Policies made in the centre benefit the centre. These figures prove it

WE’VE often said that while the consequences of climate change are global – a tonne of carbon emitted anywhere affects everywhere, essentially no matter where it was emitted from – the causes of that climate change are hyper-local. Causes of damage to the planet can be identified down almost to the centimetre.

They come from that exhaust pipe, from this badly insulated home, and from the oil well located right there. In the Green movement they often say that pollution knows no borders – and this is true – but policy certainly does. Borders are, in a very real sense, the consequence of local policies. They are the line between where one government and their policies stop and another begins.

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This means that local sources of pollution require local policies to reduce and eliminate them. This, in turn, means that a lot of the actual heavy lifting of Scotland’s Green Transition will land on our local authorities to plan, coordinate and actually implement. Given that all of these plans must operate simultaneously and to the same timescale, it is vitally important that we are able to see what progress is being made and where, and possibly where they can learn from each other.

This is what makes a new report from Climate Emergency UK so interesting. Their latest iteration of their Council Climate Action Scorecards provides a deep dive into the progress being made (or not being made) by every local council in the UK. [Note: Common Weal is not affiliated with Climate Emergency UK nor were we involved with the creation of their report.] Their Scotland database shows both the general lagging behind of many of Scotland’s councils (only 14 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities had an overall score at or above the UK average) but also the very wide disparities between councils on meeting the climate targets set.

The highest in Scotland – Edinburgh City Council – had an overall score of 58% (the highest score in the UK was Westminster Council at 62%. Edinburgh came in as the only council in the UK in the top five and that wasn’t a district of London). For those of us on the west coast, Glasgow was ranked number 10 in the UK and second in Scotland with a score of 55%.

Conversely, the lowest scoring councils in Scotland were also our areas farthest from the capital – Orkney (24%, above), Shetland (19%), and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (17%). (I’m deliberately not calling Shetland “remote”. It’s fine just where it is. Edinburgh is remote from Shetland.) This is not a failing of these local councils. I’m not accusing them of holding back Scotland’s climate targets. Quite the opposite. What this report shows is that the policies developed in the political centres of power (of both the UK and Scotland) are far too tailored for those centres. They leverage their already built-in advantages to the detriment of elsewhere.

I support the various campaigns happening in our cities, such as Get Glasgow Moving’s push for public ownership of buses, or much of Edinburgh’s Active Travel plan, but these are policies that work well in urban environments and less well in more rural areas. Similarly, regulations on retrofitting housing on a street-by-street basis is much easier to do when retrofitting an estate of privately developed, cheaply built, volume-constructed houses all built to three or four floor plans.

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It’s harder to do when your farmhouse was built 150 years ago, your nearest neighbour is over the hill and their farm is completely different from yours. Indeed, our 2019 policy paper on rural fuel poverty, Carbon-Free, Poverty-Free, found that “accessibility to infrastructure” – not income, or wealth, or any other factor – was the highest correlator of fuel poverty in Scotland’s rural areas. This tells us that policy emanating from a political centre is just not reaching out to the places that need it most.

Local solutions are required but this also means better resourcing for local councils – and it needs more trust from the political centres. Scotland is long overdue for a serious discussion about local democracy and local resourcing for climate change mitigations – though small but important steps like the Tourist Tax and the recent announcement of a local Cruise Ship tax are welcome (despite my own land-locked South Lanarkshire being unlikely to benefit from the latter). I hope I’ll have space in future issues of In Common to explore those discussions more fully.

The Scottish Government should pay very close attention to the findings of the climate action scorecard as it develops the next set of climate policies for Scotland.

Ultimately, the solution to climate change lies in those with the power who haven’t been using it effectively. letting it go and giving it to those who can.

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