davepickering

ScotWind auction: A truly historic opportunity … or selling off the family silver on the cheap?

Crown Estate Scotland has announced the outcome of its application process for ScotWind Leasing, the first Scottish offshore wind leasing round in over a decade and the first ever since the management of offshore wind rights were devolved to Scotland.

The results coming just months after Glasgow hosted the global COP26 climate conference show the huge opportunity that Scotland has to transform its energy market and move towards a net zero economy.

Highlights include:

17 projects have been selected out of a total of 74 applications, and have now been offered option agreements which reserve the rights to specific areas of seabed
A total of just under £700m will be paid by the successful applicants in option fees and passed to the Scottish Government for public spending
The area of seabed covered by the 17 projects is just over 7,000km2 (a maximum of 8,600km2 was made available through the Scottish Government’s Sectoral Marine Plan)
Initial indications suggest a multi-billion pound supply chain investment in Scotland
The potential power generated will provide for the expanding electrification of the Scottish economy as we move to net zero.
The details of the 17 applicants who have been offered option agreements can be found below and in the downloads section.

Totals		£699,200,000		24,826
Map reference	Lead applicant	Option Fees	Technology	Total capacity (MW)
1	BP Alternative Energy Investments	£85,900,000	Fixed	2,907
2	SSE Renewables	£85,900,000	Floating	2,610
3	Falck Renewables	£28,000,000	Floating	1,200
4	Shell New Energies	£86,000,000	Floating	2,000
5	Vattenfall	£20,000,000	Floating	798
6	DEME	£18,700,000	Fixed	1,008
7	DEME	£20,000,000	Floating	1,008
8	Falck Renewables	£25,600,000	Floating	1,000
9	Ocean Winds	£42,900,000	Fixed	1,000
10	Falck Renewables	£13,400,000	Floating	500
11	Scottish Power Renewables	£68,400,000	Floating	3,000
12	BayWa	£33,000,000	Floating	960
13	Offshore Wind Power	£65,700,000	Fixed	2,000
14	Northland Power	£3,900,000	Floating	1,500
15	Magnora	£10,300,000	Mixed	495
16	Northland Power	£16,100,000	Fixed	840
17	Scottish Power Renewables	£75,400,000	Fixed	2,000

Simon Hodge, Chief Executive of Crown Estate Scotland, said: “Today’s results are a fantastic vote of confidence in Scotland’s ability to transform our energy sector. Just a couple of months after hosting COP26, we’ve now taken a major step towards powering our future economy with renewable electricity.

“In addition to the environmental benefits, this also represents a major investment in the Scottish economy, with around £700m being delivered straight into the public finances and billions of pounds worth of supply chain commitments.

“The variety and scale of the projects that will progress onto the next stages shows both the remarkable progress of the offshore wind sector, and a clear sign that Scotland is set to be a major hub for the further development of this technology in the years to come.”

Should any application not progress to signing a full agreement, the next highest scoring application will instead be offered an option.

Once these agreements are officially signed, the details of the supply chain commitments made by the applicants as part of their Supply Chain Development Statements will be published.

This is just the first stage of the long process these projects will have to go through before we see turbines going into the water, as the projects evolve through consenting, financing, and planning stages.

Responsibility for these stages does not sit with Crown Estate Scotland, and projects will only progress to a full seabed lease once all these various planning stages have been completed.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has welcomed the “truly historic” opportunity for Scotland’s net zero economy, as the winners of the ScotWind offshore wind leasing auction were announced by Crown Estate Scotland yesterday.

17 projects, with a combined potential generating capacity of 25GW, have been offered the rights to specific areas of the seabed for the development of offshore wind power – with developers giving commitments to invest in the Scottish supply chain, providing opportunities for high quality green jobs for decades to come.

The projects are expected to secure at least £1bn in supply chain investment for every 1GW of capacity proposed. They will also generate around £700 million in revenue for the Scottish Government and represent the world’s first commercial scale opportunity for floating offshore wind.

