital.

This is not to say that I believe that a simple call for those powers via a Section 30 order will be successful. I don’t think it will be, for the same reason that the Section 30 order for independence referendum powers almost a decade ago was not successful. Governments and politicians will only do something that they do not want to do when the consequences of not doing so – as they see and feel them – are worse than the consequences of acquiescing. If they are told to do something and there is no credible answer to the inevitable response “or what?”, then they won’t.

But let’s assume that they do. Let’s imagine a scenario after May where the Scottish Government clearly won’t win a campaign for a second independence referendum (which would inevitably absorb all other campaign energy and would, if successful, win the powers over energy anyway) but there is scope to win a “more devolution” campaign, including or centred around energy. It might well come about due to the SNP failing to win a majority of seats in Holyrood (and thus failing in their self-imposed prerequisite for an indyref campaign) but there nonetheless being a strong pro-independence majority in Parliament coupled with voices on the other side who don’t favour independence but would welcome more powers over energy (so…not much different from the recent outgoing Parliament then?).

What then?

The powers over energy get devolved to Holyrood, but what then? What is the plan for using those powers? here

I know what Common Weal would do with them. We’ve written extensively on energy matters for over a decade now and have pulled in expertise from some of the top people in the field. We have papers on how to reform the Grid written by people who have helped to run national grids. We have papers on how to heat homes, written by people who have helping to define the standards by which home energy needs are measured. We understand that trying to decarbonise the economy we have today without fundamentally changing that economy is doomed to failure.

So we have our own answers to the question of what we’d do with devolved energy powers and you can hear about a few more of them in my recent interview on the Scottish Independence Podcast here and below.

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I’m not convinced that the present Scottish Government has fully thought their answer to that question through though. From what I can see there are promises of energy price cuts without elaboration as to how it’d happen, there’s a manufacturing sector based almost entirely around inwards investment – though the UK’s blocking of the Ming Yang wind turbine factory on “national security” grounds (read: “we didn’t want to upset Daddy Trump”) is appalling – and there remains the continued risk that vital improvements like the proposed PassivHaus energy efficiency standards will get watered down and compromised by people who profit massively from your heating bill.

I am greatly concerned that the current Scottish Government’s plan, such that it is, will not be the overhaul of the energy sector that it needs. It won’t be based around bringing the sector into public ownership. I suspect this because they haven’t used the powers they currently have to bring much of it into public ownership.

They’ve also made efforts to privatise energy infrastructure that was in public ownership for no reason other than it would boost the “inwards investment” line a bit more – Scotland’s ‘public’ electric car charging network is now operated by an Austrian company. The Government also reviewed policies around community benefit fund recommendations and chose to reduce them in real terms compared to when they were first launched. And, of course, we’ve seen what happened with Scotland’s largest auction of offshore energy options where it’s very possible that the Scottish Government left many billions of pounds on the table due to undervaluing those assets.

As of the time of writing, we’ve yet to see the manifestos of most of the political parties (including the SNP) ahead of the elections next month but on this topic I’ll be paying particularly close attention. It’s simply not enough to call for more powers but to not lay out what to do with them and I am concerned that what the parties would do with them would just perpetuate the rip-off that the energy sector is. Powers must be used with purpose and that purpose should be not to serve the already wealthy and powerful, but All of Us.

The Scottish Parliamentary Election 2026:- The Manifestos

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” – Ernest Benn

This post and the research underpinning it is undertaken in my own time and outwith other political work that I do. It is presented here free to access as a public service but if you’d like to throw me a wee tip to support this work, you can here.

It is that time again. Scotland faces another election for its devolved Parliament at Holyrood. As I have done in the previous several Scottish and UK General Elections, I want to collect here as many of the political party manifestos as I can so that you, the voter, can find them all in one place as they can sometimes be surprisingly difficult to find (they also tend to disappear from the internet after the elections which can make it difficult to hold parties to their promises later – but that’s for a future article.

The Scottish Elections tend to be quite vibrant in terms of the number of parties involved and this year promises to shake the main parties to a degree not seen in generations so I want to give voters the change to see as broad a set of candidates as I can.

Unfortunately, there are limits. It’s difficult in this format to present Independent candidates fairly as they often don’t present a traditional manifesto and even when they do, by definition, they can only stand for one seat in Scotland (constituency or regional).

