The Common Home Plan

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:

• Buildings: All new construction must be energy-neutral and have at least 60-year lifespan | Renovate rather than demolish | Set up National Housing Company and insulate all existing homes to 90 per cent efficiency | Make all construction materials organic or recycled | Make all public buildings ‘energy positive’ | Require businesses to achieve high heating efficiency but provide subsidies for small businesses | All electrical goods must have AAA efficiency rating
• Heating: Set up an Energy Development Agency to plan the shift to renewable heating | Set up a National Energy Company to install a national District Heating System with renewable heat generation | Install renewable heating in off-gas-grid houses | Invest in training the workforce | Establish a Heat Supply Act to make this happen
• Electricity: The Energy Development Agency plans the move to a zero- carbon electricity | Set up a National Energy Company to build the generation and energy storage | Build electrolysis plants to generate hydrogen for energy storage | Nationalise and upgrade the National Grid with local storage and ‘smart grid’ technologies | Gradually take existing generation capacity into public ownership | Use an Industrial Strategy to develop domestic supply chains for all of this | End the extraction of oil and gas in Scotland
• Transport: Create a National Transport Company to plan the transition to carbon-free travel | Use better planning to reduce the need for car journeys | Begin installing charging and refueling infrastructure for zero-carbon vehicles | Replace or retrofit existing public transport to be zero-carbon | Commission more hydrogen ferries | Develop an air transport strategy
• Food: Set up a National Food Agency to plan a transition to a regenerative food system | Move to an agro ecological system for Scotland’s food production | Implement a strategy to greatly reduce food waste | Invest in new forms of food growing like vertical farming | Shorten supply chains by supporting new food processing businesses in Scotland | Strengthen regulation of the food industry and redesign farming subsidy regimes to encourage agroecology | Use pricing mechanisms to embed environmental externalities in the cost of food | Pursue import substitution to reduce the environmental impact of unnecessary imports | Institute a legal Right to Food to ensure that changes to the food system do not harm the access to healthy nutrition of anyone in Scotland | Consider implementing a Universal Basic Income
• Land: Set up a National Land Agency to oversee the management of Scotland’s land | It should then deliver a target of 50 per cent reforesting | Introduce a process of National Land Planning to zone rural land for specific purposes | Strengthened regulation and reporting on land management | Train roughly 20,000 additional land managers | Take direct action to diversify land ownership in Scotland | Develop a rural industrial strategy | Allocate fishing quotas on the basis of environmental performance | Implement Scotland’s water shortage plan
• Resources: Set up a National Resources Agency to oversee the move to zero waste | Develop a circular economy | Set a hierarchy for resource use: deconsumerise → dematerialise → simplify → share → reuse → remanufacture → compost → and only then recycle | Create a national waste collection and reprocessing service | Use ‘Producer Responsibility’ to make manufacturers responsible for the full lifecycle of the goods they produce | Use ‘externality taxes’ to ensure the price of goods reflects their true lifecycle costs | Invest in a wide range of initiatives like National Deposit Return schemes, container standardisation and tool libraries to optimise resource use | Ban single-use plastic | Regulate to discourage and then end the use of most single-use materials | Set up a National Consumer Agency to monitor all products, require them to be manufactured along circular economy lines and ban particularly harmful materials altogether

Summary of actions and approaches

There are a number of tools which can be used to encourage transformative changes to our lifestyles. However, it should be noted that most of these policy tools are designed to enact structural change rather than individual change and, again, it must not be read that these can simply be introduced into a free market economy as if they will succeed in shifting those markets. They won't, at least not as a result of individual behaviours.

— Infrastructure and planning. This is most important; our infrastructure drives our actions. If all shopping is out-of-town, cars become essential for shopping. If these longer journeys become unavoidable, we seek to minimise them by bulk buying. When we do large volumes of shopping in one go we make bad decisions which lead to more food waste. The single most important thing we can do is plan our infrastructure such that it makes it easy for us to 'do the right thing' – and much harder for us to do the wrong thing.

— Regulation and law. Certain behaviours must simply be curtailed or prevented; there are a number of places in the Common Home Plan where specific regulations have been proposed. One legal approach which should be emphasised more is a 'rights-based' approach, such as a legal right to healthy and ethical food. This places an additional legal pressure to stimulate transition.

— Tax and incentive. Pricing mechanisms are considered 174 175 above (see Trade). These are not primarily designed to 'nudge' behaviour but rather to make people responsible for the impacts they are already having. This is more about making responsibly-produced goods more competitive against cheaper, poorly-produced goods, but will inevitably also have impacts on how people spend. There is some scope for other incentives (such as payments, tax discounts or funds to encourage people to do things or to stop doing things) but these largely assume market solutions (such as home feed-in tariffs for renewable energy generation) and most of the work needed will be done and paid for collectively, reducing the need for targeted incentives.

— Measurement and accounting. There is a very wide literature on why our current indicators for measuring social and economic progress are flawed, particularly for their failure to value externalities and the incentives towards bad behaviours they create (such as by relying on GDP measurements). The need to stop these current indicators dominating political debate is well known, as is a wide range of other measurement options. These must be adopted and used. However, measurement has in part become such an important part of political debate because of the decline in collective planning; we should not be adopting an approach of 'stand back, look at the indicators and then nudge policy levers accordingly' but rather one of collective planning and monitoring of progress towards outcomes.

— Education. This has been considered above (see Learning). These are the range of actions which can help to change individual and organisational behaviour. Their specific application has been discussed throughout the Common Home Plan. Changing political behaviour is much more difficult. This report is not the place to discuss this in depth, but our current political structures are designed in a way which reinforces poor decision making processes. Ineffective regulation of commercial lobbying continually leads to bad decision-making, short term electoral cycles leads to short term planning, an overly-commercial media reinforces commerce-friendly debate at the expense of proper reporting of the wider impacts of commerce, a focus on personalities reduces the amount of focus put on policy scrutiny and proper evaluation of long-term outcomes and so on.

Common Weal has published a range of work on democratic reform, from new modes of participatory democracy to ways to make lobbying much more transparent (and to limit its impacts). While it is hard to argue that the Common Home Plan is impossible without democratic reform (including land reform), it will be much more difficult to sustain momentum politically if reforms aren't made. In particular, unless action is taken to diversify the media and limit the impact of commercial lobbying, there will be a well-funded and organised attempt to prevent many parts of the action programme because they will interfere with the short-term interests of different commercial groups.

Making it happen

— Set an explicit policy of deconsumerisation and promote its benefits to individuals.

— Change our cultural expectations and lifestyles with the full range of structural changes proposed in the Common Home Plan.

— Make all of our consumption habits operate within a circular economy model by implementing proposals in the Resources and Trade sections of the Common Home Plan.

— Establish a National Consumer Agency with the aim of regulating all goods sold in Scotland.

— Radically reform the role of advertising and marketing by changing definitions of 'fair' advertising.

— Adopt a planning rather than market approach to change and expect governments to work to much longer-term timescales.

— Replace existing measures of economic success which promote growth and replace them with measures of wellbeing and social development