Chamber and committees

What a pleasure to follow that.

This has been an interesting balance of constructive debate, consensus and some disagreement. Alex Rowley, Michael Matheson and Emma Harper were among the many members who very clearly expressed the connection between the infrastructure challenges that we face and the attitudes of the public, in a sense setting out that the direct energy benefit of that renewable energy infrastructure needs to be connected to an economic and social public benefit. If we do that, we will earn, retain and lock in public support for the transition.

Members made that connection, but they also referred to the gulf between where we are now in Scotland and what those countries that have been truly successful with community ownership have managed to achieve. Denmark and Norway in particular were mentioned on a number of occasions by different members. We need to recognise what those countries have done to achieve their level of success if we are going to learn those lessons.

I want to recognise those points of consensus and common ground, but there have, of course, been differences, too. There is no doubt that I disagree with some of what was said by some of the conservative voices—mostly, but not wholly, in the Tory party. I disagree with those who have voted for climate targets over many years and who now, recognising that we are behind schedule on climate action, suggest that we slow down rather than speed up.

I do not agree with those who seek to demonise renewable energy infrastructure, when we could be seeing it as an opportunity to transform the ownership of our energy system.

I do not agree with the SNP voices that express opposition to the windfall tax on fossil fuel profiteers. That industry has done a huge amount to bring about the climate emergency and to promote climate-denial conspiracy theories but very little to invest in its own workforce, despite knowing that the transition has to come along. The windfall tax is one way of ensuring that that highly profitable industry actually pays for some of the transition, and that will not happen without tax playing a role.

The planning process needs to make the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate developments of any kind, whether they are for renewables or anything else. It is for the planning process to do that. That is very far from saying that we should not be maximising the opportunity that comes from Scotland’s renewables potential.

I also disagree with the Liberal Democrats’ support for Rosebank. That project will neither improve energy security nor reduce energy costs; it will merely eke out the old, failed, polluting and profit-driven energy system of the past a little longer, while keeping emissions on the rise.

I was much more enthusiastic about Beatrice Wishart’s comments about Shetland Heat, Energy and Power, which I have had the chance to visit—I even got the opportunity to operate the grabber at the energy-from-waste plant. I will be even more enthusiastic about that project once it has moved away from waste and on to more sustainable energy sources. However, it is the kind of project that we should see a great deal more of around the country.

Christine Grahame talked about her concern that better-off communities might be better placed and more likely to benefit from community ownership. That is a challenge with the current model. It makes the case for moving away from that model, in which communities have to negotiate for mere community benefit, and instead shifting power into community hands. That would include the formation of publicly owned community energy companies, whether they are owned by the community or the local authority.

I would like us to think about the energy system that we to aspire to. What will it look like in the future, once we have made the transition to a genuinely sustainable energy system that also places a great deal more emphasis on community ownership? Whether the energy is wind, solar or storage, and whether the communities are rural or urban, what will those communities look like? They will be communities that have at their disposal not only power in the sense of energy sources, but political and economic power. Far more of the income that is generated from the energy system will be invested back into the community, including, for example, in energy efficiency and heat decarbonisation. Why on earth should we not see an energy system that pays for those costs rather than leaving them to the public purse while the private sector takes the profit from the energy system?

In that energy system, we will see much more reliance on local energy companies to lock in the benefit, using publicly owned land, buildings and assets. There will be much more reliance on public borrowing capacity to invest in systems that will generate profit for the future that is in public hands.

Many have made the case that remote rural communities and villages or islands are natural places where we have the opportunity to put local resources to good use, and there are many examples of where that has been attempted. However, I want to make the case that we can see our urban communities in the same way, whether at a community scale or even down to the level of an individual tenement block. We can see those as green energy islands in their own right, with people investing collectively in the energy challenges of retrofit but also in the energy opportunities of installing renewables and storage in a way that cuts people’s bills and creates good local jobs in the community. That opportunity needs to be relevant to every community of every scale in all parts of Scotland, rural and urban.

