Chamber and committees

I would have to look back at that. In my time as energy minister—Dr Allan then became the energy minister when I became cabinet secretary—I cannot recall calling in a decision that had been made by a local authority.

I am not here to answer for Ed Miliband. Upgrading the grid infrastructure has actually been the policy of successive UK Governments—it was the previous Government that put in place grid infrastructure upgrades. I take the point that everything like this takes a very long time, but the time to start is now.

I welcome your views, Mr Russell. You asked me what my view is. The consultation is out there, and I look forward to seeing what you put in by way of a submission to that effect, and the arguments with which you back up what I imagine is your opinion on the matter. Others will have the same view as you.

10:30

In the consultation that we have put out, I want to hear feedback from people so that we can see what the general view is. It is also important to hear the views of those who will be making the decisions. If councils and councillors overwhelmingly want to make all the decisions that are associated with energy developments, we need to take those views into account. However, there will be some—or perhaps many—councils and councillors who do not hold that view, and there might also be communities that do not hold that view. That is why we are doing the consultation.

I have heard different views on that. I am not talking about people in my party, and I will not divulge who I heard those views from—it was at a public event, but I do not feel comfortable saying who they are. They had a completely different view and wanted the status quo to remain.

I would just note that all the planning regulations that pertain to Scotland have been passed by this Parliament, and that the Parliament put through national planning framework 4. There are also the regulations associated with the Electricity Act 1989, which are in statute, too. Of course, there are also the statutory consultees and the views that they put in. All of that is taken into account by the reporter.

Robert Martin might be able to give you a little bit more legal background on how the reporter operates.

To go back to what Fergus Ewing said, there is an opportunity for constrained power to be used to produce green hydrogen, although the potential for that has not yet been exploited at scale. As you rightly said, in your constituency, the H100 Fife project is leading the way in proving the point that hydrogen could be safely used for heating homes. There are different views on whether that is feasible from a cost point of view, but the H100 project is seeking to prove the concept. I was delighted to be able to visit it to see what it is doing.

Water usage, whether for hydrogen or anything else, is continually assessed by Scottish Water and SEPA. Hydrogen would not be the only high water usage industry. There are many high water usage industries in Scotland, including breweries and distilleries, and hydrogen would be another one. We would need to ensure that we had the volume and the capacity to allow that. Anyone who required to use a great deal of water would have to engage with SEPA and Scottish Water on their plans before they could implement them, because their business case would depend on that water being available. They would need to assess whether they had the volumes that they needed before they put in a planning application associated with what they wanted to do.

In general, water scarcity is becoming a more pressing issue in Scotland. Last year, we had record water scarcity, and river levels were very low. That started a lot earlier in the year than is usually the case. SEPA issues licences for water abstraction from watercourses, and quite a number of people who would ordinarily apply for such licences, such as farmers, were told that they could not take water from watercourses over a period of several months.

Scottish Water monitors the volumes in its reservoirs. Until fairly recently—up until the past few months—Scottish Water’s reservoirs were back at their normal levels, except in Dundee. People think that “sunny Dundee” is just something that a Dundonian came up with for a laugh, but it is genuinely true—rainfall levels in the Dundee area are a lot lower than those in the rest of Scotland. That is why Scottish Water has implemented a household usage pilot in Dundee.

Given the more general concerns that exist, Scottish Water, SEPA and the Scottish Government are working together to produce water scarcity reports and assessments of where water is needed. Consideration needs to be given to the availability of water, whether to produce hydrogen or for anything else. For example, a lot of the beer that Brewdog makes is made in my constituency, which is where the company’s headquarters is. Brewdog had to engage with Scottish Water, because it wanted to expand and it required more water. At the same time, planning applications for new housing developments were going through the council.

An assessment is made at local level of what water is required in particular areas, and that would be the case in relation to hydrogen production.

More generally, your question gives me the opportunity to mention a hobby-horse of mine. We must start treating our water as a precious resource. The fact that it is rainy in Scotland does not mean that we have an abundance of water. We have the best water in the UK when it comes to water quality. However, the supply is not infinite, and we should not take its availability for granted. Scottish Water puts millions of pounds into upgrading its facilities to stop leakages and to bring down the emissions associated with processing our water, and SEPA constantly monitors our river sources and our watercourses.