That said, if you spot a political party manifesto out there in the wild that I haven’t yet listed below, please let me know. The criteria for entry are fairly simple:
1) The party must be registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission.
2) They must be standing at least two candidates across at least two constituencies and/or regions (the same single person standing in both a constituency and in a region doesn’t count).
3) They must have published a manifesto of election promises and commitments to voters. It needn’t be called a “manifesto”. Alternative names like “contract”, “election promise” or suchlike may be similar enough for inclusion.

This means that “manifestos” produced by trade unions, think tanks or third sector organisations who are seeking to influence politics but who aren’t standing candidates under their party banner won’t be included.

This is going to be live article for the next several weeks to follow me on social media or check back here regularly for updates.

Note:- Parties marked in square brackets are placeholders for now and the prospective list may change as manifestos are published, parties emerge or, indeed, parties drop out of the electoral race. If a party produces several focused manifestos (e.g. a Manifesto for the Islands, or a Manifesto for Young People) then I may link to them, but the main banner image shall point only to their primary manifesto.

Click on the party name to be taken to their current manifesto webpage which may include accessible or localised versions of their manifesto. Click on the thumbnail image to download a copy of their primary manifesto directly.

Incumbent Parties

The following parties were represented by at least one MSP at some point during the 2021-2026 Parliament and are standing at least two candidates in the upcoming election. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party

Scottish Greens

Scottish Labour Party

Scottish Liberal Democrats

Scottish National Party

Reform UK

Insurgent Parties

The following parties were not represented in the 2016-2021 Parliament. These parties may not be standing in all constituencies or electoral regions.

Alliance to Liberate Scotland

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link)

Communist Party of Britain

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link)

Independence for Scotland Party

Scottish Common Party

Scottish Family Party

(Note: No downloadable document – only a web link)

UK Independence Party

Scottish Libertarian Party

Scottish Socialist Party

Workers Party of Britain

Edits and Updates

07/04/2026 – Added Scottish Conservatives.

09/04/2026 – Added Independence for Scotland Party and Scottish Common Party

13/04/2026 – Added Scottish Labour Party

14/04/2026 – Added Scottish Greens

16/04/2026 – Added Alliance to Liberate Scotland, Communist Party, Scottish National Party, UK Independence Party, Scottish Family Party, Workers Party of Britain

17/04/2026 – Added Scottish Liberal Democrats

19/04/2026 – Added Scottish Libertarian Party and Scottish Socialist Party

 

 

Process over policy was never a route to Indy

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” – Georges Jacques Danton

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

The Scottish Parliament’s Constitution Committee has recently concluded a short investigation into legal mechanisms for triggering a second independence referendum. The final report and the reports of the evidence sessions are worth reading, but the conclusions are fairly simple albeit in a direction that probably won’t please anyone who has an especially vested interest in the process for Scottish independence.

Essentially, the principle of becoming independent is itself legal (as opposed to many states which have constitutions that explicitly prohibit the secession of components of the state) but there is currently no legal mechanism in place that would allow for Scotland either to unilaterally declare independence nor to unilaterally hold a public referendum (even an “advisory” one) on the question of Scottish independence. This stands in contrast with various other states which explicitly legislate to allow components to secede either unilaterally or provide a mechanism to translate the democratic will of their residents into the legislative process of independence.

Instead, the processes which would allow for independence cannot be enacted unilaterally and may only be enacted via the UK Government or UK Parliament. This includes a mechanism similar to the one in place for Northern Ireland which would allow for a poll on leaving the UK and reunifying with Ireland if public sentiment makes it seem likely to the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland that such a poll would return a result for reunification. That’s a slightly technical wording but the crucial point is that public polls in favour of reunification are only a mandate for a referendum if the UK Government chooses to not be wilfully blind to them – the veto is still in their hands.

As is the legislative process of becoming independent – that can’t be done by the Scottish Parliament passing a ‘Divorce Act’, but instead by Westminster passing legislation to enact independence. The obvious route to my mind is that they would amend the Scotland Act to delete Schedule 5 and so remove the list of reserved powers – essentially devolving everything not already devolved.

