How SNP's 'world-leading' £2 billion nature restoration pledge disappeared into thin air

Instead, it’s about seeking a fight in the hope that cruel “Westminster” tells him: “You don’t have powers to fix the price of cheese.”

Hopefully, though I wouldn’t count on it, nobody is daft enough to oblige. Instead the wheeze should be left to backfire of its own devices, amidst disdain that genuine anxieties around living costs in a global crisis should be exploited as a crude political pawn.

Alas, this is the pathetic level at which so much of Scottish politics operates. Headlines are invariably unmatched by outcomes. Vast sums are wasted which could have been devoted to productive purposes in our society of many needs.

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Environmental quango’s soaring budget

So let me digress into one precedent of where grandiose schemes ungrounded in reality have come to grief so that all we are left with is wasted years, wasted money and lost opportunities for genuine reform.

Recently, I was surprised to learn that the budget of NatureScot, the environmental quango, has increased by 60 per cent in the course of the parliament just ended. At the same time, in a different silo, local government continues to be cut to the bone and beyond.

It’s not as if councils don’t have their own environmental ambitions which they are unable to fulfil because they are skint. These would probably be more closely aligned to the priorities of their communities than NatureScot’s agenda.

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The specific reason for Edinburgh’s largesse towards NatureScot is tied into a commitment to spend hundreds of millions on tree-planting and peatland restoration as part of a drive for net zero.

I like trees and will happily see more on our hills. About “peatland restoration”, I am more sceptical. Maybe that’s because I live on an island largely composed of peat and it would take both a century and a fortune to make any noticeable impact, other than improving landowners’ bank balances.

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Plutocrats and hedge funds

Instead of getting on with these tasks at an affordable level in partnership with rural communities, they have become the peg on which to hang another fiasco. That word reminded me of Humza Yousaf, briefly First Minister of Scotland before he fell out with the Greens.

Humza went to the City of London to declare Scotland a “world leader in natural capital”. Plutocrats and hedge funds were beseeched to join the green rush by investing in Scottish land on the promise of carbon credits which would flow from planting trees or restoring peatland.

To anyone with half an ethical wit, it seemed a dubious proposition, which could have been designed to attract spivs and chancers (as it duly did). Demand for access to the envisaged pots of gold was bound to drive up land values, at the expense of any community interest.

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This was the diametric opposite of reforms, long promised but undelivered, to create a more democratic structure of Scottish land ownership. If the aims were environmental, why not just invest public money in rural communities? Why turn it into a circus of speculation?

That approach would have been unlikely to attract the desired “world leader” headlines. And so it came to pass that in March 2023, NatureScot announced “a private finance investment pilot that could mobilise £2 billion” for these purposes. Please note – that’s billion with a ‘b’.

A press release gushed: “The partnership with UK private bank Hamden & Co, Lombard Odier Investment Managers and global impact firm Palladium is a ‘national first’ in ambition and scale, positioning Scotland as a world leader in nature restoration through natural capital investment.”

Another dead duck

Except that it didn’t. The whole thing quietly disintegrated without a pound of private investment leveraged. Private investors concluded there were richer pickings elsewhere than in the peat bogs and windswept hills of rural Scotland, while waiting for the carbon credit market to take off.

Early last year, after these City of London titans had disappeared, ambitions were quietly downscaled from £2 billion to a mere £100 million through a tie-up with the “wealth and investments group”, Aberdeen. Just before Holyrood broke up, the Labour MSP Rhoda Grant tabled a question asking how much private finance has been committed through this partnership.

The rural affairs minister, Jim Fairlie, grudgingly admitted: “No private finance has yet been directed through the partnership into on-the-ground projects.” What he did not say, but emerged this week, was that Aberdeen have pulled out and, to all intents and purposes, the Nature Investment Partnership is another dead duck.

Mr Fairlie stands accused of misleading MSPs by failing to refer in his answer to Aberdeen’s withdrawal. It would scarcely have been an election-changer but the collapse of yet another grandiose scheme might have created a minor embarrassment.

After all, in the space of three years, the promised commitment of private finance to be leveraged by the Scottish Government’s own substantial expenditure on planting trees and restoring peatland has gone from £2 billion via £100 million to precisely zero. Let’s hope our environment wasn’t depending on it.

How many such sagas are required before the penny drops that fresh eyes and ideas might give Scotland a better chance? Instead of unplanned and uncosted grand announcements, we need a government of delivery and vision for how Scotland can advance beyond the mire of permanent grievance-seeking.

Instead, we live in a fantasy land where vision is defined as telling Tesco what to charge for a loaf of bread or boasting about £2 billion funds that never exist. Surely Scotland deserves better?