As well as helping complete Scotland’s own journey to net zero, creating thousands of jobs in the process, our offshore wind resource also has the potential to position Scotland as a major exporter of renewable energy, including green hydrogen.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: ““The scale of opportunity here is truly historic. ScotWind puts Scotland at the forefront of the global development of offshore wind, represents a massive step forward in our transition to net zero, and will help deliver the supply chain investments and high quality jobs that will make the climate transition a fair one.

“It allows us to make huge progress in decarbonising our energy supply – vital if we are to reduce Scotland’s emissions – while securing investment in the Scottish supply chain of at least £1 billion for every gigawatt of power.

This will be transformational. And because Scotland’s workers are superbly placed with transferable skills to capitalise on the transition to new energy sources, we have every reason to be optimistic about the number of jobs that can be created.

“That means, for example, that people working right now in the oil and gas sector in the North East of Scotland can be confident of opportunities for their future. The spread of projects across our waters promises economic benefits for communities the length and breadth of the country, ensuring Scotland benefits directly from the revolution in energy generation that is coming.

“The scale of opportunity represented in today’s announcement exceeds our current planning assumption of 10GW of offshore wind – which is a massive vote of confidence in Scotland. So we will now embark on the rigorous consenting process required to make sure we can maximise the potential that clearly exists in offshore wind while also ensuring that the impacts of large scale development – including on other marine users and the wider natural environment – are properly understood and addressed.

“While it is not yet possible to say with certainty what the scale of development will ultimately be, there is no doubt that the scale of this opportunity is transformational – both for our environment and the economy.”

The Falck Renewables and BlueFloat Energy partnership taking part in the current ScotWind offshore wind leasing round is celebrating the success of three of its bids to secure seabed leases for sites which lend themselves to the deployment of large-scale floating wind technology in Scotland.

Two of the partnership’s proposed projects – a site east of Aberdeen in Plan Option E1 and a site north of Fraserburgh in Plan Option NE6 have been granted leases from Crown Estate Scotland – along with a proposed site east of Caithness in Plan Option NE3 which will be developed by a consortium of Falck Renewables, BlueFloat Energy and Ørsted.

The three areas could accommodate a total of approximately 3.0 GW of offshore wind capacity with the projects scheduled to be operational by the end of the decade, subject to securing consent, commercial arrangements and grid connections.

The successful bids combined BlueFloat Energy’s knowledge and experience in developing, financing and executing offshore wind projects with Falck Renewables’ strong track record of global project development and over 15 years of community engagement in Scotland.

Carlos Martin, CEO of BlueFloat Energy, said: “The Scottish coastline is ideal for developing offshore wind projects and our team is thrilled to be given the opportunity to deploy our expertise to deliver these projects in Scotland.

“The potential for boosting the economy and reinforcing Scotland’s position at the forefront of the energy transition is huge. We have already carried out extensive work on mapping out the Scottish supply chain and now look forward to ensuring we work with as many local companies as possible.”

Toni Volpe, CEO of Falck Renewables, said: “We are delighted that our applications have won the support of Crown Estate Scotland and that our offshore wind projects will be making a considerable contribution to providing Scotland with clean energy.

“Falck Renewables has a worldwide renewables portfolio and with our growth strategy we are on track to facilitate the global transition to a low carbon future.”

Richard Dibley, Managing Director of Falck Renewables Wind Ltd, said: “We are hugely excited about the positive impact these projects will have on the whole of Scotland in terms of creating jobs, economic benefit and helping to achieve a net zero future.

“Over the past 15 years we have seen communities empowered with the help of the financial support they have received from our onshore wind farms and we look forward to sharing the benefits of offshore wind with local communities.”

The Falck Renewables, BlueFloat Energy, Ørsted consortium has already begun work with community ownership experts Energy4All on a new framework which will allow residents of Scotland and Scottish communities to share the financial benefits of the offshore wind energy projects the consortium plans to build in the future.

