Scotland's green transition will be more expensive than it has to be

Good evening! This week's edition comes from Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research at Common Weal.

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Scotland’s green transition is coming, it’s going to be expensive, and it’s going to be worth it.

However the strategy from the Scottish Government is going to make it much more expensive than it has to be, will ensure that those least able to pay for it will foot either the bill or the consequences of not paying up, and is going to blame us for missing their targets as a result of our “individual inaction”.

It needn’t be this way and in our latest policy paper, we’ve shown how much cheaper the alternative of collective public action would be in comparison.

The Secret Bill identifies two major sources of cost premium of the individualistic model of retrofitting that, between them, will push up the cost of home retrofitting by around £9000 per house.

The first is the upwards cost to you, the homeowner, for planning your own retrofitting project on your house (that is, if you are even in a position to go that far – if you’re a tenant and you landlord doesn’t want to maintain their capital asset – your home – at an adequate standard then you’re just going to have to put up with that cold flat knowing that they’ll evict you if you complain and they’ll put your rent up anyway if you don’t).

READ MORE: Call for heat pumps to be part of major public works programme

Yes, some grants and subsidised loans may be available to some, but for many it won’t cover the full costs and if you don’t have the cash in hand for the remainder then you’ll be borrowing from the bank at commercial rates that are currently higher than they’ve been in over a decade.

It won’t just be the bank that profits, of course. The result of privatising large swathes of our economy (including our housing, construction and energy sectors) mean that everyone involved in those chains will take their cut too.

The outsourcing of manufacturing beyond Scotland’s borders is another source of money outflow which almost certainly means that the little public funding you do get to help will often move into the profits of a company overseas.

Whether that company is private and pays taxes to its host nation or it is outright publicly owned, that means our public money helping to fund the green transition in those countries too.

The second source of inefficiency lies in the piecemeal nature of the work. Imagine hiring someone to replace your gas boiler with a heat pump. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s a one-day job. Tomorrow, they’ll be in the next town over installing one there.

Next day, they’re half way across the country. The day after that, they’re at your neighbour’s house. That’s a lot of inefficient travelling and time wasted.

For some jobs it’s worse in that they might be waiting for plaster to dry before they can repaint a freshly insulated wall. Street-by-street retrofitting (something once strongly advocated by the Scottish Green Party) has been shown in places like the Netherlands has been shown to be cheaper and faster and, ironically, Scotland is well suited to it because of our mass-built cookie-cutter estates that are easy to survey compared to European suburbs full of bespoke houses.

The job of retrofitting our houses should be a national scale public works project done for the common good and paid for collectively over time. We didn’t create our networks of sewage waste removal by telling people that they won’t be allowed to sell their home unless they upgrade the outhouse at the bottom of the garden.

While it’s encouraging that the Scottish Government is slowly coming to this realisation (albeit only after suffering the bad headlines that I and others warned them would come if they didn’t), they’re still going about collective responsibility in retrofitting in the wrong way.

It’s not enough to tell people they must upgrade their home ... except if they live in a zone where they might get a heat network at some point in the future, except we’re not going to fund local authorities to work out where the heat network zones might be.

That’s a policy that might salve last week’s bad headline but even for someone like me who lives and breathes energy policy ... it just leaves everyone confused.

If my oil boiler breaks tomorrow, should I get a heat pump that might be replaced in two years if a heat network arrives? Or should I just get a cheap oil boiler replacement then spend 10 years wondering if it’ll last until the heat network does?

The Scottish Government must radically overhaul and collectivise its retrofitting strategy.

We all need it. We’re all going to have to pay for it. They owe us to do it as effectively and as efficiently as it can be done. Only then, will it be worth it.