Chamber and committees

Christine Grahame is not the only one who was slightly surprised at the lack of action in the Queen’s speech today on the cost of living crisis. She is right to point to action on unclaimed and underclaimed benefits as a very obvious thing that could be done to maximise household incomes. We need to make sure that people are accessing the money that they are entitled to.

It is a disgrace that there is £1.7 billion—that is the figure that I have, but if it is £1.8 billion I stand to be corrected—sitting in UK Government coffers instead of in the pockets and purses of pensioners who need it so badly.

The Scottish Government will continue to place an emphasis on income maximisation schemes, and there is a great deal that we can do to support people to have the information that they need about the benefits that they are entitled to. I hope that the UK Government will take similar action.

I thank all the members who have taken part in the debate. I am told that this might be the first time that Parliament has debated walking, specifically. If that is true, it might be because, for most of us, for most of our lives, walking is so natural and casual that it does not need to be discussed. However, the views that members across the chamber have expressed show that the issue needs to be discussed and that there is great value in the debate.

I do not know whether it is entirely a coincidence that a debate on national walking month comes at the end of what all members know to be national canvassing month. Graeme Dey made that connection and—as it is for him—it is canvassing that is keeping up my step count at the moment. Members talked beautifully about the places and landscapes that they are walking through on the election campaign trail. Most of the views that I have seen have been of tiles and windows in Glasgow tenements. Beautiful though they are, I hope to get a bit of a change over the summer and to see some more of the country.

I think that all politicians and the thousands of political activists whom we work with, who have been out campaigning and canvassing around Scotland, are encountering more and more the barriers to walking that exist for people in their communities. Whether the barriers are physical, cultural or economic, or relate to the important points that Paul O’Kane made about women’s safety, in particular, we need to address them, and we need to recognise that we have a political responsibility to do so.

However, we also have an incredible opportunity. Several members, including Paul O’Kane, Gillian Martin and Karen Adam, talked about the experience during lockdown—the really different context in which people were “permitted” daily exercise and when people went out for a walk for that very unusual reason. That was about encountering their communities in a different way and experiencing them in a new way. That gives us all a responsibility to ensure that communities become more accessible, more inclusive and safer places for people to walk.

There has been, I think, more consensus in the debate than there has been disagreement, so I hope that members from across the chamber will work constructively with the Government on what we are taking forward.

We are working with Paths for All to lead the refresh of the walking strategy. In keeping with what several members have said, there is real scope to look at that strategy not in isolation but in terms of how it connects to the Government’s other strategic objectives, whether around health—physical health, mental health, and issues around loneliness and isolation—around the climate and the need to cut car kilometres by 20 per cent, or around reinvigoration of our local economies as they recover from the pandemic. That cross-cutting approach is very much in keeping with what Alex Rowley and others said about taking a joined-up approach.

I hope that Mr O’Kane will acknowledge our not supporting his amendment; we will continue to have disagreements about wider local authority funding. We believe that we have protected local authority funding significantly. Opposition parties will say that we have not done enough on that, but there is simply no question but that we have dramatically increased direct funding to local authorities for active travel, and not just in relation to what the Scottish Government spends. This year, the cycling, walking and safer routes funding has increased to £35 million. That is a £10 million increase in one year alone.

There is also the work that we are doing with Sustrans on the places for everyone programme. There are other funding streams and there is the work that Maree Todd mentioned through increased funding in sport and active living budgets. There is direct funding to local authorities that is allowing them to take the work forward.

In relation to the free bike pilots, I am genuinely sorry to hear that the very clear repeated public commitments from the Scottish Government have somehow not been acknowledged. The pilot schemes that we committed to were up and running within the first 100 days, as promised. They will be evaluated later this year, as promised—and they need to be. We need pilot schemes so that we can evaluate a wide range of issues.

Graeme Dey was right about issues in the supply chain. They are not unique to Scotland, but they are certainly issues that we need to understand and overcome.

There are a wide range of other issues. We are looking to ensure that young people who—for whatever socioeconomic reasons and whatever their background—need access to free bikes have that access and our support in that. They will be the same young people for whom issues around storage are an additional barrier. They also need access either to repairing skills or to a repair service to make sure that their bikes can be repaired when they go wrong.

We also need to make sure that we increase the range of available adaptive bikes so that it is an inclusive programme for young people with a wide range of disabilities. We also, as others have said, need to increase skills in, and the capacity for, recycling bikes to ensure that we increase supply.

We need to work with pilot schemes, so I hope that Labour and others will work with us, instead of making unrealistic demands with impossible timescales. Let us work constructively with the many organisations that are enthusiastically developing the pilots and will report to us later this year.

Whether walking is for recreation, for tourism, for health, to see more of our beautiful country or just to get about on our daily trips; whether it is part of a journey that involves other modes of travel; and whether it is a whole journey in its own right, there is huge potential to make sure that more people feel able to walk. The Scottish Government has made an unprecedented commitment to active travel, both in funding and in policy. However, as Gillian Mackay argued, what we do has to be inclusive. Walking, wheeling and cycling address all the diverse needs of our people and realise a positive vision of safe, healthy and thriving local communities in every part of Scotland.

