Chamber and committees

That issue came up at First Minister’s question time. It is important that we get zonal pricing right. The current wholesale electricity market in Great Britain is not fit for the delivery of our net zero ambitions. The Government and I recognise the trade-offs and complexities that exist in the debate on zonal pricing, and we continue our conversations with the United Kingdom Government to ensure that the voices of industry and community are heard in that debate. Any reforms or policy interventions from the UK Government must reduce costs for Scottish consumers and businesses while protecting investment.

I thank colleagues from across the chamber for their valuable contributions to today’s debate on the Aarhus convention and the important matter of environmental justice.

As Mr Golden and many others have pointed out, access to justice in environmental matters is vital for both urban and rural communities. As members will appreciate, access to justice does not, and cannot, mean that all parties will always achieve the outcomes that they desire from every decision, but we should, as the Government does, seek to ensure that the rules are fair.

Siobhian Brown set out with great clarity the position in respect to compliance with the Aarhus convention, and it is important that we keep that issue in perspective, as she and many other speakers did. The Aarhus convention includes a wide range of obligations regarding environmental information, consultation and access to justice. We are currently working to address concerns raised by the compliance committee regarding one area that I accept is important: the cost of seeking judicial review of a decision. That is not a challenge to our overall approach to environmental information approvals or permitting, so I do not accept that the Scottish Government has, as some speakers suggested, been ignoring the convention.

There is clearly much that the Scottish Government can do and is doing to make progress on the outstanding issues. As was said earlier, action has been taken on protective expenses orders and a rule change has been enacted prompting a petitioner to request confidentiality when lodging a motion requesting a PEO, so that any hearing would be heard in chambers. That is progress, as is a rule change enacted in June last year that clarifies that a potential litigant’s exposure to an intervener’s costs is likely to be nil, provided that the litigant acts reasonably.

I accept that there is much more to do, but I will pick up on more areas of progress. A number of speakers referred to the specific point about reform of the system as it applies to sheriff courts. It is for the next court fees consultation, which is due to take place in the coming year, to look at that issue, but the Government certainly hopes that there will be progress.

The bill will be introduced to Parliament this year. The timescales that we are working towards aim for it to receive royal assent by the time of dissolution, so it will be introduced in the present session of Parliament.

I am disappointed that Meghan Gallacher regards the proposed bill as simply a rehashed version of the previous proposal. I had expected her to point to the areas that are different from those covered by the consultation on the original bill, some of which I mentioned earlier. The fact that we are talking about targets rather than prohibition is a fairly significant change. It will not be one that everyone will agree with, but it reflects the fact that the Scottish Government has listened to the people who came to us during the consultation rather than merely going through the motions. I hope that she will come to want to work with the Scottish Government, because we should seek to work together towards an aim for which the whole Parliament voted.

The member will appreciate that wood-burning stoves and heating oil open up two very different sets of questions. I made it clear from the outset that we are seeking to move people on to clean systems of heating their houses by 2045.

The member will be aware that I responded to the issues that were raised about wood-burning stoves and the regulations that surround the building of new houses around rural Scotland. I sought to respond to those concerns and to ensure that communities’ voices were heard, given that, in many areas, those forms of heating remain not only the most suitable but, in some cases, the cleanest form of heating that is available.

Warmer homes Scotland will be 10 years old soon, and it continues to grow in scale, with an expectation that we will support—I noticed recently—our 50,000th customer sometime very soon. To meet the strong demand for the scheme, we allocated an extra £20 million to it in 2024-25, bringing funding to a record £85 million. It is a very important scheme, and the funding has enabled us to support the largest number of households in one year since the scheme began. Each eligible household is offered a bespoke package of measures that takes account of the needs of their property and their household.

I very much respect Patrick Harvie. I am not entirely surprised that, in the course of the questions on my statement, I have been told both that the bill is a rehash of what was in the consultation and that it represents the gutting of what was in the consultation.

Patrick Harvie had a deep involvement in this area of Government and has a great knowledge of it. He had to acknowledge that Government can do only what is possible, and he, along with the rest of us, had to acknowledge that, for instance, decarbonising 1 million homes by 2030 was not possible.

I will not make the mistake of bringing a bill to the Parliament that I know not to be feasible or possible. That would not be fair to the Parliament or the public. I have sought to come forward with a bill that has targets. Patrick Harvie is right about that and in saying that targets mean something only if there is a plan to get to them. There will, indeed, be plans to get to those targets, and that is the next job of work.

The member is right about that particular issue, which exists in rural areas such as the ones that she and I represent. As I mentioned earlier, the best clean heating solutions for some remote and rural areas might, in fact, vary from what is best for our towns and cities. We will take a technology-neutral approach, which will enable building owners in all areas to choose technologies that are right for them and their homes. In some rural and remote areas, that might include bioenergy and biofuels. We need to recognise the differences that exist across the country and the particular problem of fuel poverty, which we in no way wish to exacerbate through that process.

I understand that the Government is working with the Scottish Law Commission on some of those issues.

The member represents Edinburgh Northern and Leith, a constituency that is virtually entirely comprised of Victorian or pre-Victorian tenements. Challenges are faced in an urban landscape like that one that may not be faced in other parts of the country, not the least of which is the challenge of trying to get all eight—or however many—households in a close to act at the same time.

I mention that not to deflect attention to the UK Government but because examples like that point to the need to open up the debate about the price of electricity. Many a heating engineer has told me, when I have been visiting their training in colleges around the country, that they would love to install large numbers of electric boilers in places such as Leith—if the price of electricity were such that it would be an attractive prospect to do so.

Douglas Lumsden will be aware that the decision will ultimately be made by the UK Government, but we are clear on our support for a just transition for Scotland’s oil and gas sector that recognises the maturity of the North Sea basin and is in line with our climate change commitments.

Offshore oil and gas licensing, as well as the consenting and associated fiscal regime and all the things that go with it—

I do not know why Douglas Lumsden is shouting at me, because, as I was saying, all those matters are currently reserved to the UK Government.

Any further extraction and use of fossil fuels must be consistent with our climate obligations and just transition commitments. It is vital that we take an evidence-based approach to the energy transition. That is why we have consistently called on the UK Government to approach decisions about North Sea oil and gas projects on a rigorously evidence-led, case-by-case basis, with climate compatibility and energy security as key considerations.