Opinion: Will Scotland’s Programme for Government really set us up for a year of delivery on climate or will we look back at a missed opportunity?
The Programme for Government falls short on delivery, failing to meet the scale and urgency of the climate emergency. CERG member Stefanie O’Gorman stresses that the Scottish Government must now step up to delivery —adopting a genuine whole-of-government approach, backed by detailed delivery plans and rapid implementation.
It is exactly one year since John Swinney took over as First Minister of Scotland. He inherited a government on the back-foot on climate action, and over the last year has strongly reasserted his commitment to putting Scotland on track to reaching net zero by 2045. With just one year left of this Parliament, The Scottish Government has promised a ‘year of delivery’. But it is hard to see how the policies announced in this week’s Programme for Government (PfG) will deliver at the scale and with the urgency needed to address the climate emergency and deliver meaningful outcomes.
Some individual policies are welcome, but they are overshadowed by delays, missing measures, the dilution of previous commitments, and insufficient delivery.
On transport, the surprise scrapping of peak rail fares from September is most definitely welcomed to encourage the use of trains, but this will not reach the poorest households and overall the impact of this measure on delivering the required modal shift requires careful monitoring. The £2 bus fare cap pilot, while positive, has already been announced and the promised policy statement on reducing car use is set to be a watered-down version of a long standing and delayed commitment to cut car km by 20%.
On heat, while the importance of the Heat in Buildings Bill remaining in the government’s legislative programme cannot be understated, this too has been significantly delayed and diluted. It could play a strong part in tackling fuel poverty, the cost of living and child poverty, if it includes sufficient detail to provide market and consumer certainty, especially around heat networks, to drive delivery this year and next.
On land-use, the restoration targets for Scotland’s peatlands and woodlands are important but fall far short of what’s needed. While SEPA has just announced a water scarcity alert, amid concerns about this year’s harvest, progress to reform agricultural payments and strengthen advice to farmers to adapt and introduce nature-based solutions have been far too slow.
Commitments in the PfG need to be backed up with detailed delivery plans and swift implementation. In October last year, the Climate Emergency Response Group (CERG), published a report reflecting on why this delivery of climate commitments is off track and suggesting new ways of working that could turn this situation around. These included leadership, governance and a whole of government approach, that would see climate change integrated into all government plans, policies, and processes. In a ‘year of delivery’, getting these delivery approaches in place should be a priority.
While the climate emergency remains one of the government’s four key priorities, there is no evidence as yet that it really is at ‘the heart of everything we do’, a promise made in 2019. Rather than see the climate emergency as separate to, or even at odds with, the other priorities, the PfG had the opportunity to demonstrate how solutions to the climate emergency could support Scotland’s local economy, public services and child poverty eradication goals in the long term. This opportunity has not been grasped.
Rather than allowing further delays, the Scottish Government must now actually step up to delivery, by introducing a truly whole of government approach, founded on taking a systems approach, that integrates climate across all aspects of government action. And by bringing forward a Climate Change Plan this that delivers emission reductions now rather than relying on future developments in technology to address the climate emergency.
Stefanie O’Gorman
