Chamber and committees

In the financial year 2022-23, we will invest £336 million in our heat, energy efficiency and fuel poverty programmes.

Since 2013, we have allocated £61 million through our area-based schemes to tackle fuel poverty in North East Scotland. Those projects have benefited more than 18,000 fuel-poor households. Vulnerable families in the north-east will also benefit from the home insulation delivered through our warmer homes Scotland service, and we continue to provide free and impartial advice through our Home Energy Scotland service, which includes advice about relevant grant and loan schemes to help to meet the costs of improved home insulation.

—they will the end but not the means.

We are also committed to a 20 per cent reduction in car use. In conclusion, I say to Richard Leonard that that is taking Scotland in the right direction. Scotland used to have road traffic reduction targets, but the Labour-Lib Dem coalition scrapped them.

If the member wants an intervention, it is very clear that most of the people at the lower end of the income scale rely on public transport and on active transport. If we are concerned about transport justice, they are the people we should be supporting.

I suppose that it is normal at this stage in a debate to say that it has been of high quality, worth while and enlightening. I fear that that is not true today and that we have wasted our afternoon listening to some hyperbolic but also, bizarrely, quite shallow and contorted arguments against legislation that the Parliament has already passed and regulations that have already been passed by committee, about the principle of local decision making, which has already been agreed. From the debate on the original amendment that brought the power into being to the discussions on the development of the policy through to today, I have yet to hear an argument on a point of principle as to why councils should not be allowed to make this decision.

I welcome increased scrutiny. We had scrutiny at committee yesterday, and consistent scrutiny has taken place throughout this process. I hope that Liz Smith is not suggesting that Opposition parties should never be able to bring ideas to the table during the legislative process, pass amendments and introduce changes to the law. I hope that the Conservative Party will seek to use that influence constructively—more constructively than Graham Simpson today, who not only made no serious argument on the point of principle but, like so many Conservatives these days, was reduced to childish name calling. If he is trying to suggest that the Greens are a political party unworthy to be in government, he maybe needs to raise his own game a little.

It might be legitimate to oppose the policy, but it is not necessarily consistent to do so. It is certainly not consistent for the Labour Party to do so, because it was, after all, a Labour-run UK Government that introduced this power south of the border and it was a Labour council in Nottingham that introduced the measure and showed it to be such a practical success—Mark Ruskell set out clearly the degree of success that it has had. That is why Labour councillors in Glasgow and Edinburgh introduced a proposal for the scheme in their manifesto and why Labour councillors in Leicester and Oxford are also looking to develop it—they see its success.

As for the Conservative show of consistency, the Conservatives have—regrettably—been in government in the UK for the past decade or so and they could have scrapped the power at any time they wished, but they chose not to.

There should, of course, be consultation about the levy, including with the unions. That point has been well made. Of course, there was a 12-week consultation during the summer last year. If councils bring forward proposals to implement the scheme, they will also be required to consult at that point. I note that the STUC, quite understandably, chose not to engage in consultation on the technical regulations. I also remind members that some organisations have not been cited at all; their arguments have barely been acknowledged. Friends of the Earth, Edinburgh Napier University, the Confederation of Passenger Transport, Living Streets, WWF Scotland, Sustrans and more have all offered their support to the scheme.

I will give way one more time if I have a moment.

I simply do not accept Miles Briggs’s suggestion that the lowest-income families in this country own cars. The lowest-income families are mostly excluded from car ownership and we should support public transport, as the Government is doing, with more powers for municipal buses; serious investment in rail and public ownership of ScotRail; and free bus travel for under-22s adding to the existing free bus schemes, so that almost 50 per cent of the population will have free use of buses in Scotland, which in itself will make more routes viable. There is also the fair fares review and so on.

Were those parties taking Scotland in the right direction then? As in so many other issues, on climate change—

I will in a moment.

It is perfectly legitimate to be against the policy and to think that it is a bad idea, either in general or in specific local circumstances, but I hear no argument, as a point of principle, for forbidding councils to make their own decisions on the issue.