As part of the preparatory work to deliver the offshore wind projects the consortium will collaborate with Energy Skills Partnership Scotland (ESP) to help train up a skilled workforce in time for construction to begin.

Research will also be carried out with the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) to investigate the potential effects of floating offshore wind developments on the marine environment. Projects under discussion will examine how fishing interests and offshore wind can work together and study the interaction of fish, marine mammals and seabirds with floating offshore wind farms.

Energy4All is a non-profit distributing co-operative social enterprise formed by the Baywind Energy Co-operative in 2002 to enable more communities to own and operate renewable energy projects.

Marna McMillin, Chief Executive of Energy4All, said: “Climate breakdown is the key environmental challenge facing our society. If we are to successfully decarbonize our economy, we must rapidly replace polluting fossil fuels with clean power. This requires us to generate much more zero carbon electricity to heat our homes and power our vehicles.

“We need the public to support those changes, and we believe one of the best ways of ensuring that support is to allow individuals to have a share in those projects.

“Falck Renewables has a 15-year track record of working with Energy4All having successfully set up seven co-operatives at its Scottish onshore wind farms, enabling thousands of people to buy a stake in their local wind farm.

“We think partnerships of this sort could be a model for other offshore projects in both the UK and the rest of Europe.”

Reacting to the outcome of the application process for ScotWind leasing by Crown Estate Scotland, the ALBA Party Depute Leader and MP for East Lothian Kenny MacAskill MP said: “This offshore wind giveaway is selling the family silver cheap while Scots families face crippling energy bills this April.

“Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it. It looks like the Scottish Government have surrendered vast chunks of the North Sea wind resource for a relative pittance just as Westminster gave away Scotland’s oil in the 1970s.

“Instead of a one off payment of under £700 million there should be annual payments. Instead of Scottish resources being just handed over to international investment companies there should be a public stake in every single field.

“One has to question the basic competence of Crown Estate Scotland. They think they have auctioned away 10-12 GW of power. Informed industry estimates are the real capacity from this round alone is double that.

“Offshore wind is fast becoming the most lucrative major power source on the planet. Scotland has one quarter of the resource of Europe. It will be cold comfort to Scottish pensioners shivering in their homes facing vast fuel bills to know that the Scottish Government have given away so much of the green power of the future for so little in return.”

The STUC says that the announcement must mark the end of broken promises to Scottish workers and presage the start of a long overdue renewables jobs revolution.

Oil giants Shell and BP, alongside Scottish and Southern Energy, Scottish Power Renewables, and a number of multinational companies have all won leases to develop offshore wind farms off Scotland’s coast.

Following campaigns from trade unions in the wake of failures to secure meaningful fabrication contracts at BiFab, the ScotWind leasing round included requirements on companies to make supply chain commitments, with many bidders making public statements promising major investments in job creation. However, these statements have not yet been published and in any case they do not require a specific proportion of work to be undertaken locally.

The STUC continues to be concerned that so few successful bids are from domestic companies, with previous experience showing that multinational companies regularly offshore work to Europe and the Far East.

The STUC is calling for the Scottish Government to call a summit of successful developers to secure ongoing commitments to cooperate on delivery and work with unions and government to make the green jobs revolution a reality.

STUC General Secretary Roz Foyer said: “Over the past six months the public relations teams of the prospective bidders have been in overdrive, promising the long overdue renewables jobs revolution. Now we need to make that happen.

“The First Minister says that we have every reason to be optimistic about the number of jobs that can be created, but our skills workers in oil and gas need more than words given the experience over the past decade tells us that jobs in offshore wind are consistently offshored overseas.

“With over 1000 massive turbines to become operational over the next decade, it would be nothing short of economic vandalism if we fail to build a thriving supply chain in Scotland. Fundamental to that is building the infrastructure to enable large scale fabrication in Scottish yards, requiring local content from developers, and addressing questions of ownership through the development of a Scottish National Infrastructure company.