Then it might add Scotland to the Statute of Westminster 1931 which essentially says that new UK laws won’t apply to Dominions and the Commonwealth nations unless they explicitly request or consent to it. Only then could this be followed by a Scottish Act or Constitution Article to make it unlawful to request or consent to such laws plus further laws to remove the role of the UK Supreme Court and other state apparatus that may remain plus something to clarify questions around Crown succession or to remove the Magic Hat entirely and become a Republic.

Another crucial conclusion is that there is no international law that can be applied to legislatively compel Westminster to act on public sentiment or on the calls for a referendum. The UN isn’t going to send in blue-helmeted peacekeepers to enforce some hypothetical ‘Decolonialisation Mandate’ or something like that.

Instead, the Committee concludes, that the question of independence was less a legislative question but more a diplomatic and democratic one. Essentially, that independence could be legislated for should it need to be, but this is only going to happen in practice when the UK Government decides that it needs to be.

Here’s the thing – This was also pretty much exactly the thought process that went in to us writing our books Direction in 2023 and our policy paper Within Our Grasp in 2019. It’s important to note that the latter paper was written before the Supreme Court ruled that a unilateral advisory referendum would be unlawful – a decision that at the time seemed likely but far from assured and therefore until that moment was ambiguous.

“Our goal should be to set up the situation where Westminster has absolutely no choice but to come to the negotiating table to enable independence because not doing so would be worse for them.”

We recognised long before this Committee was even conceived that the question of independence was going to be more about democracy and diplomacy than sheer legislation and we’ve taken quite some flak over the years from trying to push back against elements of the independence campaign who tried to magic independence into being by finding ‘one weird trick the lawyers won’t tell you about’ that would somehow invalidate the Act of Union and prove that Scotland had, in fact, been independent all along. I remember with wry fondness one person who reacted to my explainer of the legislative process above by calling me a “Colonialist Westminster Shill”.

Wishing independence into being isn’t going to make it happen, but the lack of a clear legislative process with goalposts and milestones isn’t a weakness either. Goodhart’s Law very much applies here in that some process that demands that, for example, public polls show 60%+ support for a sustained period of six months before a referendum can be considered could always be knocked into the long grass by a single 59% poll or – perhaps worse – could bounce us into campaign mode without a plan for the day after (like Brexit). Even the SNP’s foolish target of calling for a referendum if there’s an SNP majority in May grants the UK Government the ability to decline that offer even if every single MSP in Holyrood is openly pro-indy, but only 63 of them are SNP.

Instead we should recognise that the precise legislative formulation for independence is ultimately irrelevant. If Westminster has the ultimate veto over whether or not it goes ahead, then we must recognise that they will always enact that veto if doing so causes them fewer problems than not doing so. This is why Sturgeon’s 2017 demand for a referendum was dismissed with a curt “now is not the time” and every other attempt with even less.

This was the purpose of our book and policy paper. Our goal should be to set up the situation where Westminster has absolutely no choice but to come to the negotiating table to enable independence because not doing so would be worse for them. I’ll leave the details of that strategy behind the links to the book and paper (please go read them and buy the book) other than to say that only one component of it is building the public support for independence to undeniable levels.

We also need to consider building an escalating pressure campaign whereby Westminster essentially realises that governing a Scotland that no longer wants to be governed is more hassle than it’s worth (which, if the propaganda is true, is already not worth much because we’re such a money sink).

We weren’t invited to give evidence to the Committee, despite the detailed work we’ve done on the topic, but if we had been we may have questioned the reason for the inquiry being called. Its conclusion was obvious to us long before it was even started and so should have been obvious to the people who called it. I fear that the inquiry was never designed to be part of a coordinated ladder of escalating pressure but was instead another attempt at substituting process for policy.

There’s a simple test of whether I’m right or not. One that will separate a checkbox exercise designed to let the parties tell potential voters they’re doing something from one where they are actually doing something to bring about independence.

The Committee’s final conclusion calls for the Scottish Government and UK Government to negotiate a pathway to exercising Scotland’s right to determine its constitutional future as a matter of urgency.

The test is this: What will you, the politicians, do when (not if) Westminster once again says ‘No’?

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

/ 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.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

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

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

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

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

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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

/ 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

/ 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.

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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

/ 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

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“A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.” – Joanne Harris

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s Daily Briefing newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

A stock photo of vials of Covid-19 vaccines

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

/ 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.