A Year In Common Weal - 2024 Policy Review

Intro

Welcome to the end of 2024. I can feel the Dùbhlachd tightening around me these days. I’ve always been a rather solar powered person (with a longtime ritual of greeting midsummer by reading outdoors under the midnight glow) and while I’m not afflicted – as some of my friends are – with full blown Seasonal Affective Disorder, I do feel the urge to crawl under a duvet and hibernate until the sun returns. Humans weren’t made to run a summer schedule in the middle of winter – we should be huddled around the hearth telling stories and hoping that the pickled fruits last till Spring.Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to my winter break and some time to switch off, chill, and break into the aforementioned pickles – possibly with some home smoked cheese!Until then, I want to leave you this year with a round up of what we got up to at Common Weal – especially as this year marked our tenth anniversary! We remain very possibly the most productive think tank in Scotland (supporting all of our staff members while the whole think tank earns less that the First Minister does – if you’d like help us correct that, then please sign up as a regular donor). We published 12 substantial policy papers, policy briefings or consultation responses this year plus we submitted several more less substantial consultation responses to the Scottish or UK Governments (many really are barely worth the time to submit but if we don’t then it gets held against us when it comes time to lobby properly for the outcome we want). This is all in addition to the whole staff writing in our weekly newsletter and our regular In Common Column in The National, plus all of the other media appearances we make with our work. Not a bad return for an average donation of £10/month! Regular newsletter readers will, no doubt, remember many of the stories and policy papers but newer subscribers or folk who have been a bit overwhelmed with the news of the year (i.e. all of us) may have missed a few things.

Care

Probably the largest portion of my time working on policy this year was around Care. Our Care Reform Group have been, once again, absolute stars and their expertise, passion, dedication and sheer willpower all go far beyond what Common Weal could ever hope for. It hasn’t been just their work in producing policy papers and responses to government announcements but their lobbying and knitting together of stakeholders across an extremely diverse sector that has produced powerful results in the face of a government implacably determined to push its flawed NCS Bill despite shedding support from almost everyone involved with it.Of the twelve major papers we published this year, five of them had to do with care and the National Care Service Bill. We spent much of last year fighting for (and winning) a pause to the legislation process while the proposed Bill at the time could be improved from its state then – where care services would be torn away from local government control and centralised under Ministers – into something closer to our vision in Caring For All. The Bill was due to come back in amended form in February this year and we produced a briefing for MSPs outlining why the Bill had to be substantially amended or voted down. Unfortunately, the Government strongarmed Parliament into voting for the Bill as written with the promise that they would produce amendments before the summer recess – a promise they reneged upon, instead setting up a group of experts (including Common Weal) to scrutinise those amendments before presenting them to Parliament. This promise was, too, reneged upon with the Group only getting sight of the amendments shortly before our final meeting together and with little chance to do anything with them. Shortly before the Bill came back to Parliament, we also submitted our own amendments not just to the Bill as written but also to the Government’s proposed amendments (if that all sounds complicated, then yes it is – as far as we can tell, no other piece of legislation in the devolved era has tormented the usual process like this Bill has). We also submitted those amendments as part of our formal response to the Call for Views on Stage Two of the Bill.Amid the politicking of all of that, we also paid attention to one key area of the Government’s proposed amendments – a motion to create a National Social Work Agency. Social Work is too often treated as the “care of last resort” in Scotland but is also underfunded, under resourced and exists in a fragmented landscape. The creation of a NSWA within or as part of the NCS would be a positive thing. However the Government’s proposal in particular doesn’t go into much more detail than my previous sentence, so we published a blueprint of what it would need to do to make a difference to the sector.By October though, our frustrations with the Government finally boiled over. After both Cosla and the STUC withdrew their support for the NCS Bill we followed and declared that the Bill as written simply would not result in a Care Service worthy of that name and we couldn’t support it passing until the Government amended it properly. However we also didn’t want to condemn everything in the Bill. Even some of the Government’s amendments (like the NSWA) represented genuine efforts to improve care provision. Even better, many of them were not entirely dependent on the NCS to function and some didn’t even need primary legislation to kick into being. So after discussion with multiple stakeholders in the sector we published Tackling The Care Crisis Now which identified these positives in the Bill and offered options on how to make them happen. This led to the Scottish Greens’ debating at their conference around which of two of those options they should adopt as policy and then deciding to adopt the path (not, I must say, our preferred option – but a decent Plan B nonetheless) of submitting an amendment that stripped all of the framework of the NCS out of the Bill and essentially leaving all of the “good bits” behind. The Government responded by announcing yet another pause to the Bill to consider their options (the pause is indefinite, though we understand that the aim is to announce their plan early in the New Year).On one final note on Care, I’m sad to announce that valued member of the Care Reform Group Colin Turbett is leaving us for a very happy and well deserved retirement. Colin’s work for us has been utterly invaluable through many aspects of our care work but I’ll particularly be keen to keep the torch lit for his blueprint for care community hubs which – in our view – should be the foundation and backbone of the National Care Service in the same way that GPs are the foundation of the NHS. Thank you Colin and enjoy everything you do going forward.