“Unions will work proactively and positively with employers and business to deliver the Fair Work future our workers deserve, but we will also campaign vigorously to ensure that promises are kept.”

RCOT announce new strategy for championing the occupational therapy profession

The Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT) has announced a new strategy and rebrand, crucial to achieving its vision that people everywhere will value the life-changing power of occupational therapy.

The vision purposefully focuses on occupational therapy’s wider impact on society – enhancing the profession’s profile and positioning the role of occupational therapy for the future.

The five-year strategy details what RCOT will do to make its vision a reality. It guides RCOT to rise up to be bold, progressive advocates and champions, open up to new opportunities and people, lift up every occupational therapist to be the best they can be. RCOT has also adopted new organisational values that define how it’ll act and make decisions to reach its vision.

The new brand signals a major change and is essential to achieving RCOT’s ambitions. It has ‘occupation’ and inclusivity at its heart to capture the positive, dynamic and deeply human spirit of occupational therapy.

Commenting on this, RCOT Chief Executive Steve Ford said: “I’m hugely excited to be announcing our strategic plans and revealing our new brand which is critical to achieving our ambitions for the organisation and profession.

“At RCOT, everything we do is so that one day people everywhere value the life-changing power of occupational therapy. Our vision purposefully focuses on our wider impact on society – enhancing our profession’s profile and positioning the role of occupational therapy for the future.

“We listened to our members to find out how we can best support them as individuals, to enable and grow the profession, and to boost awareness so that more people want to get involved with occupational therapy – and choose it as a solution, or as their profession.

“To reach our ambitious goals we must improve and change how we work to become a more forward-looking organisation. We will boldly lead the profession forward with a stronger voice than ever before.

“We will be the advocate and champion that occupational therapists deserve, sharing and celebrating the life-changing outcomes they help to achieve for people and society. We will be proudly inclusive – welcoming and supporting new generations of occupational therapists to join the profession so we reflect the diverse society that we represent and work with.

“It’s time to show the world the true power of what we do.”

Burns Night delight: Buck & Birch present The Forager’s Haggis

With Burns Night fast approaching wild flavour innovators Buck & Birch felt it was a great time to share possibly the most indulgent and decadent Burn’s supper recipes going – The Forager’s Haggis!

A Burn’s Supper would traditionally consist of Haggis, neeps and tatties but head chef, master forager and flavour expert at Buck & Birch, Rupert Waites has elevated the dish with foraged ingredients, wild game and a mound of sweet, sticky, braised red cabbage made with a generous glug of Buck & Birch’s award-winning elderberry liqueur, Aleder Elixir.

This recipe may seem a little daunting to make from scratch, but a butcher bought haggis will work just fine but don’t forget the Aleder Elixir braised cabbage – it makes all the difference!

FOR THE HAGGIS

Beef bung for stuffing
500g toasted pinhead oatmeal
200g of well cared for, organic, minced pork fat or belly.
1.4kg wild game pluck (heart, lungs liver), ½ diced, ½ minced
500g of mixed wild game trimmings
100g finely diced onion
3 cloves of garlic chopped fine
1.5 litres game stock

SEASONING

6g juniper berries
6g dried coriander seed
2g ground mace
6g cracked black pepper
6g fresh thyme
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Salt to taste

METHOD

Toast the oatmeal and set aside. In a large pan fry the onion, garlic and dried spices until onions are translucent before adding the meat and browning for 5 minutes (some prefer to cook the meat first but this method keeps the finished haggis more juicy).

Add the oatmeal and ½ the stock and keep stirring, adding the remainder of the stock gradually until the oatmeal is al dente. Once done, season with lemon juice, fresh thyme and salt to taste.

Let the haggis cool before spooning the mixture into the soaked, rinsed ox bung. Be aware the filling swells as it cooks, so pack quite loosely, and keep a little bung at each end. When the haggis is the size required, expel any extra air, pinch, tie with string and cut with scissors.

Tie the new end of the bung, and continue stuffing. Freeze any spare haggises.

