Meeting of the Parliament 01 June 2016
We are on fracking at the moment and I am sure that when my colleague discovers energy, we will move on to that. I will go back to the matter at hand. [Interruption.] I knew that the consensual sentiments expressed by Roseanna Cunningham earlier would not last for long, but I thought that we would get further than four minutes nine seconds in.
I say to the three amigos—the left-wing cabal of the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party—that on fracking, they are out of step with the scientific evidence and with what consumers and businesses want and need. They need to stop playing politics and start standing up for Scottish jobs. How they can look unemployed oil and gas workers in the eye while refusing them new jobs is beyond me.
The SNP needs to make up its mind—it is less decisive than the Liberal Democrats. It also needs to listen to its own advice. The Scottish Government’s own report says:
“The technology exists to allow the safe extraction of such reserves”.
The SNP needs to think about the long-term consequences of blocking an industry that has so much potential to create jobs and to increase security of supply. Of course fracking must be subject to local authority consent and the safest regulatory regime in the world but, from a global climate change point of view, it is worse to have swathes of supertankers traversing the world’s oceans to deliver shale gas to Grangemouth when we could have that production in Scotland.
Despite the Scottish Government’s talk—its talking up of Scotland in relation to climate change, which I welcome; today’s motion; and Roseanna Cunningham saying that she is incredibly proud—it has missed its interim climate change targets and recycling rate target for the past four years. In fact, the recycling rate in Scotland is the lowest in Britain—it is lower than that in England and far behind that in Wales. We need Scotland to set targets that are realistic, ambitious and linked to action.
I will focus on some areas for action. First, we need to send the right market signals. That means working with our finance sector to ensure that investment for circular economy business models and infrastructure is on similar terms to those for conventional investment.
We need to move away from using recycling rates as our only measure of success. After all, recycling is only the third best—or third worst—option on the waste hierarchy. We need to encourage waste prevention and reuse. We have a nationally accredited reuse brand in the revolve reuse quality standard and an increasingly professional third sector. We need to recognise those successes. We send the wrong signal if, when a local authority chooses to roll out an effective waste prevention campaign—such as the love food, hate waste campaign—and the food waste collected at the doorstep reduces as a result, the recycling rate is lower, because the local authority is doing the thing that we want it to do. Therefore, we need to consider other mechanisms for analysis, for example using carbon metrics, which have already been produced, or developing circular economy metrics.
We also need to represent design far more strongly than is done in “Making Things Last: A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland”. Politically, design sits with culture. Given that 80 per cent of a product’s lifetime environmental impact is decided at the design stage, we need to intervene then, which means aligning cultural and industry funding and ensuring that we not only produce the world’s greatest designers but retain them in Scotland. One solution would be to create a design hub that links academia with industry and ensures that we engage in product design, as well as business model and system design.
Somewhat tangentially, we must ensure that ownership is not the focus of the debate on land reform. Rather, we must use land more sustainably for the common good.
We need to create a circular economy for Scotland, and we need to ensure that we meet the needs of this generation and the next.
I move amendment S5M-00226.1, to leave out from “low-carbon” to end and insert:
“circular economy; considers that progress needs to be made for Scotland to meet its climate change targets, and believes that good and sustainable land use, rather than the way in which land is owned, is critical to ensuring a vibrant rural economy in Scotland.”
14:59Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.