Land

In 2021 we produced a major report on how to reform and replace Council Tax with a Property Tax that is based on the actual value of the house. This would rectify a great injustice in Scotland where the poorest pay a much largest share of the value of their home in tax and the richest pay not just less for their primary dwelling but nothing at all if they own multiple homes that they rent out. However the largest store of untaxed wealth in Scotland needs looked at too – land. Debates about a Scottish land tax precede devolution but have been almost as hard to progress to action than Council Tax reform has been. Often the debate has fallen down around how to value the land for taxation (especially in Land Value Taxes that try to calculate the theoretical “unimproved” or even the “maximised optimal economic value” of the land). We took a simpler approach. The economic value of land right now is almost completely divorced from the market value of land, driven up by speculation and a push for prestige via Lairdship and hunting lodges or, increasingly, as a means of laundering public money via carbon credits. Our land tax essentially treats land and buildings as the same kind of property (you buy both from the same estate agent after all) and extends our Property Tax to cover land. For the first time in Scotland we also produced an estimate of the total value of all of the non-urban land in Scotland based on current market rates for various soil grades of land (about £70.3 billion at 2022 prices) and we reckon that, as a starter, Scotland could raise around £443 million per year from a land tax (subject, of course, to exemptions and discounts for people like crofters or premiums for large landholders, foreign or corporate owners or whatever other conditions Local Authorities may wish to apply). Between this and the Council Tax reforms, this would be enough to wipe out the projected deficits of nearly all Local Authorities in Scotland – but in the budget this year, the Scottish Government decided to not implement the plan, preferring instead to keep Councils fiscally bound in a way that they would be the first to complain about if Westminster did it to them.Elsewhere on Land, we are fighting against the Scottish Government’s attempt to marketise Scotland’s “natural capital” (defined by them as “our geology, soil, air, water, plants and animals”) and package up our ecology to flog off to foreign individuals and corporations under the guise of “inwards investment”. We’ll come back to that idea in a segment or two.

Energy

Energy was another big focus of our time here this year, with the faltering and backsliding on climate targets set to create the perfect conditions for yet another winter energy crisis, We engaged at a UK level (unusual for us, as we mostly focus on purely Scottish affairs) to advocate for the dropping of energy standing charges (something now under active consideration along with an energy debt jubilee) and another on zonal energy pricing. The latter would mean that electricity users in regions of the UK (which could mean “Scotland” or it could mean anything down to community-level regions) would be charged on that use based on how much energy the region produces, imports and exports. Essentially, this would turn the UK’s energy pricing system (a system designed for the age of transporting coal by rail) on its head and would mean that Scottish electricity users could benefit from being close to the high levels of energy supply from our renewable resources leading to much cheaper energy bills instead of some of the UK’s most expensive.

