Meeting of the Parliament 10 May 2018
For clarification, the Labour amendment and the Tory amendment to the Scottish Government motion are the only two amendments that have been selected for debate.
Labour welcomes the publication of the route map. It sets out a series of targets to ensure that homes are warmer, greener and more fuel efficient, and it seeks to reduce the scourge of fuel poverty, which—as we all agree—blights the lives of so many people and families across Scotland. In addition, it lays out further steps to meet our climate change obligations. In my speech, I will cover mainly housing; my colleagues will cover other aspects of energy efficiency in their contributions.
We agree that we must, when we set policy, always help our most vulnerable people. There is therefore a huge amount to be done to reduce actively the burden on poorer households who are trying to stay warm and reduce their energy bills.
There is a lot that we can welcome in the route map but, in truth, it has failed to be the ambitious framework that it might have been. It is a missed opportunity, so we set out to influence its direction of travel in the debate today. We share the view of the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, in that we do not believe that a commitment to reduce fuel poverty below 10 per cent by 2040 properly represents a commitment to end fuel poverty.
We do, however, welcome the new definition of fuel poverty, which is calculated after housing costs, but we believe that the timescale is too long. We agree with the SFHA that a commitment to reducing fuel poverty below 5 per cent by 2040, or even below 10 per cent by 2030, would have been more desirable.
We disagree strongly with the Government’s decision not to include a rural minimum income standard in the new definition. It is quite astonishing that rural fuel poverty does not feature much in the route map, when the highest levels of fuel poverty are found in Scotland’s rural and island communities. The fuel poverty rate for rural households in Scotland is 37 per cent, which is more than 10 per cent higher than the national figure.
We agree with the Government that energy efficiency should have the status of an infrastructure priority—a point that was covered by Alexander Burnett. However, as has been said by the consumer futures unit of Citizens Advice Scotland, we believe that significantly higher levels of funding would have been commensurate with the designation that would be required to make it a reality as an infrastructure project. That is a missed opportunity.
The £54 million budget that was announced by the First Minister for 2018-19 is not all new money; it is rather disappointing that only £5.4 million is new funding. The Scottish Government needs to rethink that. Energy efficiency cannot be taken seriously as a national infrastructure priority with only £54 million having been allocated to it.