Meeting of the Parliament 14 March 2023
I thank the members of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee for carrying out the inquiry, the many organisations and individuals who gave evidence and the committee clerks and researchers for their work in distilling the evidence into the committee’s excellent report, which makes an important contribution to the debate on how we get Scotland on track to meet our climate commitments.
As the report stresses, our local authorities are crucial to the journey to net zero. As the biggest employers and service providers in Scotland, and as major owners of land and buildings, councils will have to lead by example in cutting their own carbon footprint. Many of the services that our councils provide—from transport to housing and from recycling to care of our open spaces—will be key in supporting communities to play their part in tackling the climate and nature crises.
Our councils are more than the sum of the services that they provide. They are the bodies that we look to for leadership in our communities to build the local partnerships that will help to enable us all—households and businesses—to cut our carbon emissions and meet our common goal of a transition to net zero and, crucially, to make sure that it is a just transition. However, councils can only do that if we properly empower and resource them, which we are failing to do.
In budget after budget, the Scottish National Party and the Greens have hollowed out local government, stripping £6 billion from council budgets in the past decade. As the Scottish Trades Union Congress said in its evidence to the committee,
“The most recent Scottish Budget has further entrenched cuts to Local Government. This needs to be reversed.”
The NZET Committee was clear in its report. Our councils need additional financial support in their core funding and a more strategic approach to dedicated net zero funding, ending the fragmented, short-term, time-consuming bidding wars that we see from challenge funding.
Although the Government has not yet bothered to respond to the committee’s report, COSLA’s response made the point that
“Local government does not have the core, flexible resources it needs to develop local net zero programmes and climate resilience … we need to urgently simplify funding of national programmes so that there are fewer challenge funds, and more larger, multi annual funds.”