If a hydrogen producer wanted to invest an awful lot of money in a way that involved counting on water coming from a particular watercourse, that would have to be bottomed out with SEPA well before it put in a planning application.

If someone is in danger of being told by SEPA in the months between April and September that they might not get a licence to take water, that is a pretty precarious position for their business to be in. A combination of all those things applies not just to hydrogen but to anyone who needs a water supply to run their business or housing development, or whatever it is.

I absolutely agree that community engagement varies. I feel very strongly that that should change. There should be a level playing field, and I do not think that community engagement should be voluntary. Regardless of the type of energy that is being produced or the activity within energy infrastructure, community engagement should be mandatory. There should be very strict guidance associated with what good practice looks like. The Scottish Government does not have the levers in that regard, but we have good practice principles. As I said, through the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, we have secured the ability for the Scottish ministers to mandate community engagement, which is a very welcome development, because everything around that used to be voluntary.

Such engagement might mean that company A goes into a community to undertake early engagement, with lots of public meetings and many innovative ways of talking with everyone. The company might also make offers of community benefits, work with the community to give them a percentage share of the profits that are associated with the activity, carry out housing retrofit to bring down people’s bills or give the community some kind of endowment to do things that it wants to do in its area. In such cases, neighbouring communities will look at the opportunity that another community is getting and say, ‘‘That’s great. I wish we had that opportunity as well.’’ That is a very positive story.

However, we might have project B, which is of a very similar nature but which is run by a different company that does not do any of that and leaves a very nasty taste in people’s mouths. As far as the public is concerned, the companies are all tarred with the same brush. All that it takes is one company in one area of Scotland—again, let us say the Highlands and Islands—to leave a very bad taste in people’s mouths: it might fail to act in a way that brings the community with it, avoid engaging with or offering anything to the community, or, worse, promise to do things in that community, but then, once the development is through, the community does not see them for dust. There are a number of companies like that and, in future, should another developer—even if it has good intentions—want to do something, it will be told to take a hike.

All the developers should be held to the same standard, which should be mandated at UK level. I also want community benefit to be mandated at UK level. It should not be voluntary; it should be a statutory obligation, whether for battery storage, solar, hydro or onshore wind. That way, everyone will know what is on offer and what they are getting, and developers will all be held to the same standard. Communities should have that engagement and decide how any benefit is used. That dialogue must happen well before the plans are made—it must take place before the application even goes in. Developers or transmission owners should work with communities, understand their concerns and work with them to find engineering solutions, which can then be put into the plans before they get submitted to the ECU, the council or whichever body it is. Developers or transmission owners must also be held to account on delivering the community benefits that they have promised or said that they will give to the community.

10:00

The devolved Governments and the UK Government have commissioned NESO to develop the strategic spatial energy plan. NESO is also developing a regional energy strategic plan for Scotland. Those documents will help to shape the way in which Scotland’s energy infrastructure will need to develop over the coming decades to meet demand and energy security requirements and to assess things such as cumulative effect.

On an individual project basis, cumulative effect is taken into account by the council that determines the applications—at the moment, those are applications for developments that are under 50MW—and by the ECU.

However, not all applications can be predicted. The convener mentioned battery storage, which is an area that has a lot of speculative players. Communities, including my own community, certainly feel the impact of such speculation. They hear word of particular actors that seek to put forward developments—there are lots of actors and they are all speculating. Not all of those developments will go into the application process, but the speculation is enough to make communities feel worried about the cumulative impact. There is probably far more battery storage speculation out there than developments that will come to fruition, but that does not stop communities feeling a bit helpless.

Community engagement is important, and it should not be voluntary. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 now gives us the opportunity to liaise with all stakeholders, including communities, on what they think community engagement should look like. Once we have taken all that evidence and feedback, we will be in a position to say to developers, “This is the mandatory community engagement that you are now subject to and that you must do, and it has been informed by Scotland-wide consultation.” Such consultation will be done in the way that you suggested should have happened in years gone by.

