Chamber and committees

I will take your question in two parts. If I remember correctly, the local heat and energy efficiency strategies are all complete and we have funding for their development and delivery. I will let one of my colleagues confirm the arrangements for that shortly. There is no doubt that local authorities are critical partners. The funding for the development and delivery of the strategies is committed over a number of years but, again, my officials can confirm that.

On the skills side of things, I have wrestled with and discussed with stakeholders the question of how much of the preparatory work has to be done in the supply chain, skills development or even public readiness before we legislate, and how much legislation will drive that. It is a kind of chicken-and-egg scenario, and we need to get the balance right.

A lot of work is being done on skills by the Government and industry. For example, Scottish Gas has the start at home scheme where it allows teams to practise the heat pump installation by doing it in their own homes. That is an example of a major employer such as Scottish Gas leading the way. For our part, our warmer homes Scotland scheme has a contractual requirement for training and I believe that that is producing quite a number of modern apprentices.

That is all happening now, but the setting of the 2045 target as a backstop for decarbonisation will, ultimately, drive what we do. It says, “This is the direction of travel and the way that we are going. Some preparatory work has been done, but it now needs to be stepped up.”

I will bring in Gareth Fenney, who can correct any of the numbers that I have used and give a bit more detail on apprentices.

First, that reflects what my constituents say to me. I visited a constituent in Carstairs village in Clydesdale who had installed a heat pump and various bits and pieces through our warmer homes Scotland scheme. He told me that his motivation was that he wanted a warm home and wanted to do the right thing for the environment and his grandkids. On the same day, I could speak to a constituent who would tell me, “This is so far off my priority list. I would love it; I would love to have lower bills and to have a wind and waterproof home, but I don’t know how to navigate the system.”

Trust is really important. Of course, we know that certain past experiences have worn away people’s trust. That is why the Home Energy Scotland piece is important, and why we are trying to clarify that Home Energy Scotland is the single window in Scotland to go to for support and for trusted advice on what people might be entitled to and how to move through the system. Sometimes, when I speak to stakeholders, they say that there is too much hand holding and that, in order to achieve the kind of scale that we need, we will have to change the system to become a little more hands off. However, I am wary of that; many of the people whom our schemes support are in fuel poverty, and we are talking about fundamental changes to their home. As soon as the work starts, quite a lot of my constituents panic a little bit, and think, “Now the work’s begun, have I signed up to the right thing here?” and so on. Therefore, I think that that support mechanism is important, and I would be very open to looking at how local authorities could play a role in that. I guess that they do play a role just now, but you are talking about a more fundamental, strategic delivery partner role.

We are trying to offer that sort of thing on an on-going basis, using the best information that we have at the time. What we have in the draft climate change plan is our best projection of the policies and proposals that we think can help meet our trajectory. The strategy and delivery plan that we will be producing at the end of this year will be another articulation of our attempt to set out in a really clear way the steps, the funding and what needs to come together in order to make this work. We will just have to keep doing that on an on-going basis, such is the complexity of this work. Moreover—and this brings me back to your previous point—we will always be drawing on all our delivery partners, because the Government cannot do this ourselves; it just would not work if we tried to.

My colleagues have just reminded me of something that I neglected to mention: I am responsible for the policy in this chapter of the plan, but Ms Martin oversees the whole of it, and she chairs a climate oversight group jointly with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. That group is asking itself, “Here’s the challenge in front of us, and here’s what we know Government can offer. What can local authorities do, and how do we work with industry and the public, too?”

Just for clarity, we will try to provide that step-by-step policy, funding and delivery with as much information as we have at any time as we move forward.

That is a good point. It would be fair to say that we do not see there being a system in the future in which everybody is referred through the process. Increasingly, people will take it upon themselves to organise the work. It will not happen as much that they will have to come through the scheme in order to engage with us; people will be able to have the work done outwith schemes. There will be a mixture.

Yes. My point is that, as we scale up, more people will not access it through the scheme but will do it off their own bat.

It is worth noting how exciting the prospect of industry building is when it comes to the opportunity that we have with heat networks. It is a critical part of solving the puzzle of decarbonisation, but it is also a huge economic opportunity, and we are trying to make sure that we do everything that we can to support it.

That is exactly our intention with the strategy and delivery plan.

We are. You mentioned the session that you had with COSLA and others, and I read the Official Report of that in preparation for today. For us, it represents an important part of understanding what people think about the draft plan and how it might need to change. We are taking all of that on board.

Henry Hardy spoke earlier about the processes that the climate change plan team and Gillian Martin will go through to update the plan, and he can say more about that.

Exactly. I mean Home Energy Scotland programmes, the warmer homes Scotland scheme, area-based schemes and so on.

I deliberately referred to that in my opening remarks because it is an important part of the mix. We are trying to achieve decarbonisation across homes and buildings in a landscape of a devolved/reserved split of powers, expected technological advancement and a differing availability of public money versus the likelihood of private investment—all of it over a long period. That is the challenge, and one main part of it is the cost of electricity. We have been clear for many years about the importance of rebalancing the relationship between the costs of electricity and gas. The Climate Change Committee has been clear that that is one of the most important—if not the most important—UK Government actions that can be taken.

To put a bit of colour around that, we can look at fuel poverty and unit costs. Right now in Scotland, it is estimated that, based on the recent energy price cap announcement, around 33 per cent of all households in Scotland are in fuel poverty and 17 per cent are in extreme fuel poverty. That is before we even get to those who rely on alternative fuels. We can set that against the fact that heat pumps are estimated to be three times as efficient as gas boilers, but the unit costs for electricity are currently around five times higher than for gas. Although about one third of our population are in fuel poverty, the cost of heat pumps is still running about five times higher compared with gas, despite a massive efficiency benefit. I therefore hope that the committee can see how important it is that, as we legislate for our population to make the transition, we have to be able to tell them that it will be affordable and that it will not exacerbate fuel poverty.

Much of what the UK Government is going to do is expected in its warm homes plan, which is now much delayed. I hope that it is delayed because its content is going to be refined and well developed, and that my counterparts are taking their time with it because they are thinking seriously about how to do it as well as possible. Nonetheless, I am in the dark, and I do not know what the UK Government intends to do to rebalance electricity and gas costs. Until I do, I cannot assure Scotland’s population that, in asking them to decarbonise, the schemes will not cost them more to run.

The CCC has been clear that the UK needs to take that action. We cannot bake it into our projections, which is another aspect of our legislation that is difficult to wrestle with. However, as and when the UK Government takes that action, which I hope it does, we will be able to look at our projections and see how they can change.