Chamber and committees

Sure. I am happy to do that.

You see it happening in some local authorities. With the scale and level of investment that has now gone into aspects of active travel, you can see the considerable levels of ambition that some local authorities have on helping to get the right active travel infrastructure in place. It partly reflects the significant increase in funding that we are making available to active travel and the priorities that we have set out in the NTS and the investment hierarchy and the transport hierarchy.

You can see it by some of the ways in which local authorities are looking at the future delivery of transport provision within their areas and at different models and different approaches to take it forward. We see some real ambition being set out by local authorities.

Is there more that I would like to see happening in some local authorities? Absolutely. A lot of it is sometimes dependent upon individual officers and their desire to pursue particular policy areas. However, we are starting to see aspects of the NTS hierarchy becoming real policy on the ground, particularly in areas such as active travel and looking at wider transport provision within local authorities. I expect that to continue to develop, given the level of funding that we are putting into it in the coming years.

I gave a commitment to the committee earlier in the year to give you an update, which I am about to provide this week. I hope that it will give you much more detail on how the organisation will be taken forward and how it will operate. I hope that the committee will find it useful, given that I gave a commitment to provide that further detail. That information will be with you shortly.

That is covered by building regulations, but I am more than happy to take it away and we can come back to you with some further detail, including on the technical points that you have raised on how the points system operates.

If I recall correctly, the challenge around that is that we had intended to respond to the committee’s report with our work on developing a new marine plan. That work was paused and delayed, which meant that we were not able to provide a full response. I am more than happy to ensure that we look at providing that response as part of our work to develop the new marine plan.

If the grid capacity is there, it could be by 2030.

Thank you, convener. Good morning. Households across the country are struggling to cope with the cumulative pressures of the cost of living crisis, and energy costs lie at the heart of that crisis. Record-high inflation, which is in large part being driven by energy price increases, has forced thousands of people to choose between heating and eating and to experience the worst decline in living standards in the past few decades. The tragic events in Ukraine have exacerbated the already elevated fuel prices, which have risen to unprecedented levels, and the impacts are felt by domestic and business consumers in Scotland. We have also seen the standing charges in fuel bills double, which means that reducing consumption does not save as much as would have been the case previously.

Scotland is a forerunner in renewable energy generation and has the potential to expand our renewable capacity and reduce energy bills. However, investment is being held back due to unfair network charges, which is a missed opportunity in the current energy crisis. A significant number of Scottish households are off the mains gas grid and, due to the interconnected nature of the energy market, natural gas price increases have had a knock-on effect on electricity, heating oil and liquefied petroleum gas prices.

This year, the Scottish Government is set to invest almost £770 million in helping to tackle the cost of living pressures, which includes a £150 cost of living award to support households with higher energy costs, and there is a further investment of £10 million to continue our fuel insecurity fund. Crucially, we are also committed to investing at least £1.8 billion over the next five years in heating and insulating Scotland’s homes and buildings.

We have repeatedly called for urgent and targeted support from the UK Government in the immediate and longer term, such as: a one-off windfall tax on companies that are benefiting from significantly higher profits during the pandemic and energy crisis; direct financial support for low-income households; improvements to the warm homes discount scheme; and a temporary removal of VAT on energy bills.

Sadly, in the March budget, in the energy security strategy and, last week, in the Queen’s speech, the UK Government repeatedly failed to deliver anything to match the scale and urgency of what is required. However, we continue to engage with the UK Government on those matters. We are also engaging with stakeholders and the sector to explore what more we can do and how we can work on a four-nations basis to help to address what is a growing crisis for many households.

Convener, I am happy to respond to the committee’s questions.

I want to be clear—are you referring to the fact that there is additional capacity in the UK to produce gas, but the domestic price has not dropped to reflect that?

However, the biggest constraint on that will be grid capacity. If you want to build an offshore wind farm, you require a date to be set by National Grid for when you will be able to connect to the grid to supply it with electricity. The biggest risk for ScotWind is National Grid not having put in place the right plans—although I welcome the fact that it is doing its holistic network review at the moment—which could stop a project that could be delivered by 2030 from being delivered until 2035 because it cannot get the grid connection until, say, 2034.

For the delivery of such projects, grid capacity needs to be in place. National Grid is taking forward that bit of work. Our view is that that should be delivered by 2030, and National Grid is planning how to deliver that.

Energy efficiency has an important role to play in the short, medium and long term, but it would be unrealistic to expect energy efficiency programmes to be rolled out on the scale that would be needed to deal with the potential crisis that we face in 2022 and into 2023 as a result of how the energy markets are. I will give an example of why there are challenges.

The sector has challenges in accessing labour to do energy efficiency work. I met a company that is involved in our area-based programme for local authorities, which targets properties where people could be fuel poor by providing greater energy efficiency and in some cases district heating systems. The company’s managing director told me that, even if we doubled the money that we offer for such projects, his company could not deliver them because it does not have access to labour. He said that his company used to have a lot of eastern European labour but no longer has access to that because we are no longer part of the European Union. I did not throw that up just for a Brexit-related reason, but that company was pointed about the fact that it does not have the same access to labour as it had pre-Brexit, which has constrained its capacity and ability to ramp up programmes that we would like it to deliver.

That issue does not apply to every company, but it happened to be the case for the company that I met. One constraint is access to labour and skills to deliver programmes, so programmes need to be taken forward in a way that ensures that the sector can deliver and which will expand the skills that are necessary to develop such programmes in future years. There are constraints and limitations.

Energy efficiency will play an important part in the short, medium and long term, and it is clearly an important part of meeting our climate change target of reducing energy consumption. However, it is wrong to think that the sector could easily double the number of homes that we insulate under the energy efficiency programme tomorrow, because the sector faces constraints.