Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 07 December 2021
In 1904, the Oakbank Oil Company built the Niddry Castle oil works at Winchburgh in my constituency. The irony is that, long before the electrification of the nearby Edinburgh to Glasgow railway line, the works were connected to the shale mines in the area by an electric narrow-gauge tramway. For several decades in the 19th century, Scotland was the leading oil producer in the world.
West Lothian has many former coal mining communities: strong towns and villages and people, but brutalised by the unjust transition of the abrupt and political end of coal mining. The consequences of generational mass unemployment can run deep and long and, despite the resilience and capability of the county, the impact can still be felt. It is therefore not the first time that our workers and communities have faced industrial transition. Yes, the British Leyland car plant in Bathgate got replaced by inward investment with a Motorola plant and 3,000 houses and, yes, Whitburn Polkemmet’s smoking bing is now the Heartlands estate. However, not everyone was helped, and people were not always helped with skilled work and good wages.
As the just transition commission report states,
“This transition needs to be a national mission with social justice at its heart: something achieved BY the people of Scotland, not done TO the people of Scotland”.
We need a just transition with skills and training that help to secure good high-value jobs in green industries, job security for people in the industries that will play the biggest part in the transition and costs that do not burden those who are least able to pay. However, there cannot be a detailed just transition if there are not detailed climate change plans, and the criticism in the UK Climate Change Committee’s progress report must be addressed by ministers.
Government cannot and will not do this by itself—it needs industry, investors, energy companies, unions and the public sector to work together. The £100 million facility that is proposed for Nigg and the prospect of 400 jobs in an offshore wind tower factory is a major step in the right direction.
Scotland will be running on the dual fuel model of carbon and renewable energy for some time and we need a sensible collective joined-up solution for transition; the workers involved need to be reskilled for the journey and job opportunities and investments need to be identified. Oil and gas companies and their workers are and must be part of the just transition.
From COP26, paragraph 85 of the Glasgow climate pact has for the first time a reference to just transition, and how we achieve that is of great interest to others and to other Governments. In a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Scotland scored 62 out of 100 on the green jobs barometer and was the top-ranked part of the UK; for every green job created in Scotland, an additional three jobs are created elsewhere in the economy.
In a world where international investments can go anywhere, we need to anchor our transition with Scottish-owned companies, not just Scotland-based companies, and we need to build in sustainability for the whole supply chain and for procurement activity. As we know from West Lothian transitions, inward investment is mobile and can leave.
No Government in the world has done enough to introduce the changes that are needed, but there is no country in the world quite like Scotland, with our experience of shale, coal, cars, electric hydro and nuclear, oil and gas, wind, wave and tidal, and now a focus on and drive to hydrogen.
We will debate, question and scrutinise the steps on the way, but let us stand today united and committed to a just transition for our communities, our country and our climate.
16:22