KATE FORBES: Go and stick the fire on…
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Many of my recent discussions have centred on how community groups themselves are resolving problems and finding solutions.
That is partly due to constraints on the public purse, and partly because of community empowerment legislation that has enabled small groups to achieve their aspirations themselves.
As the land fund matched legal powers to buy land or buildings, and communities saw an opportunity to become more resilient, their ambitions have grown exponentially. See the Aviemore and Glenmore Community Trust!
Communities aren’t waiting, they’re working together to fix local problems.
Local volunteers, who should be anointed as heroes, dedicate hours of work to serving their local community – unpaid and often unofficial.
They do the work of several teams of paid public servants.
But as the dedication and determination of local communities surpass anything that has gone before, they are rightly inpatient and intolerant of any active efforts by well-paid public officials to disrupt, delay or undermine their efforts to build resilience.
I think that is why so many recent Government policies – local and national – have gone down like a lead balloon in local communities.
And it’s why the most recent decision to semi-ban log burners in new builds seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s backs.
Think about energy. No Government has ever bothered to install mains gas in many communities. Connecting new builds to electricity often costs in tens of thousands of pounds with lengthy delays.
In these same communities, we’ve seen increasing numbers of prolonged power cuts in the last few years.
In some cases, these have lasted days. I know of several householders, often older residents, who have unblocked chimneys and installed woodburners precisely because of the lack of resilience in the energy system.
People don’t complain, they just find solutions. When it comes to a power cut, spiralling energy costs or any other risk to energy security, there is only one solution: put a fire on.
And so they really don’t like it when Government appears to want to eliminate one of the very few options they have for resilience.
As somebody said to me in response to news of the ban on woodburning stoves in new builds – so what happens when the heat pump breaks down, you order a part and it gets delayed in transit?
Everybody else can stick a stove on – but you can’t because you applied for your building warrant after 1 April 2024.
Of course, we still aren’t precisely sure whether the ban is really a ban because the wording for what constitutes an emergency is woolly.
A power cut affects every home equally badly, irrespective of when the house was built. The well-insulated modern home may last a bit longer, but with several days of power cuts these days, even they might need to stick a fire on.
You’ll be able to spot the new builds in a power cut easily – they’ll all be huddled around a big bonfire in the garden trying to stay warm.
The Scottish Government has done so much for rural communities, but in politics you’re only remembered for the last thing you did.
There is no level playing field – rural areas face much greater hurdles. Government should be trying to lower those hurdles, not add more.
