Meeting of the Parliament 10 January 2023
I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of his statement.
The long-awaited publication of the draft energy strategy and just transition plan comes at a time when we are facing a cost of living crisis and a climate crisis. The need for a just transition to a low-carbon, affordable energy process has never been more important. However, many of the so-called plans that have been published today are a rehash of existing policies that the Climate Change Committee has said are simply not enough. There is little new that will change the Government’s failure to ensure that our transition is a just one.
In 2010, the Scottish National Party promised that there would be 130,000 jobs in renewables per year by 2020. We would be the Saudi Arabia of renewables, it said. The reality behind the rhetoric is that just a fifth of that number of jobs has been delivered, and supply chain contract after supply chain contract continues to go overseas. Therefore, few people will believe the cabinet secretary’s commitments today.
However, it is not just the jobs that the Government is offshoring: 90 per cent of the energy from the recent ScotWind leasing round will come through overseas-owned multinationals, which are offshoring the billions in profits.
At a time when Labour in Wales has committed to creating a Welsh publicly owned energy firm, and the next UK Labour Government is committed to a UK publicly owned energy firm, why is there no commitment from the Scottish Government in this strategy to a publicly owned energy firm, to keep bills down and to keep the profits here in Scotland?