PEOPLE in the Highlands face a more difficult winter this year than last, an SNP MP has warned.
Graham Leadbitter, who was elected to represent Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey at the General Election in July, spoke to the Sunday National after holding constituency surgeries across the area he now represents at Westminster.
He said that – after saying congratulations – many people across the Highlands and Moray brought up issues like the cost of living, cost of doing business, and energy bills. People were being impacted by austerity, Leadbitter said, although no one was calling it that.
“If I'm being absolutely honest, [austerity] is not a word that the public have generally used at all,” he said. “It's a word that's been used by parties, by politicians and by journalists.
“An individual doesn't talk about austerity as a whole. They talk about funding for local infrastructure, for a particular thing they are concerned about, or whether their Winter Fuel Payment will come in, whether there are enough buses to get them around. Individuals break it down to the individual things that affect them.”
The Winter Fuel Payment is a particular issue in Leadbitter’s constituency, which covers the northern Cairngorms – some of the most mountainous terrain in the UK. The payment had been available to everyone of pension age and was worth between £100 and £300 before Chancellor Rachel Reeves took the decision to cut it back and make it means-tested.
Last Friday, energy watchdog Ofgem confirmed that the price cap on energy would rise by 10% to £1717 per year for an average household from October 1. Although this is lower than the £1834 price cap which was in place in 2023, the loss of the Winter Fuel Payment for many pensioners means they will face paying more.
Leadbitter raised concerns that the least well-off are being saddled with higher bills, and said Labour needed to answer why their “first port of call to try and ‘balance the books’ was to take away the Winter Fuel Payment, which absolutely, disproportionately affects the people in my own constituency in the Highlands and Moray”.
He went on: “I don't think anybody who was involved in that decision has spent more than a few days' holiday in the Highlands, and probably not in the winter. They really need to understand the totally disproportionate impact this has.
“What we're getting with the UK Government is essentially more of the same, and the only way that we are going to see fundamentally different approaches to how things are done is for Scotland to be independent. For the people who are making the decisions to have a much, much greater understanding of the communities that are most affected by those decisions.
“At the moment, we have a distant government with people who are distant from the issues and distant from the people who are affected by those decisions.”
The new UK Government has insisted that its GB Energy investment vehicle will lower energy prices in the long term, but Leadbitter said it had not been “coherently explained” how that would work.
The SNP MP argued that more rapid intervention in the market could bring down bills faster. “We're working with a regulatory system that is decades old. There's no resemblance to how energy is generated now, or where it's generated,” he said.
Leadbitter warned that this winter was set to be more difficult than the last for many people, adding: "To strip away the funding for the winter fuel allowance and not be dealing with the regulatory issues and issues around the price cap, there's certainly going to be a bitter winter for folk."
Leadbitter’s arguments echoed those made by Octopus Energy boss Greg Jackson, who said last month that a change from the UK’s current national energy pricing system to a regional one would benefit every part of the country and see Scotland “have the cheapest electricity in Europe".
But that reform does not look to be coming from the Labour government, which has already scrapped plans for social care reform, cut back investment for road, rail, and health infrastructure, and is reportedly set to raise taxes and impose cuts on some departments in the Autumn Budget.
Leadbitter said that from speaking to people in his new constituency, and stretching back “many, many years” over his time as a councillor and Moray Council leader, he believed Scots in general would be willing to pay fair taxes if that meant improved public services.
However, he warned Labour would have “absolutely no excuse whatsoever for an increase in taxes for people who are the least well-off”.
Reeves and the Labour government faced accusations of making the poorest pay after reports earlier this week that they would allow social rents in England to be raised by inflation plus one per cent every year for a decade.
Labour’s plan is to give providers of social housing – which is usually rented at 50% of the market rate – extra income in order to build more affordable homes.
However, a slew of charities warned that the move would negatively impact the least well-off, with the Social Housing Action Campaign accusing Labour of heaping “financial misery onto the shoulders of struggling families”.
Leadbitter said that the approach was the wrong one. “A thing that really grates with me is that if you want to kick start an economy and grow an economy, the best way to do it is to put money in the pockets of people who will spend that money,” the SNP MP said.
“The Tories, when they cut taxes for the wealthiest, in many cases that additional money will end up going into savings or an investment fund. I'm not saying that savings or investment are a bad thing, but it's not circulating money in the high street. It's not spending money in the local butcher. It's not spending money with local companies.
“If you give that money to people who really need it, then it gets circulated back into the economy, and that supports more jobs and economic growth and that generates tax revenue. It’s a much more virtuous circle.”
He further argued that there are options for the Labour government to look at which are not even being considered, such as nationalising “not just the rail service, but the rolling stock that's used on the railways”.
“Those rolling stock companies are taking out hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and many of them declare their dividends offshore,” Leadbitter said.
“So even in the delivery of public services, we're losing many, many millions of pounds worth of taxation that should otherwise be coming into the economy and supporting the services that we all value.”