To cook the final haggis poach gently at about 83 deg c for half an hour to 45 minutes.

FOR THE AELDER BRAISED CABBAGE

1 small red cabbage
1 sliced red onion
70g soft light brown sugar
70ml cider vinegar
100 ml Aelder elixir
One large knob of butter
Sprigs of thyme

METHOD

Quarter the red cabbage and remove the core, then finely shred. Tip into a large pan with the red onion, brown sugar, cider vinegar, Aelder Elixir, thyme and butter and season well.

Bring to a simmer, then cover with a lid, lower the heat and cook for 1 1/ 2 hrs, stirring every so often.

Remove the lid and continue cooking for 30 mins until tender and the liquid is reduced and glossy .

Hidden Door to open at old Royal High School this summer

Hidden Door is delighted to announce that we will be bringing the old Royal High School on Calton Hill to life for a ten day festival of live music, visual art, dance, theatre and spoken word.

The property, which has mostly lain empty since the school closed in the late 1960s, will be used to celebrate Scotland’s exciting new and emerging creative talent, before work begins to transform it into Scotland’s new National Centre for Music.

The festival will completely transform the entire complex from 9 – 18 June 2022.

Inside the vast building, forgotten rooms will be transformed into performance spaces and given over to artists to fill with installations. The audience will be encouraged to explore the myriad of passageways, corridors, nooks and crannies that make up this remarkable building.

One of the most impressive rooms, the central debate chamber, will host specially commissioned in-the-round performances and spectacular events that respond to the unique space.

Outside, a stage will be built for large music performances and a bar will take over the front terrace, giving festival goers a unique view on the city.

An early release of tickets are available NOW via hiddendoorarts.org/tickets or from Citizen Ticket.

Once the full programme is announced, ticket holders will be able to select which days they would like to attend.

New funding for community organisations

Corra Foundation in partnership with Comic Relief are welcoming applications from community groups, organisations and charities for the latest round of #ShiftThePower Scotland Comic Relief Fund.

#ShiftThePower supports organisations with passionate people to make meaningful change in their communities.

Up to £20,000 is available to grassroots organisations and charities with an income of £250,000 or less, whose work fits one of two strategic themes:

Children Survive and Thrive

Supporting children to survive and thrive during the first years of life (0-5 years old) through targeted work and opportunities for children and families facing disadvantage.

Mental Health Matters

Supporting people with mental health issues or challenges to share their stories, live free from stigma and discrimination, and build positive relationships and experiences.

The Children Survive and Thrive strand will fund organisations supporting children at risk of, or experiencing, disadvantage.

Examples of this could include supporting parents, carers and communities, ideas that test new ways of supporting pre-school children or support for staff/volunteer training in early years settings.

The Mental Health Matters strand will prioritise organisations that have a focus on mental health issues alongside preventative approaches that support people before mental health issues escalate.

For example, the funding could be used to improve support networks or accessibility or relevance of services for people experiencing, or at risk of, poor mental health, especially those from marginalised groups.

The fund is seeking applications that demonstrate how the money will support people and increase the reach, capacity or quality of an organisation’s work or how it will support new ideas or approaches.

It is open to applications from today (17th January) and will close at midday on 8th March 2022.

The team at Corra is encouraging groups to get in touch to discuss their ideas before sending an application.

You can contact the #ShiftThePower team at shiftthepower@corra.scot or on 0131 444 4020.

More information, the full criteria and application can be found at www.corra.scot/grants/

Ten richest men DOUBLE their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99% of humanity FALL

New billionaire created every 26 hours, as inequality contributes to the death of one person every four seconds

The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion – at a rate of $1.3 billion a day – during the pandemic while the incomes of 99 per cent of humanity have fallen with over 160 million people forced into poverty and inequality contributing to the death of one person every four seconds, an Oxfam report reveals today.

The report Inequality Kills, published on the opening day of the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda, finds that a new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the start of the pandemic while the collective wealth of all 2,755 billionaires surged more than in the last 14 years put together. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest increase in billionaire wealth since Forbes records began in 1987.