We have an opportunity to learn from the best of what other European countries have done. I know that the intention is there, but we are not yet seeing that happening on the scale that it needs to happen. I look forward to seeing a recognition of that in the closing speech from the Government.

I add my voice to those of members across the chamber who have expressed how welcome the debate is. Of course, by their nature, the amendments do not all come from the same point of view, but I note that they all seek to add something to the motion rather than to delete anything from it. That demonstrates that there is at least some consensus on what the Scottish Government has to say, even if Opposition parties think that more needs to be said.

Unlike the Conservative amendment, the Scottish Labour and Green amendments bring positive ideas to the table, which is the intention behind both of them. The amendment in my name sets out the positive steps that will need to be taken if we are to maximise the public, environmental, social and economic benefits of having community, public and shared not-for-profit ownership of our energy infrastructure.

We are at a critical point in the transition to a sustainable energy system, but we are also at a point at which people are struggling with their energy bills. Political parties across the UK are beginning to be too willing to accept pushback against the idea of an energy transition, and some parties are either heeding or even peddling the misinformation that is coming from anti-climate action or anti-net zero voices, including those that are funded by the corporate fossil fuel giants.

Therefore, we are at a pretty dangerous point in relation to how our political landscape is dealing with the energy transition. Most members of the public want climate action, and they embrace the idea of a future that prioritises renewables. However, it is critical that we recognise the need to continue to earn, and to reinforce, that support for an urgent transition. To do so, we must ensure that people benefit from it, but many are rightly cynical about the profit motives of an overwhelmingly privatised energy system.

A key part of the energy transition must be not only replacing the past century’s dirty fossil-fuel power generation with renewables but rebalancing the ownership of our energy system. It is a case not only of putting the power to generate electricity into local communities, but of putting its ownership into their hands. In short, we should not swap a bunch of fossil-fuel multinationals for a set of renewable multinationals. We have an opportunity to transform ownership of our energy system, and to transform its economic benefit, too.

None of this is new, and none of it is rocket science. It is all stuff that other countries have done successfully for years, decades or even generations before now. Many other European countries have high levels of public, community and not-for-profit ownership of energy infrastructure. I am pleased that the debate gives us an opportunity to focus on the issue. However, as I said in my intervention on the Acting Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy, we must recognise that, despite the long-term growth in renewables, which is extremely positive in its own right, we have not seen a substantial part of that growing renewables sector being put into community hands.

I express my thanks to Community Energy Scotland, the Scottish community coalition on energy and Social Enterprise Scotland for their briefings in support of the debate. They make it clear that, although some corporate, privately owned projects make community benefit payments available, the benefit that comes from community ownership projects is many times more substantial than those community benefit payments. All the benefit that flows from such projects can be put back to social and environmental use in the community, thereby providing a direct social benefit in addition to the direct benefit of increased renewable capacity, as well as a change in the relationship between people and the energy that we consume. That cultural change needs to go hand in hand with the practical infrastructure changes if we are to continue to earn, reinforce and retain public support.

There is a great deal that we need to do more of, both in providing access to capital for new projects and in repowering existing projects. Publicly owned assets can be used to lever in the capital that is needed.

As several members have remarked, we also need to make public land available for community energy. Public bodies that are responsible for managing large swathes of Scotland’s public land, such as Forestry and Land Scotland, already host large numbers of renewable energy projects, but few of those projects are community owned. Such bodies have an opportunity to step in and increase the transfer of energy assets into community hands at the point of lease renewals.

A recent opportunity to do that on the Cowal peninsula in Argyll and Bute was missed. Cowal Community Energy was not able to enter the tendering process, which was designed to attract bids from corporate players. When the cabinet secretary or the minister responds to the debate, I hope that they will respond on that particular issue. Are they aware of how that barrier came about? What could they do to prevent such opportunities from being missed in the future?

To ask the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body what its response is to the open letter to the Presiding Officer, signed by cross-party MSPs and staff, regarding the interim position on the use of facilities in the Parliament building.