I do. I suspect that most of the chamber agrees that the UK Government has failed to respond to both the scale and the urgency of the cost of living crisis. The Scottish Government has written repeatedly to UK ministers setting out detailed proposals on acting now to support households that are struggling today, although, as Fiona Hyslop rightly indicates, further cost increases are looming in the autumn. Those actions include the UK Government cutting VAT on fuel bills; increasing benefits; reinstating the £20 cut to universal credit; and implementing a broad-ranging windfall tax on superprofits.

In the meantime, as well as increasing help through the major investment programmes that I have just mentioned, the Scottish Government will continue to do everything that it can to make homes warmer and cheaper to heat. To address the wider cost of living crisis, we have increased the groundbreaking Scottish child payment and will do so again before the end of the year. We have committed to doing what we can to mitigate the benefit cap and have implemented our pioneering policy of free bus travel for young people. The chancellor may think that such measures are “silly”, but I think that most people in Scotland will think that they give help to those who desperately need it.

In March, in response to the cost of living crisis, we announced further help on energy efficiency through our existing programmes. We are including more people in our flagship warmer homes Scotland programme, increasing grant levels in local authority area-based schemes and expanding the capacity of the Home Energy Scotland advice service to support an extra 12,000 households this year. We continue to explore further ways that more people can be supported, building on our substantial programmes, which have benefited more than 150,000 fuel-poor households in the past decade.

The Scottish Government has allocated more than £1 billion since 2009 to tackling fuel poverty and improving energy efficiency. More than 150,000 fuel-poor households have benefited from our investment.

This year alone, we have committed a further £336 million to help make homes warmer and less expensive to heat, as part of our £1.8 billion commitment over this session of Parliament, which is the most ambitious programme in the United Kingdom. Last October, we published our “Heat in Buildings Strategy”, which sets out our commitment to addressing the dual challenges of reducing carbon emissions and tackling fuel poverty.

That is a high priority. I regularly see correspondence from members who are supporting constituents to access the wide range of support through advice and grant and loan schemes that the Scottish Government provides to enable people to increase energy efficiency measures in their homes and switch to zero-emissions heating. I hope that Brian Whittle and other members across the chamber will support their constituents to access that support.

I agree completely that there is a stark contrast between those two agendas. The issue is not just the different view about whether expanding the fossil fuel industry in the midst of a climate emergency is viable but the UK Government’s extraordinary decision to publish not only a heat in buildings strategy but a UK energy security strategy that does not emphasise energy efficiency and demand reduction. The Scottish Government is committed to placing a high priority on that.

Scottish ministers wrote to the secretary of state on 18 March to set out wider views on energy policy, including the need to accelerate the decarbonisation of electricity, which, in part, supports the decarbonisation of heat and transport; to reform the network charging system; to create new business models for green hydrogen; and to rebalance policy costs to protect consumers.

As the cabinet secretary said in his response to question 1, since March, we have announced wider eligibility criteria for energy efficiency upgrades and the warmer homes Scotland programme, as well as measures to ensure that the maximum number of people benefit from our area-based schemes, including the focus on fabric-first insulation upgrades.

It would be inappropriate to predict the outcome of the discussions that we are having with COSLA. We need to work in a co-operative and collegiate way with local government, and that is the spirit in which we are entering the process.

However, as an indicative example, the most recent pilot phase offered local authorities the option of bidding for up to £50,000 for staff or consultant capacity to allow them to undertake their work. I think that, of those that followed things through to completion, most drew down slightly more than half of the £50,000 on offer—from £25,000 up to the mid-£30,000s. That is an indicative example of the kind of ballpark that we might be talking about but, as I have said, it would be wrong to pre-empt the discussions that we are having with COSLA by trying to predict the outcome at this stage.

Our experience of working through the pilot phases gives us confidence that, with the right resources and capacity in place, local authorities will be able to complete that work on the timescale that we have set out. As I said in my opening remarks, we have worked very well and closely with COSLA as a body and with the individual local authorities that have been taking forward their pilots, and I do not think that significant concern has been raised about the timescale for the first strategies.

I am sure that Monica Lennon and I agree that not only local government but the heat in buildings agenda more generally are extremely exciting places to work.

Beyond LHEES, we also have the clear commitment to introduce a phased schedule of regulations to ensure that our homes and buildings are brought up to standard on energy efficiency and the transition to zero-emissions heating. The clear sense that the Scottish Government and local government working together are committed to that long-term agenda will give the industry confidence to invest in the recruitment, training and skills that are necessary. That, in turn, will send strong signals to the further education sector about the opportunities.

I believe firmly that there are not only good jobs but long-term, high-quality careers to be had in the transition. It is a massive investment in the transformation of our building stock. That must be done to a high quality and in a way that meets people’s needs on fuel poverty. It has to be a just transition. That means that a huge amount of work needs doing. The Scottish Government is committed not only to signalling the long-term commitment to seeing that work through but to maximising the investment from public and private sources to ensure that it is well funded.

We should see the situation more as an opportunity than a challenge. It is a huge technical challenge, but it is a really big opportunity for our economy as well.