First of all, I want community benefit to be mandatory. The UK Government has consulted on the issue—the consultation is closed and it is assessing the responses—and I am hopeful that we will have a situation in which community benefit is mandatory. Once that is the case, all the issues of the sort that you have mentioned will have to be worked out. Consideration will have to be given to what “community benefit” means and how “community” is defined.

A community’s proximity to the geographical siting of a development, whatever that might be, is the reason why it should benefit. Because the community is hosting that development or infrastructure, there should be a benefit associated with that, as it is right on the community’s doorstep.

The point that you made about Castlemilk relates to line of sight. As I said, I hope that the UK Government agrees to make community benefit mandatory. Once that has happened, we will need to do a piece of work that involves going out to the public to assess what community benefit should look like, what conditions should be associated with it and who should get it.

There is a trade-off to be made, because if we spread the community benefit too thin, people will feel as though they are not getting much of anything, and communities that host the infrastructure will think, “It’s all very well for that neighbouring city over there to get community benefit, but we’re the ones who’ve got this on our doorstep.” There will be different views on that.

However, the first step is to make community benefit mandatory. At the moment, the picture is too piecemeal. I have been to certain communities where really good work has been done on community benefit and people are delighted with how things have gone. However, we all hear from communities that feel extremely aggrieved, because they have been promised something that has not been delivered, they have not been engaged with properly or they have felt that their views have been ignored. Such things need to be made mandatory—the conditions, the guidance and the protocols on such matters need to be set in stone, and the process needs to be based on good practice.

We published guidance on effective community engagement in local development planning in December 2024. Transmission operators are expected to follow that guidance, which was produced by the ECU, so that they deliver consistent and meaningful pre-application consultation and engagement. Because of the extent to which we were hearing from communities on that issue, we could not wait for the UK Government to set out a mandatory process. We wanted to put in place something that meant that I could hold developers to account by saying, “Here’s the good practice that we’ve asked you to follow.” Of course, we do not have the power to make following that guidance mandatory, but it is there.

In addition, we got Planning Aid Scotland to produce an information sheet for communities—that was published in September last year—and there are guidance notes that explain the role of community hearings.

However, to be honest, until community benefit is made mandatory, the rogues who might be out there, whom people feel aggrieved about, can ignore all that. It needs to be made mandatory.

Absolutely. When—if—community engagement becomes mandatory, we are going to consult widely on the issue and the good practice that is associated with it. However, the issue that you have just described, of people not seeing community benefit, is the cause of the problem of communities not buying into these developments.

I am almost becoming like a broken record, but we are no longer in the realms of painting the scout hut or buying football strips for the school team. There has to be a substantial and meaningful community benefit that will improve that community. I believe very strongly that it should be the community that decides how the money is spent.

I will give you an example from my constituency. Vattenfall had a process in which it worked directly with all the associated communities around its Aberdeen offshore wind farm, including community councils and community groups, to see where its community benefit should go. The process was quite wide ranging, and there are communities in the west of Aberdeenshire that cannot see the sea that got community benefit from it while some coastal communities that bid for money did not get any. It is all about balance. Again, spreading the community benefit too thin is a problem.

I am not currying favour with you, convener, but I would say that it is a bit disappointing that you only got a park bench out of it. However, what a great dog walk Whitelee is. I have family in the area, and we often go up there to walk our dogs.

I do not really have a view. I want to hear the views of those who will be making those decisions and the views of the communities. One of the reasons why we went out to consultation was that we felt that the 50MW threshold was getting out of date, because there are more substantial developments than previously and the level might be too low.

Even anecdotally, there are a variety of views. Some councillors do not want that responsibility; they want the level to stay as is. We will hear from those people, but we will also hear from the councillors and the communities who want local decisions to be made locally. I do not really want to dictate through a consultation—that is not what consultations are for. I do not want there to be one offer; I want to know what people think. Do they think that the threshold should be 100MW, 75MW or the same as it is now? Once we have heard those views, we can have a full discussion on what is appropriate.