The cross-party letter, which has been published online, has the support of 17 members from four political parties and 31 members of staff. It expresses serious concerns about the decision that has recently been made and draws attention to the comments made by Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, who said that the Supreme Court’s judgment has been misunderstood. In his words:

“It is important to note that you are allowed to exclude trans women from these facilities, but you are not obliged to.”

I am concerned that, in making the decision to take an exclusive and exclusionary approach, the SPCB risks taking us back to the breach of human rights that existed prior to the creation of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and to a position that, as little as 10 years ago, was the obsession of the extremist fringe of the United States Republican Party.

It is not enough to use words such as “inclusive experience” or “welcoming environment”. Does the corporate body recognise the impact that the decision has already had on those who are being told that they are no longer permitted to use basic facilities such as toilets on the same basis as everyone else and who now feel unwelcome and demeaned in their own workplace?

If that is the intention and what the corporate body wishes to achieve—I do not doubt that it may intend that—I have to say that the decision that was made recently fails to do that.

The member mentions the code of practice on which the EHRC is currently consulting. That code of practice suggests that birth certificates could be required from people merely because they are suspected of being transgender. I have to say that I feel almost nauseous using that language, because I am old enough to remember how other queer people felt when we had to worry about whether we were suspected of being who we are in our society.

Can the corporate body promise us that nobody will be required to provide birth certificates or other paperwork merely because someone intolerant suspects them of being transgender?

As the Government analyses the responses to that consultation, can the minister tell us what the scale of the Scottish Government’s objective is? He has heard support from his own back benchers for community ownership on something approaching the scale of what Denmark has achieved. I know that that cannot be done overnight, but is it the Government’s intention to achieve something of the same order over the longer term?

The cabinet secretary is setting out reasons why community ownership has significant benefits and there is very little dissent from that principle. Renewable energy has been growing dramatically for many years in Scotland. If the model that has been pursued so far has been a success, why does the cabinet secretary think that there is not a more significant share of the overall renewable energy industry in community, public or shared hands? Why do we have a very private sector-dominated industry?

Both repowering and lease renewal for land can be trigger points or opportunities to achieve that. We perhaps need to go a little further than simply encouraging the private sector to maybe donate a little and instead make it a requirement, so that we see a significant increase.

There is also an opportunity to improve the situation through the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. I hope that the bill will be amended at stages 2 and 3 so that we can take advantage of that opportunity.

Before I close, I will say something about heat. There is also a huge opportunity in the urban landscape for the transformation of our energy system. It is a real necessity that we achieve that, which creates an opportunity for benefits in areas that do not have access to wind farm sites, for example.

Denmark is 50 years ahead of Scotland in that regard, and it has shown that a non-profit approach can achieve the transformational change that it has put into practice. That approach creates community benefit—it puts the community benefit first—but it can also earn and retain public support, and we need to do much more to make that a reality in Scotland.

The energy transformation that is required is not only about rural communities, although it is significant in those rural communities that have wind and solar developments, where we need to retain public support for infrastructure, rather than demonising infrastructure, as some seem tempted to do at the moment. However, our urban landscape also needs to transform, and the public and community ownership of energy infrastructure in our urban landscape is equally important.

I again express support for the Labour amendment, and I hope that the Government is supportive of the Green amendment.

I move amendment S6M-17648.2, to insert at end:

“; acknowledges that any significant increase in public, community and shared ownership of energy infrastructure will require new and increased forms of support from the Scottish Government, including making public land available for energy projects and diversifying the ownership of existing energy assets; considers that community ownership of heat networks offers further opportunities to maximise the social, economic and environmental benefit of heat decarbonisation, and calls on the Scottish Government to build on its relationship with Denmark to draw on its experience of both shared ownership of renewables and developing heat networks built and operated on a not-for-profit basis.”

15:09  

The Israeli Government forbids independent journalism inside Gaza. Does that impose restrictions on humanitarian aid workers and agencies recording and reporting their direct experience of the situation that they face on the ground?