Profits

Quite possibly one of the papers I’m most personally proud of producing for Common Weal, Profit Extraction sought to challenge the Scottish Government’s over-reliance on “inwards investment” to fix our economic woes. It’s not just in our “natural capital” that they are willing to fly across the globe to pitch a tent and hand out shares in Scotland, Inc to anyone who passes. The consequence of investment is that if it pays off, the investors get a return. The problem with foreign investment is that when it pays off, the profits leave Scotland (amongst other issues like compromising our democracy to appease foreign corporations or those companies that have proven themselves mobile enough to come to Scotland also being mobile enough to leave as soon as the tax breaks end). I managed to get data on the level of profit flows for Scotland and compared them to every other country in the world (and several other polities like UK Overseas Territories and other dependencies) and found that not only does Scotland experience far higher levels of profit extraction than other countries of our level of development (most countries with similar GDP/capita to Scotland actually see net inwards flows of profits as their state owned energy companies and the like draw in profits from elsewhere) but some of the highest levels of ANY country, even proportionately higher than the average of the poorest and most indebited countries on Earth.In the latest data year alone (2021), Scotland lost over £10 billion to this profit extraction and more than a quarter of a trillion pounds since records began at the start of devolution in 1999. I’m far from a Trumpist nativist when it comes to economic matters but Scotland swings far too far in the other direction where multiple nations are being allowed and even encouraged to own and profit from our energy and natural resources, as well as our manufacturing and services sectors, but Scotland itself lacks even basic things like a national energy company to help retain the profits from those assets here.

Homes

Two years ago I was asked if I could win just one policy in Common Weal’s library, what would it be. My answer was easy: Homes and other building regulations should have passive energy efficiency as the minimum for all new builds going forwards and it should be the target to reach for all retrofits where physically and economically feasible.Just a couple of months later, Alex Rowley MSP introduced a Members’ Bill to Parliament stating more or less just this and – faced with a defeat in Parliament if they opposed – the Scottish Government accepted the debate and asked Alex to withdraw his Bill on condition that the Government would bring it in as an official policy – promising to lay down legislation by the end of this year. We’re still waiting for that legislation (Edit: The first provisional plan was published just after I submitted this article and can be read here) but they have appeared true to their word and our energy team (particularly Keith Baker) has been working behind the scenes with civil servants and energy and building sector contacts to help influence how things go (in particular, I do believe we need building regs to go beyond just high energy efficiency for Net Zero but also need to consider the carbon embodied in construction as well as using building techniques that are compliant with the Circular Economy). Over the summer, the Scottish Government issued a consultation on what we’ve been calling the Passive Housing Bill (it’s not going to be one single Bill, but multiple bits of legislation woven through various regulations and legislations) and we produced a coordinated response with the Energy Poverty Research Initiative, the BEAM Centre, RIAS and several others. You can read that response courtesy of EPRI here.

Conclusion

There has been, of course, more that I couldn’t mention in an already far too long column – we’re never short of new and interesting topics to discuss in our newsletter each week. As for next year, I’ll be focusing on projects around the Care Bill and the Passive Housing Bill as well as looking at how to integrate the Circular Economy into both. Other colleagues are also working on substantial interventions into reform of health and justice which will be comparative new areas for Common Weal (though surely nothing says “All of Us First” like ensuring we get justice right!). And there’s the somewhat delayed work I’ve been doing on the Demographics of Independence. I had hoped to publish my latest update to that project around the 10th anniversary of the indyref but time and resource constraints pushed me back. To be honest, I’m glad it did because polling in Scotland has gotten WEIRD. I’ll dive into it in detail in the New Year but just as a teaser, try and guess which political party is now the second most pro-indy in terms of the percentage of their voters of all the parties who currently have an MP? Answers in the comments.Once again, I’d like to thank you all for coming on the Common Weal journey with us. Next year is the last full year before the Scottish Elections so our work holding Government to account and providing exciting, radical and progressive policies for all parties to consider adopting is only going to get more vital. Please help us continue this work next year and for another ten years. As always, we aren’t government funded, don’t have multi-national corporate sponsors and don’t even have adverts on our website. So if you’d like to chuck us a wee Christmas present then we’d be extremely grateful. If you can't, all of our policy papers will remain open and without paywalls so please read those that interest you and share them around. We’ve changed Scotland in profound ways over the last ten years but we couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you. See you in the New Year. Enjoy the winter break, and I’ll be thinking of you when I crack into that smoked cheese!