Meeting of the Parliament 24 January 2024
I felt that it might not be appropriate to ask members to vote Labour, so I thought that it would be better to ask them to note our policy, then I would go through its benefits. My colleague Jonathan Reynolds has been talking about Joe Biden’s fantastic Inflation Reduction Act 2022, and about the competition that means that we have to deliver in Scotland and the UK. That is the point of my speech today.
Our local authorities are vital in supporting low-carbon infrastructure, but we are, disappointingly, not seeing the levels of investment in community renewables that the SNP Government promised. We have huge opportunities to create heat and power with our land and buildings, which would deliver lower bills to our communities and deliver investment. That is an unacceptable missed opportunity.
We need Government leadership at the UK and Scottish levels. To be honest, the Scottish Trades Union Congress was absolutely right in its briefing, in which it said:
“The Scottish Government has been too quick to set ambition for jobs and economic benefit from green industries without setting up the necessary policies and funding to realise them.”
The cabinet secretary is muttering, but the SNP has been in power for more than 16 years and it has failed to deliver the transformative change that we urgently need. We have come together on two climate change acts—in 2009 and 2019—but, as the UK Climate Change Committee reported in 2022, the Scottish Government has failed to deliver on lowering our carbon emissions, on homes and buildings and on transport and land. Scotland and the UK urgently need change, and Labour’s green prosperity plan would deliver that. [Interruption.]
To be honest, a lot of the comments that I can hear the cabinet secretary muttering are deflection from SNP failures. We have had no publicly owned energy company, as promised; delays to the green industrial strategy, energy strategy and just transition plan; and massive cuts to budgets. It is not just this year—