This woodburning stove ban is an assault on the rural poor

A blast from the stove will soon raise the thermometer. So I turn to a trusty fuel “made from recycled wood compacted into high-energy, clean-burning logs with exceptional eco-friendly credentials” or so it says on the recyclable packaging.

Soon, I feel not only warm but doubly virtuous. Air source heating … box ticked. Clean-burning logs with exceptional eco-friendly credentials… Halt! At this point, the spectre of Patrick Harvie alights upon my conscience.

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Far from being virtuous, my clean-burning logs are so pernicious they must be banned. The might of the Scottish Government is turned against them. If a house is ever again built in this setting, the act I have just committed will be illegal.

Those who come after us will endure power cuts without the glow of peat or wood to bring relief. Hopefully they will still be allowed to huddle round their candles.

Incidentally, though it will be a double whammy in Mr Harvie’s book, his edict will effectively kill off peat-cutting in the Highlands and Islands, the sole purpose of which is for domestic fuel. That is a cash-free transaction which rewards hard toil with the means of heating homes. Sad to see that honourable culture wiped out with a stroke of green ink.

All this is in the name of environmental virtue. But hang on. Not only are common sense credentials in dispute, so too are environmental ones. Air source heating in cold conditions works harder and needs more power from the grid.

Writing in Scottish Housing News, Dan Gates, an engineer who knows his stuff, states: “The use of wood stoves … can have considerable benefit to homes with heat pump systems. This is because heat pumps work harder in cold weather and can thus draw more power off the local grid on the coldest days”.

He continues: “In fact, in Sweden you are not allowed to install a heat pump in a rural home without having a wood stove for this reason.” I love that. In environmentally-friendly Sweden it is illegal not to have a wood stove and in Scotland it will be illegal to install one. What does the Byres Road jury make of that one?

Dividing lines in relation to this latest SNP/Green misadventure are naturally seen as urban versus rural; policy makers in Glasgow and Edinburgh who neither know nor care about the impact on daily lives of others. There is obvious truth in that analysis.

However, the more important and wide-ranging dichotomy is between rich and poor. In this case, it is mainly rural poor whose interests are disregarded; people, many of them elderly, who do not use wood or peat as a back-up but the only affordable and available source of heating. That will remain true for the foreseeable future.

There are over half a million properties in Scotland without gas grid connections, one in five of the total. They include two-thirds of homes in rural areas and well over 100,000 in towns and cities. In the Western Isles, as you might expect, 88% do not have mains gas. In Glasgow the figure is still 17%.

Non-availability of gas correlates strongly to fuel poverty: over 40% in the Western Isles and 25% in Glasgow. Should we not expect that any Scottish Government policy might be directed towards reducing these statistics rather than to further disadvantaging the very places and people who already fare worst?

That depends on your political priorities.

In Scotland, 1.4 % (repeat one point four) of households have heat pumps. Mr Harvie’s target is to install 200,000 a year by the end of the decade; a hypothesis on which other policy is based. In fact, 5,000 were installed last year which suggests quite a leap of faith (and indeterminate amounts of money) are required to match fiction to reality.

The underlying assumption of the woodburning stove policy, like so many others, is that ordinary people are reluctant laggards who need to be dragooned into line by legislation and regulation in order to meet the aspirations of their moral superiors. From that starting position, policies are imposed which will almost certainly have to be retreated from once they coincide with the cold light of day.

In Scotland, only 1.4 per cent of households have heat pumps (Image: Andrew Aitchison)

“Think before you ban” would be good advice. We have seen the same mentality at work with Highly Protected Marine Areas, the Deposit Return Scheme, the over-zealous traffic measures which are killing Glasgow city centre and much else. The SNP on their own were bad enough but with the Greens thrown in, they are insufferable.

In all these instances, a general public willingness exists to do the right thing for the environment. The same applies to the complex challenge of combining good practice with affordability and practicality when it comes to heating homes. But balance is also needed. Banning fuels on which a significant part of the Scottish population depends, particularly in areas of highest fuel poverty, is a fool’s errand.

Thoughtful politicians should strive to encapsulate the positive public mood on environmental progress and bring public opinion along with them. Zealots are incapable of taking that approach and too much of policy-making in Scotland is currently run by zealots.

Inundated with protests, Kate Forbes MSP tweeted: “New builds face same power cuts, fuel poverty and local wood source that make woodburners essential”. It seems unfortunate that she and her colleagues were unaware of all that before the policy took effect, rather than after another storm was provoked.

Brian Wilson is a former Labour Party politician. He was MP for Cunninghame North from 1987 until 2005 and served as a Minister of State from 1997 to 2003.