21 Policies that would enable Scotland to meet our responsibilities as laid out by the 2021 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

― According to the latest figures, 26.5% (or around 649,000) of Scottish households live in fuel poverty while 7.5% of households (183,000) live in extreme fuel poverty. This is unacceptable in contemporary Scotland.

― The Scottish Government should abandon its staged approach to housing energy efficiency improves as it creates ongoing (rather than one-time) upheaval for construction companies and adds to the problem of retrofitting existing buildings to the most efficient standards.

― The aims of the European Union’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), which requires EPCs to be produced for all new buildings and those being sold or rented out, are fundamentally sound and should serve to drive improvements in energy performance. However, in Scotland and the UK, the method by which EPCs are produced are fundamentally flawed. In particular, this is due to the reliance on using modelled energy consumption data rather than actual (measured) data.

―  We have identified no examples of low-carbon heating being taken up on a large scale without government assistance.

― The primary barrier to the roll-out of low carbon heat is financial. Efficient schemes like renewably powered district heating will have to be government financed.

― Without significant government planning, individual households are likely to decarbonise their heat using heat pumps which, while an improvement over fossil fuels, have significant downsides – not least, their collective impact on the electrical grid.

This Technical Report is an annex to The Common Home Plan, a part of Our Common Home – A Green New Deal for Scotland.

There is an awful lot in the Plan. The following is a very quick summary of some of the key action points from the plan: