Chamber and committees

Perhaps if the Conservatives want to bring to the chamber another debate on the meaning of economic growth we can get into that in great detail and I will lay out the reasons why Greens around the world recognise that, on a planet of finite resources, economic growth cannot go on forever and that everlasting economic growth does not meet the needs of the majority of people.

I want to keep the debate on the issues that are before us. Let us look at the reality of the contrasts between Scotland’s two Governments, which many members have described. I contrast a UK Government that introduced the benefit cap with a Scottish Government that is mitigating that cap, even though that should not have to come from within a devolved budget. I contrast a UK Government that has cut universal credit with a Scottish Government that has introduced the game-changing Scottish child payment, doubled it and then committed to increasing it further. I contrast a UK Government that has uprated benefits by significantly less than inflation with a Scottish Government that has uprated them, where we could, by six per cent.

The UK Government has, apparently, put all its eggs in one basket by expanding the oil and gas industry in the middle of a climate emergency and by expanding nuclear power, which is one of the most expensive ways to meet the country’s energy needs. I compare and contrast that with a Scottish Government that invests in energy efficiency and renewables.

There is, of course, much more that we can and will do, and we will continue to seek to do better. However, let us look at the roll-out of free bus travel for the under-22s. I say again—I mentioned this to Finlay Carson—that the policy will help to make services, including those in rural areas, more viable than they have been. Making services more viable is one of the best consequences and side effects of the free bus travel policy. I note that the fair fares review will be taken forward as part of the Bute house agreement to look at the uneven nature of transport costs.

On energy, there is an extraordinary gap between a UK Government that published a UK energy security strategy that did not say one word about demand reduction or about energy efficiency and a Scottish Government that is expanding eligibility for the warmer homes Scotland scheme, increasing grants in area-based schemes and extending home energy efficiency advice. This Government is doing all of that in the context of a £1.8 billion heat in buildings programme and a commitment to establish a public energy agency, which will play a critical role in decarbonising heat and doing so fairly.

On housing costs, the Scottish Government has made commitments on rent controls; we are undertaking our on-going mitigation of the bedroom tax; and we are carrying out the largest affordable house programme in the UK, which is the biggest since the 1970s. On council tax, only two councils have set increases that are above 3 per cent, and all the increases are significantly below inflation.

Our most recent review of the building regulations concludes next month, with the new regulations being implemented this October.

The new regulations will include a significant uplift in fabric standards, will seek to reduce heating demand and will support the effective use of renewable technologies, and they will also future proof heating in new homes against the proposed 2024 new-build heat standard.

We are already working with industry to support delivery of those changes and to investigate further improvement.

Brian Whittle: The minister will be aware that the construction of energy-efficient and energy-generating homes has significant cost implications. As the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee heard yesterday, there is already a shortage of tradesmen and women to deal with the current demand on housing.

How does the Government propose to fund the new energy-efficient and energy-generating housing? Where will the funding that is needed for the training and upskilling of the construction workforce that is required come from?

Patrick Harvie: Part of the answer lies in the public investment of at least £1.8 billion over the course of the current parliamentary session to support accelerated deployment of heat and energy efficiency measures. That is on top of the support that is provided for the Scottish Government’s affordable housing supply programme, which involves working with the social housing sector.

We recognise that the challenge will go beyond what the public sector can provide. The green heat finance task force is already meeting to explore the widest possible range of solutions to provide the considerable investment that will be needed over the coming decades to meet the urgent and necessary challenge that we face.

I very much appreciate the frustration that many people have with the lack of clarity. Clarity is needed. However, it is the UK Government that has refused to confirm the design of the ECO4 scheme. Even though that scheme is due to come into force in April, we do not anticipate seeing the regulations that will be laid to define it until April.

Some of the changes that were signalled in the UK Government’s response to the public consultation appear to be based on the English definition of fuel poverty. That might limit the number of eligible Scottish properties.

For clarity, let me say that we have known for a long time that this change was coming. In February 2021, the Scottish Government proposed combining the warm home discount and ECO schemes into a single more flexible fuel poverty scheme in Scotland. Scottish ministers wrote to their UK counterparts in June, in October and in December to ask whether that approach would be acceptable to the UK Government, and we have still not had an answer from it one way or the other.

The energy company obligation is a UK Government scheme. Although the ECO4 scheme is scheduled to begin in April 2022, the design of the scheme has not been confirmed by the UK Government.

Since June last year, we have repeatedly attempted to engage with UK ministers on the future of the warm home discount scheme and ECO, but our approaches have not been answered. I would welcome a meeting with UK Government ministers to discuss how ECO can better tackle fuel poverty and deliver a just transition in Scotland.

I am afraid that I need to make some progress.

I was pleased to announce a further £825,000 to support 36 innovative e-bike projects across Scotland through the eBike grant fund, which includes support for non-standard and adapted bikes.

The third delivery arm that I want to pick out today is the work that we are doing with children and young people. The impact of the under-22 free bus travel policy that has been implemented this year will be even greater alongside the work that we are doing to make it easier for young people to walk, wheel and cycle. In the past year we have invested £1.3 million in bikeability training for schools in 31 local authorities, thus supporting 47 per cent of schools to deliver on-road training. Next year we will more than double our grant funding to Living Streets Scotland to more than £500,000 for programmes including walk once a week, involving more than 100,000 primary school children and their families in 26 local authority areas to encourage them to walk to school.

I know just how passionately young people care about the climate emergency and the future of our world. They challenge us to respond to that passion. Our job is to give them the choices over sustainable travel to rise to that challenge, and it is the full package that will make the difference.

Supporting active travel choices and delivering projects also come down to leadership, at every level. I do not doubt that over the next hour and a half we will hear sincere and powerful arguments in favour of active travel. All political parties in this chamber went into the last election with significant commitments on active travel in their manifestos. I hope that we will have a debate that echoes that sincerity and significance.

Sadly, however, too often that support, at both national and local levels, can disappear when it comes to projects on the ground. It is not enough to support active travel in principle and then to stand in the way of project after project happening. Too often, what we see is delay, dilution and disruption, and even sometimes the opportunism of those who complain about an imaginary war on motorists.

Clear and consistent leadership is so important. In order to ensure that people can choose to walk, wheel and cycle more often, we also have to choose. We make the choices on who gets priority for finite road space, choices on speed versus safety, choices about changing our car culture and achieving a sustained reduction in traffic levels, and choices about what we want our future places to look and feel like.

I was very much hoping for a wholly positive debate, which was perhaps setting my expectations just a fraction too high. However, many members made very positive contributions. There were speeches that focused on the public health and climate imperative—our combined imperative to achieve a sustainable transport system, and the role of active travel within it. Paul McLennan and Carol Mochan placed great emphasis on that.

A number of members, including Stephanie Callaghan and Beatrice Wishart, commented on partnership with the third sector. In response to Beatrice Wishart’s comments, I would say that more than a third of a million children have been trained via bikeability since 2010, and we are committed to continuing to build on that positive track record.

The role of local leadership—not just by local authorities but at community level—was touched on by a number of members, including Brian Whittle, Paul McLennan and Jackie Dunbar. Fiona Hyslop set herself the aspiration of covering everything from the global to the hyper local in her speech. It was clear in everything that she said that her intention was to ask, “How can we make this better?” I wish that everybody had taken the same constructive approach to the issue.

I would contrast, as Liam Kerr did a moment ago, two speeches in particular. Those speeches focused on the issue of inclusion and trying to ensure that our approach to active travel is inclusive, and respectful of the diversity of our society. Maggie Chapman’s speech and Jeremy Balfour’s speech both focused very clearly and, I am sure, equally sincerely on inclusion, but the contrast in tone between them was really clear to me. Maggie Chapman’s speech celebrated examples where inclusion is done well and constructively challenged us to do better, whereas Jeremy Balfour seemed to want policies, and indeed projects, to be scrapped. That was very much the tone that came across.

I am afraid that I am just closing.

