September in Common Weal

Care

1. A National Social Work Agency

Our latest policy paper, care expert Marion MacLeod looks at the Government’s proposals for a National Social Work Agency as part of the National Care Service Bill. The NSWA was a proposal made by the Feeley Review into care reform in the wake of the pandemic – the review that ultimately led to the NCS Bill – and so we’re glad to see that the Government listened to that part of the review and has committed to the agency. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to have done much more than that and don’t really seem to know what the role of social work or the NSWA would be within the NCS, so Marion has laid out what that role should be and what needs to be amended in the Bill to make that happen. In short, while their jobs are very different, the social worker is to care as the GP is to health.They are often the first port-of-call into getting the care you need and can help work out precisely what care you DO need. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in our previous policy papers on the subject, social work has often been relegated to last-option crisis management within a sector that has been outsourced and privatised almost to the point of failure. The Agency is required not just to champion the rights of social workers and to highlight areas of social work that need attention, it would also have a role in advocating for adequate resources to meet the needs of those demands and to scrutinise Government to ensure that the polices they make on social care result in positive action on the ground where it’s needed.

2. The National Care Service Bill (Stage 2) Call for Views

The National Care Service Bill itself is in a precarious state. The hard-won pause to the legislative process that should have resulted in the Government co-designing and seriously re-designing the Bill before it returned to Parliament did nothing of the sort. Instead, the Bill came back at Stage 1 essentially unchanged compared to its initial reintroduction and Parliament was told to pass it on the promise that the Government would publish their amendments after they did so. Then the deadline to publish those amendments approached so the Government set up an “Expert Legislative Advisory Group” to scrutinise them before they’d be published. They then didn’t give the group (which included Common Weal) sight of those amendments until a few days before the final meeting of the group. We finally got those amendments but then the Government took a step we think is unprecedented in the history of Devolution, to re-run a consultation on the Bill even though it’s now in Stage 2 of the legislative process. The result of that is that if the Government accepts any of the changes that stakeholders are demanding (you can read our list of changes in our policy paper ‘Fixing the NCS Bill’ here) then we won’t see what the Government’s own amended proposals for the NCS actually are until it returns to Parliament some time before the end of this year (and this is before we consider how the other parties may amend the Bill themselves).Our response to that Stage 2 consultation is a distillation of our broader ‘Fixing the NCS Bill’ paper (which we also submitted as evidence along with Marion’s NSWA paper) and is short compared to our usual consultation responses largely because the detailed answers lie in those other papers. However, we submitted this as a show of our commitment both to the idea of an NCS and to our desire to see it become worthy of that name despite the long and frustrating process that we’ve been dragged through to get to where we are now. Though with news breaking late this week that Cosla is likely to pull their support for the Bill (and may have done so by the time you read this), I cannot guarantee that Common Weal's own support - as constructively critical as it has been - will continue.

Energy

3. REMA 2

We’re slightly cheating with including this paper in the September reading list in that we submitted this response to the UK Government back in June but for a couple of reasons, including increased interest in the subject matter, we’re only getting around to publishing it ourselves now.The UK’s electricity grid is a product of an age that we’re rapidly transitioning away from and clinging to it is greatly exacerbating fuel poverty and climate change. The grid once did make sense. It was designed in an age where it was relatively difficult and expensive to move electricity long distances but moving coal by train was relatively cheap and easy. This mean that the grid was essentially priced so that if you wanted to build a new power station, you were incentivised to build it close to major population centres in the South East of England. However, as we transition to renewables, we’re moving to a scenario where energy can be generated in a much more distributed way (think of all the solar panels appearing on rooftops) and the major sources of large amounts of energy are, by dint of geography, further away from those southern population centres. Also, for reasons of physics, we can’t move the wind by train. So we’ve ended up with an electricity system where Scotland is double-penalised. We’re charged more to connect our wind energy to the grid because we’re far from London and our homes are charged more to take electricity FROM the grid because we’re far from London.The Review of Electricity Market Arrangements has been ongoing for some time (our first response to that review was in 2022 based on work we published in 2018) but we’re now at the stage where there is a growing consensus emerging that the solution to the transition is to stop pricing electricity based on “distance to London” but on distance to local and regional centres of electricity supply under a principle of “zonal pricing”. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex topic, if you live near large renewable generators (as the whole of Scotland would be if we consider the nation to be a single zone, but this could also apply at a community level too) then you could see your bills based on the cost to generate electricity in your area (which, for renewables, is essentially zero after the capital costs are paid off). In Scotland’s case, this could act not just to reduce fuel poverty but could also draw energy-intensive industries to Scotland to benefit from cheaper prices and could allow Scotland to export our energy indirectly without the need to large pylons and interconnectors everywhere (because we could instead export the goods made with that energy, like aluminium or steel, using other transport routes).

4. Ofgem Standing Charges Consultation

Our final paper for your reading list this month is related to the one above and deals with the much-maligned topic of electricity standing charges. This is the charge added to your meter every day before you’ve even started to use any electricity. It currently stands north of £0.60 per day in Scotland – roughly £220 per year – which is some of the highest in the UK (in London, a typical standing charge is only about £0.42 per day or £150-odd per year. Ofgem is in charge of deciding how much of your total energy bill should be split between the standing charge and the unit rate (the price you pay for every kWh of electricity you actually consumer) and there is a strong debate about where that balance is. If you think about how Scotland prices water, for instance, you can think of that bill being ALL standing charge and with NO unit rate.The argument for a higher standing charge and lower unit rate is that this would benefit people with higher necessary consumption such as elderly people with high heating demand (though we’d argue that this is itself a sign of the failure of the housing sector to provide adequately insulated homes) and that standing charges better spread the cost of building new infrastructure like renewables (the fact that companies can pass the cost of new turbines onto your bill is a key point in our argument that Scotland could renationalise the our energy without you noticing any difference in cost). What is less defensible however is, like the problems identified in the REMA consultation, is the disparity across the UK. We can’t be “all in it together” if Scotland is paying the highest standing charges to build the infrastructure to export the energy generated right next to our homes to as far away as it can get without crossing an international border (yet).We aren’t quite calling for the abolition of standing charges at this point, but we do want to see them levelised across Great Britain and reduced. A standing charge of £0.31 per day (Approximately £113 per year) would strike an adequate balance for all parties concerned and make bills fairer and help to curb excessive and wasteful use of energy while additional policies such as the electricity price cap, better housing and more public ownership of energy would protect vulnerable people with unavoidably higher energy needs.