Meeting of the Parliament 28 May 2026 [Draft]
The cabinet secretary seems to be enjoying the new rules about interventions. Is he not aware that there have been some major changes in international circumstances? Average bills had been going down, especially for those on direct debits. Most critically, if he is talking about the lowest cost, I would ask him where in Europe has the lowest electricity cost. It is France, 80 per cent of whose generation comes from nuclear. If we are going to have a serious argument on energy costs, let us have it, but let us have it on the basis of facts, not assertion and dogma, which is what we have from the SNP Scottish Government.
The reality is that, if the SNP is going to assert that independence would lower bills by a third, it needs to explain how that would happen. Where is the excess? Right now, electricity bills are underwritten by taxpayers to the tune of £39 annually. What would happen to contracts for difference under an independent regime or a devolved one? Is the SNP saying that Scottish bill payers would pick up that underwriting? The reality is that the strike price has been above the wholesale electricity price, not below it. The SNP needs to answer those questions if it wants a serious debate on the matter.
We need a serious debate, because there are a number of areas within devolved competence on which we should be seeking to go further and faster. Why has the Scottish Government not been progressing quickly and successfully on upgrades? Consumer Scotland expects the schemes in Scotland to reach just 45 per cent of fuel-poor households, but the figure in England has been 95 per cent.
On transmission and infrastructure charging and upgrades, we have failed to see the support for the planning regime that we need to accelerate progress. The reality is that it takes seven to 10 years for renewables projects to get through the planning system in Scotland. Comparable projects in countries such as Norway take three to four years. Where has been the progress on heat networks? Where is the SNP’s promised publicly owned power company? Those are just some of the many questions on matters that are within devolved competence that we need to examine, and we need a debate on them.
It is all well and good to talk about renewables, but we have failed to have a public debate and discourse about what they mean in relation to infrastructure. That is why we now see renewables being used as a political football. We need a candid discussion because, if we are going to have renewables generation, we will require the infrastructure to distribute that power—not least to the rest of the UK, to which we want to sell that electricity. That infrastructure is underwritten and paid for across the United Kingdom.
Those are some of the things that we need to talk about. By all means, let us have a candid and mature debate about the future of our energy economy, but I do not believe that the motion or the Government’s proposals are anything more than sloganeering and rhetoric from the SNP.
I move amendment S7M-00159.2, to leave out from second “that” to end and insert:
“Scotland needs a managed and just transition that relies on an integrated UK energy market, balancing the continuing role of oil and gas alongside the maturity of the North Sea activity and Scotland’s climate targets, and supports the examination of all energy technologies, including nuclear, to achieve a sustainable energy mix.”
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