This is about choice, delivery and leadership. Scotland can be a nation where walking, wheeling and cycling are the first and natural choice for so many more people. We can deliver transformed paths, roads, streets and communities more swiftly and more inclusively. Over the next 90 minutes, let us demonstrate that we have the vision and the leadership to make that happen.

I move,

That the Parliament welcomes the Scottish Government’s record investment in active travel in 2022-23, which includes new funding for footpaths, significantly increased funding for local authorities and more than doubling the funding to the National Cycle Network; recognises the unprecedented ambition of the Co-operation Agreement commitment to invest at least £320 million, or 10% of the transport budget, for active travel by 2024-25 as a means of improving health and wellbeing, enhancing the quality of neighbourhoods, promoting social inclusion and tackling the climate emergency; further welcomes the commitment by Police Scotland to take forward the National Dashcam Safety Portal Initiative; agrees that prioritising walking, wheeling, cycling and public transport and reducing private car trips will be essential to cutting transport emissions and achieving Scotland’s climate targets; acknowledges the leadership shown to date by local and community partners, and hopes that all future local authority administrations will recommit to this leadership and achieve rapid delivery of active travel schemes on the ground.

I am genuinely delighted to speak to the motion. This is the first opportunity for us to debate active travel in the current session of Parliament, and the first opportunity for me to set out my priorities since I became the minister for active travel. I want to highlight three themes: choice, delivery and leadership.

Over the past couple of years, many more people in Scotland have chosen to walk, wheel or cycle. They have discovered new ways to see their neighbourhoods and interact with other people around them. They have discovered the social, health and wellbeing benefits of making those choices, and they have discovered joy in experiencing less congestion, quieter streets and cleaner air.

However, the political choices that have been made over the past 60 years do not make it easy for them. Choices that were made in past decades about the location of shops and services, the layout of streets and the design of footways and junctions, along with the sheer volume of traffic that we have generated and the car-centred culture that we have allowed to develop, all conspire to make the choice to walk, wheel or cycle—which should be the natural first choice for many more people—feel at times like a choice in the face of adversity.

For every person who has told me how much they have relished the freedom to walk, wheel or cycle more, someone else has said that they feel apprehensive about doing so—as I did when I moved back to Glasgow. I had been a regular cyclist as a student in Manchester, with Europe’s busiest bus route as my daily commute, but even compared with that, my home city did not feel safe to cycle in. Then there are people who tell me that they need their car for certain trips but they would happily leave it behind in favour of active travel or public transport for the majority of their travel. Active travel choices are not binary choices.

My job and, I believe, our job as a Parliament is to make the political choices and the personal choices come together. That is why I am very pleased to be overseeing the biggest-ever budget for active travel in Scotland’s history—£150 million next year, which represents a big step on the way to our commitment to allocate £320 million or 10 per cent of Scotland’s transport budget to walking, wheeling and cycling by 2024-25. It is a level of investment that equates to £58 per person in Scotland, which is far above the £10 per head in England and the £23 per head in Wales.

In two years’ time, our commitment will also outstrip the per capita spend of the Netherlands. Admittedly, our Dutch friends have been at it for rather longer than we have, which illustrates the importance of sustained investment over a long period and that investment in active travel needs to be part of a much bigger picture of how we plan and design our streets, towns and cities.

However, this is about more than just money. Dutch levels of walking, wheeling and cycling did not get to where they are simply through the allocation of budget. How the money is spent also counts, so over this year I have set in motion a full review of how we deliver such a rapidly growing programme. I want to ensure that our delivery model for active travel makes the most of the scale of the investment that we are putting in.

I am not sure who I heard first. It was possibly Mr Whittle.

I am quite sure that the member was actively advocating for better active travel rather than simply reacting against it as some people do. However, he said that he was criticising Scottish Government policy, but he is giving an example of a local implementation by a council, which he objects to. Does he recognise that that is one of the tensions that we need to openly and honestly debate? Do we allow local decision making and fund it from central Government, or do we take control and have a top-down approach? Surely the Conservatives want to achieve the kind of fostered local leadership that will get active travel infrastructure right, instead of merely reacting against it.