If the ten richest men were to lose 99.999 per cent of their combined wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99 per cent of people on the planet and their wealth is six times more than that of the poorest 3.1 billion people.

The enormous rise in wealth is juxtaposed by a sharp increase in poverty around the world. Over 160 million more people are living on less than $5.50 a day than when the pandemic began. Inequality is now contributing to the death of at least 21,000 people each day, or one person every four seconds. This conservative finding is based on deaths globally from lack of access to healthcare, hunger, gender-based violence and climate breakdown.

Danny Sriskandarajah, Oxfam GB Chief Executive said: “The explosion in billionaire’s fortunes at a time when poverty is increasing lays bare the fundamental flaws in our economies.

“Even during a global crisis our unfair economic systems manage to deliver eye-watering windfalls for the wealthiest but fail to protect the poorest – it is an avoidable tragedy that every day people die because they lack essentials such as food and healthcare.

“Today’s generation of leaders can start to right these wrongs by implementing progressive taxes on capital and wealth and deploying that revenue to save lives and invest in our future. They should make sure that Covid-19’s long-term legacy is quality universal healthcare and social protection for all. Governments have an historic opportunity to back bold economic plans based on greater equality that change the deadly course we are on.”

The report also details how:

Developing countries, denied access to sufficient vaccines because of rich governments’ protection of pharmaceutical corporations’ monopolies, have been forced to slash social spending as their debt levels spiral and now face the prospect of austerity measures.
The pandemic has set gender parity back from 99 years to 135 years. Women collectively lost $800 billion in earnings in 2020, with 13 million fewer women in work now than there were in 2019. Over 20 million girls are at risk of never returning to school.
The pandemic has hit racialized groups hardest. During the second wave of the pandemic in England, people of Bangladeshi origin were five times more likely to die of Covid-19 than the White British population. In the US, 3.4 million Black Americans would be alive today if their life expectancy was the same as White people – a fact that is directly linked to historical racism and slavery.
Analysis of emissions by income group shows that over-consumption by the world’s richest people is one of the main drivers of today’s climate crisis. 20 of the richest billionaires are estimated, on average, to be emitting as much as 8,000 times more carbon than the billion poorest people.

Oxfam’s analysis showed that a one-off 99 per cent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls alone would raise $812 billion and could fund:

Enough vaccines for the world
Universal healthcare and social protection, climate adaptation and gender-based violence reduction in over 80 countries
While still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.

Oxfam recommends that governments:

Urgently tax the pandemic gains made by billionaires and introduce permanent wealth and capital taxes, investing the trillions that could be raised on universal healthcare and social protection, climate change adaptation, and gender-based violence prevention and programming.
Immediately waive intellectual property rules over Covid-19 vaccine technologies to allow more countries to produce safe and effective vaccines to usher in the end of the pandemic.
Tackle sexist laws that discriminate against women and create new gender-equal laws.
End laws that undermine the rights of workers to unionize and strike and set up stronger legal standards to protect them.

Inequality Kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unpre Download

Families suffering from ‘fuel stress’ set to treble to six million households as energy bills soar

The number of households suffering from ‘fuel stress’ – spending at least 10 per cent of their family budgets on energy bills – is set to treble overnight to 6.3 million households when the new energy price cap comes into effect on April 1, according to new research published today by the Resolution Foundation.

The research shows that the proportion of English households in ‘fuel stress’ – a general indicator of finding energy bills unaffordable and also the definition of fuel poverty in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – is currently 9 per cent.

It is expected to leap to 27 per cent as a result of the energy price cap rising by more than 50 per cent this April to around £2,000 per year. Ofgem will announce the new price cap level on February 7.

Levels of fuel stress are set to be highest in the North East and the West Midlands (33 and 32 per cent), among pensioner households (38 per cent), among those in local authority housing (35 per cent) and among those in poorly insulated homes (69 per cent of families in homes with an EPC F-rating).

