Analysis - Programme for Government
Craig Dalzell - September 9th 2021
Usually, the first Programme for Government after an election would be a time of relative fanfare. Given that the government has brought in new voices in the form of the cooperation agreement with the Greens, I would expect that to be doubly so (though perhaps the fact it’s not a formal coalition and it’s based around the core of the previous administration should limit those ambitions). It’s a time to set an agenda for a whole Parliament, not just a single year within it. And right now is a critical time in that this is the last full Parliament we have before we hit the deadlines laid out by the IPCC before we should have made significant progress towards addressing the climate emergency.
So why does it not feel like that?
Many of the policies in here – even the laudable ones – feel like iterative steps rather than paradigm shifts. Take the keystone announcements around childcare such as “wraparound” childcare (childcare that bridges the gaps between either end of the school day and during school holidays and the times when parents have to be in work). Even though it’s going to take several years to deliver this is undoubtedly a worthy thing and has been welcomed by many even in my own family. My cousin, for instance, currently pays almost a thousand pounds a month to allow her kids to go to school and her to work part time. An entire wage gone essentially to allow her to work to pay for the ability to work.
But as my guest and I discussed in this week’s Policy Podcast, this and the other care policies in the PfG appear to be more of the same patches over patches that have typified social care policy in Scotland for the last several decades. What is needed, is a comprehensive and strategic plan for care – starting from the principle of what is care for. Is it to invest in the early years of children at the most critical time in their development? Or is it merely a means of allowing parents to be productive participants in an ever-growing consumerist economy?
A similar story plays out in housing where the promise to build 110,000 affordable homes between now and 2032 isn’t significantly more ambitious than Nicola Sturgeon’s promise to build 50,000 affordable homes between 2016 and 2021. Not only is this not a step forward in terms of housing numbers (something I’ve long been critical of as a measure of housing policy success anyway), it still doesn’t adequately address the definition of “affordable”, still doesn’t do anything like enough to disrupt a predatory private sector and there is no mention in the PfG about increasing building standards to Green New Deal quality, so that we’re not setting up future governments for an even harder retrofitting problem than they already face. If leadership on minimum standards is not coming from national government then Local Authorities – especially the ones who have declared a climate emergency – should be stepping to the gap but they, too, seem unwilling to based on the number of announcements of substandard new builds that happen every single week. See also this about Council homes in Larkhall.
Speaking of the Green New Deal, the promises in the PfG appear to utterly ignore both the scale of the challenge ahead and the timescales we have to do it. £1.8 billion over five years to “progress” the decarbonisation of 1 million homes by 2030 sounds like a lot but look at it again. Generously assuming that this means decarbonising half of those homes in this Parliament, that’s only £3,600 per house. The current “cheapest” means of decarbonising a house currently running on oil or gas is via an air source heat pump which can easily cost double this amount after installation costs – especially if you want to run it with a heat battery to make the most efficient use of it. So this plan must involve only partial subsidies to homeowners. If you can’t afford to pay the rest then what happens? What then happens when you realise that “decarbonised heat” isn’t the same as “affordable heat” and that your heating bills have gone up as a result of moving from underpriced gas to overpriced electricity. What happens when you realise that “decarbonised heat” isn’t the same as a “warm home” and that the Government’s plan to properly retrofit your house amounts to just £18 million extra this year over what was previously promised. A Green New Deal means more than Net Zero. A plan that does only the latter will lead to increased fuel poverty at a time when Scotland should be and could be eliminating it.
This cannot be delivered by the private sector. Indeed, as I write this, the private sector has declared that there is “no market case” for wind turbine manufacture in Scotland at all, despite us being one of the richest countries in the world in terms of wind energy potential. This, just a day after the Scottish Government declared that there was no public sector case for renewable energy either as it scrapped its policy of launching a National Energy Company. If we’re not doing a Green New Deal in the public sector and “the market” won’t do it for us….who will?
The final announcement I want to talk about here is one that should have made international news – that work has restarted on an independence white paper and that a referendum should be held before the end of 2023. That it hasn’t perhaps speaks to the number of times the independence campaign has been led up and down the hill over the previous Parliament. This is a campaign desperately in need of something to positively campaign for and will not take lightly being let down again either by the government reneging on yet another promise here or even botched the delivery of that promise.
What the Scottish Government cannot and must not do is exclude the independence movement from the development of this white paper as it did both back in 2014 and at multiple times in the years since such as through the ramming through of plans like the Sustainable Growth Commission. If the referendum is coming two years from now, then we have little time to understand who needs to be convinced of the case for independence and how to convince them. Activists won’t campaign for a plan they can’t personally believe in, so another Growth Commission style fudge will not win. Common Weal has already laid our entire policy library at the disposal of the movement (as well as books like How to Start a New Country and our Common Home Plan) and we have more work to come in the form of our manifesto of what we think a Common Weal Scotland would look like. If the wider public is to be fully informed of the case for independence then voices outwith the small bubble of the Scottish Government must be involved in the drawing up of that case and we stand ready to assist should we be asked to do so.
As said earlier, this is the last full Parliament left to Scotland before the IPCC climate tipping points. There is no time left for piecemeal headline-grabbing or half-measures. We need to see the large scale projects that will actually deliver on targets not merely make “better than nothing” progress towards them. Missing the targets on the climate emergency isn’t an option and the sooner governments start acting with this in mind, the better chance they have of meeting them.