Chamber and committees

Sure. I am happy to do that.

You see it happening in some local authorities. With the scale and level of investment that has now gone into aspects of active travel, you can see the considerable levels of ambition that some local authorities have on helping to get the right active travel infrastructure in place. It partly reflects the significant increase in funding that we are making available to active travel and the priorities that we have set out in the NTS and the investment hierarchy and the transport hierarchy.

You can see it by some of the ways in which local authorities are looking at the future delivery of transport provision within their areas and at different models and different approaches to take it forward. We see some real ambition being set out by local authorities.

Is there more that I would like to see happening in some local authorities? Absolutely. A lot of it is sometimes dependent upon individual officers and their desire to pursue particular policy areas. However, we are starting to see aspects of the NTS hierarchy becoming real policy on the ground, particularly in areas such as active travel and looking at wider transport provision within local authorities. I expect that to continue to develop, given the level of funding that we are putting into it in the coming years.

I gave a commitment to the committee earlier in the year to give you an update, which I am about to provide this week. I hope that it will give you much more detail on how the organisation will be taken forward and how it will operate. I hope that the committee will find it useful, given that I gave a commitment to provide that further detail. That information will be with you shortly.

That is covered by building regulations, but I am more than happy to take it away and we can come back to you with some further detail, including on the technical points that you have raised on how the points system operates.

I will deal with some of the inflationary pressures and Ben Macpherson can pick up on the wider public sector finance situation and funding for pay increases.

There is no doubt that the increasing inflationary pressures that are being experienced by local authorities will have an impact. It is difficult to quantify exactly to what extent those pressures will have an impact, but the cost base for carrying out capital works has increased because of both material and labour cost increases. That will clearly put pressures on local authority budgets, as it will for the Scottish Government and other parts of the public sector. There is no doubt in my mind that inflationary pressures will have an impact, but it is difficult at this stage to quantify that impact.

It is also worth keeping it in mind that some of the pay challenges that local government has faced have resulted in additional funding being provided to local government to try to help to meet and offset some of the additional costs associated with the pay awards. That was as part of our on-going engagement with COSLA to try to help to resolve the pay disputes that were taking place. Ben Macpherson may want to say a bit more about local government financing.

Nuclear will not be reducing energy bills any time soon. For a start, such projects take a long time to be developed. You just have to look at Hinkley Point C, which is behind schedule and about £5 billion over budget. Given the subsidy costs that nuclear requires, it is likely to force up bills—I think that the estimate is an extra £40 on folks’ bills.

Nuclear energy is one of the most expensive forms of energy that can be produced. Just last week, Kwasi Kwarteng, the energy secretary in the UK Government, acknowledged that there is a risk of nuclear pushing up bills, even in the short term. Therefore, I think that it is the wrong approach. In fact, we can see other countries in Europe moving out of nuclear. For example, Germany will be closing its last reactor this year, and it is very clear that its strategy is to focus on renewables.

Our approach to nuclear energy is not ideological. Greg Hands has said that to me before, and it has been pointed out to him that that is wrong. In our energy strategy back in 2017, we set out the principles of why we do not support nuclear energy. In Scotland, we think that the best approach is to focus on renewables and that pump storage, hydro and battery storage capacity are the ways in which we can tackle our future energy needs.

We know that onshore and offshore wind are significantly cheaper and produce significantly lower-cost energy, and we also know that, by and large, hydro produces more lower-cost energy. In Scotland, we have a number of schemes that could be taken forward; however, there are frustrations in that respect. I would highlight as an example the 600MW facility Cruachan 2, which is being planned by Drax and which I visited last year. The problem is that Drax cannot take it to the market, because the UK Government has not provided the market mechanism to get it into the grid. It is an investment of more than £1.5 billion, potentially involving about 900 jobs, and it would also have the on-going benefit of being a renewable energy source, but it does not have a route to market.

The same applies to SSE and some of its plans around hydro. Just a fortnight ago, I visited the scheme at Sloy, which SSE is looking to expand and develop. Again, there are limitations due to the lack of a market mechanism from the UK Government, and the situation is quite frustrating.

If you look at the countries with the lowest energy costs in the world—Norway and Canada—their biggest energy source is hydro and pump storage. More than 90 per cent of Norway’s energy comes from that source, while, in Canada, the figure is 60 per cent. Our view is that the best approach for delivering energy security and lower-cost energy supplies in Scotland in the future is through renewable energy projects, whether they be onshore, offshore, solar, hydro, pump storage or battery storage. We should focus on them for our future energy needs. The UK Government has got it seriously wrong in its energy security strategy, because it focuses too much on nuclear, which could actually maintain energy prices at higher levels than they should be at or could potentially increase them.

Did you say 1930?

You are right to say that tackling fuel poverty is a devolved matter, but many of the factors that influence it are reserved—

If National Grid provides the capacity, including the planning capacity, for all the projects to be delivered by 2030, that is when the generation will happen by. If National Grid does not provide the capacity by then, the projects will not be able to be connected by that point. You do not build a wind farm without a connection.

Why would a developer build a wind farm pre-2030 if National Grid said that it could not be connected until 2035?