The sheer scale of energy bill increases mean that fuel stress will no longer be confined to the poorest households, says the Foundation, but low- and middle-income families will find it hardest to cope as they spend a far greater share of their family budgets on these essentials.

The report notes that the Government is rightly considering ways to mitigate rising energy bills, and should target support at lower income households.

The Foundation says that the most effective way to support lower-income families is through the benefits system, with a faster-than-currently-planned uprating of benefits in April (benefits are set to rise by 3.1 per cent).

Alternatively, an additional payment based on the Warm Homes Discount (WHD) could be pursued. However, the policy will require major surgery in order to make it for purpose. The reforms should include making the WHD:

Bigger, by increasing the £140 payment by at least £300;
Broader, by widening eligibility to all families in receipt of pension credit or working age benefits (8.5 million families in total) and making payments automatic;
Timelier, the extra support should be delivered via an additional bill discount this spring, following the normal winter round; and,
Taxpayer funded, by funding the payments through general taxation (at a cost of £2.5 billion) rather than through further increases in everyone else’s energy bills.

A new vastly improved WHD would cut the number of households living in fuel stress by around five percentage points – equivalent to over one million families.

The report adds that the Government may also want to take action to cut everyone else’s energy bills too.

This could be achieved by spreading the costs of energy firm failure over a number of years (reducing bills by up to £65) and temporarily transferring the social and environmental levies needed to future-proof Britain’s energy supply from bills to general taxation.

This would cut everyone’s energy bills by around £245 and would cut the number of families in ‘fuel stress’ by over seven percentage points – or 1.7 million families – but at a cost of £4.8 billion.

In combination, this dual approach of providing support to all energy bill payers, alongside targeted support for those most at risk of falling into ‘fuel stress’ would reduce energy bills by up to £545 a year – at a cost of around £7.3 billion – and help to avert a cost of living catastrophe this year. The rise in fuel stress would be reduced by two thirds, with 2.7 million fewer families in fuel stress.

Finally, while short term measures are clearly needed, the medium- and long-term solution to energy price shocks is reform of our energy market, better insulating our homes, and reducing our dependence on natural gas via an accelerated move to heat pumps, and the rollout of renewable and nuclear electricity.

Jonny Marshall, Senior Economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “Rising gas prices are causing energy bills to soar, and will see the number of families suffering from ‘fuel stress’ to treble to more than six million households this summer.

“Fuel stress levels are particularly high among pensioner households, and those in poorly insulated homes – a stark reminder of the need to modernise Britain’s leaky housing stock and curb national dependency on gas for power and heating.

“The Government can take action by targeting support at lower income households via benefits or a bigger and broader version of the Warm Homes Discount. They should also temporarily transfer the cost of environmental levies onto general taxation, as well as spreading the cost of supplier failure over three years.

“While not cheap at £7.3 billion, this plan is affordable, and by cutting bills by up to £545 would help prevent the upcoming rise in energy bills turning into a cost of living catastrophe for millions of families.”

Forth and Inverleith Voluntary Sector Forum meets tomorrow

Forth and Inverleith Voluntary Sector Forum meets online tomorrow at 1.30pm for the first session of 2022.

AGENDA:

1) Welcome and Introductions

2) Update on Adult Learning Consultation – Fay Butler

3) Support with fuel bills and heating – Niall Murphy

4) Community Benefits Portal – Claire Darlow

5) Craigroyston High School support needs – Morag Wilson

6) Group Updates

7) AOB and next meeting

The meeting will take place on Zoom.

For login details please contact Kate Barrett, EVOC Community Planning Development Worker: telephone 0131 555 9100 or email kate.barrett@evoc.org.uk

EACC EGM this Thursday

The next meeting of the EDINBURGH ASSOCIATION of COMMUNITY COUNCILS will be an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) on Thursday 20 January at 7pm to update the EACC Constitution.

Other items include on the agenda include best practice for community council treasurers and police reports at CC meetings.

Author: davepickering