The Secret Bill

Briefing Note

Credits — Common Weal

Overview

What you are not being told about who is going to pay the price for decarbonisation.

This briefing attempts to produce an indicative figure for how much extra households in Scotland are going to have to pay for climate change mitigation as a result of the methodology the Scottish Government is using as opposed to the methodology Common Weal proposes. It draws on two main reports; the Common Home Plan (a costed, comprehensive Green New Deal for Scotland) and The Retrofit Challenge (a more detailed paper on how to retrofit houses for energy efficiency written by Scotland’s leading retrofit architect) then uses two modifiers to indicate how much extra it will cost to do it the way the Scottish Government is doing it, one to cover the profit they are inducing to incentivise the private sector to do the work and one for the inherent inefficiency that that creates.

It concludes that the average cost to households of climate change mitigation work is in the order of £46,000 – but that in addition to that the private sector model favoured by the Scottish Government adds an additional £9,800 in profit and extra inefficiency taking the total per household to over £56,000. If the cost of replacing petrol vehicles is included the cost to households rises to over £100,000 of which about £20,000 is an unnecessary premium. These are average numbers and the figure for some households will be much higher.

The public is not being told about this honestly and nor is there an open and honest debate about whether this is the right way to go about the work of decarbonising our homes and our lives.