At last, some long-term thinking about our energy supplies.
Scotland features hugely in the UK Government’s plans to upgrade our gas and electricity networks. We are, after all, the “renewables powerhouse of Britain”. It’s going to cost £90billion over the next five years to renew our gas pipelines and erect new electric pylons. So we will see lots of work-sites and lots of arguments over preserving the natural beauty of the Scottish countryside.
The whole programme will be paid for by us, in higher energy bills – £108 more a year on average – but the clever thing is that, in the long term, that cost will be reduced by £80 because we won’t be subject to sudden hikes in global gas prices and we won’t have to pay the £810 million a year which presently goes in compensation to windfarms whose electricity cannot be handled by the present grid network.
The project will begin modestly with Scottish Power and Scottish and Southern Energy spending £5billion between them building new pylon lines, linking the North Sea and Island windfarms with the urban centres of electric demand. But the new giant pylons are likely to run into fierce local opposition as they stride through good agricultural land and Highland beauty spots. But the electricity is needed to fuel economic growth as we transition to electric cars and home heat pumps.
Great British Energy, the UK Government’s agency for renewables, has also being outlining its long-term strategy. The Aberdeen-based agency is planning to use its £8 billion funding to leverage in £15 billion of private investment to produce 15 gigawatts of clean energy by 2030 and create 10,000 jobs. It’s slow progress, compared with the 12,000 jobs that are said to be shed every year as the oil and gas industry runs down. But it’s a start.
The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was in Scotland on Thursday defending the government’s decision to maintain the windfall tax on oil companies and stressing the need to move to renewables. He was also here to boast about the ending the two-child benefit cap, one of the big promises in last month’s Budget (costing £3 billion a year). He told campaigners in Glasgow he was proud to be lifting an estimated 95,000 Scottish children out of poverty. He wasn’t always prepared to do so, but after a year of pressure from Labour MPs, he changed his mind.
When UK prime ministers come to Scotland it’s customary to ask if they are benefiting their party’s standing or damaging it. In Sir Keir’s case, he was damaging it before the Budget and Labour’s rating in the opinion polls fell to below 20 per cent. Now, with his more left-leaning tax and spend agenda, I’m not so sure.
The difficulty for the SNP is that they are taking the blame for the shocking state of the public services, even though The Scottish Government’s overall budget is controlled by London. This week the focus was on the NHS. The usual winter pressures have been added to by the unusually early arrival of the flu outbreak. The number of people lab-tested for the infection has doubled in the last week to 1,700. A survey by the British Medical Association found that a quarter of doctors believe their workload is unmanageable and that services are “normally unsafe.”
Then on Thursday the Auditor General published his annual report on the NHS in Scotland which found it was “financially unsustainable”. No matter how much NHS budgets and staff numbers increase, they never keep up with rising demand. 37 per cent of the entire Scottish government’s budget now goes to the NHS. Long-term reforms, such as better out-of-hospital care and preventive medicine, have been long-promised but not delivered.
Perhaps there is something wrong with the way The Scottish Parliament is working, in that long-term reforms are not being confronted. A report out this week from Gordon Brown’s think tank, Our Scottish Future, says Holyrood is struggling to deliver for the people of Scotland. It says The Scottish Government should do less but do it better, with stronger financial controls and with more devolution to local councils and regions.
It’s all very well to exhort politicians to think long-term but actually it’s quite hard to do, even in our own lives. It needs patience and forbearance, qualities not fashionable these days. It’s also difficult when people have different views on what should be regarded as “long term” priorities. You only have to think of climate change.
So when governments occasionally do something for the longer term, like up-date the grid or reform the NHS, we should applaud them.
