56: Corporates and communities: how renewable energy companies are investing in new community assets

How are communities benefitting financially from commercial suppliers paying them for playing host to wind farms? Matt chats to Ian Leaver, Chief Officer of Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company, and SSE Renewables' Lindsay Dougan, to explore the benefits of these schemes, using Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston as an example.

Episode Transcript:

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero. You’re listening to Matt. I am here alone on my ownsome but that’s okay because we’ve got a cracking episode coming. Today, we are exploring community benefits and the payments that flow from big renewable projects like onshore wind and hydroelectricity directly into communities. Today, we’re focusing on rural Scotland, particularly the Highlands but also elsewhere. The three big questions we’re going to explore today will be what are community benefit payments, why we have them and what types of projects have they unlocked? In order to answer these questions, we’ll speak to SSE Renewables, a wind farm developer and also a hydroelectricity developer, who funds these community benefit payments but first up, we’re going to speak to Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company to understand how they have spent these community benefit payments on important projects in their local community.

[Music flourish]

Ian:  Hello, my name is Ian Leaver. I’m Chief Officer for Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company.

Matt:  Ian, welcome to Local Zero. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on. We were also lucky enough to hear from you a few weeks back when colleagues and I visited Drumnadrochit and we were lucky enough to hear about some of the work that you’ve been engaged with through Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company. Frankly, I was blown away by some of the work that you’re undertaking. I just wondered if you could explain to the listeners, please, what is Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company. What’s its core purpose? What does it do?

Ian:  I suppose you have to think about why it was set up. It was set up back in 2007 to receive community benefit payments. I think we’ll explain what they are as we go along. Initially, its main purpose was to distribute those community benefit payments to the community in the form of small grants. As things have evolved, it has also taken on the mantle of developing its own projects and taking it right down to basics. It’s set up as a company and a charity and because of that, it was core charitable purposes. The main one is ‘to promote, for the public benefit, rural regeneration following the principles of sustainable development where sustainable development means development which meets the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs in the areas of social and economic deprivation within the community by all or any of the following means.’ There’s then a number of ways that we can do that and that is basically what we do. That’s like a catch-all statement that allows, I suppose, Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company to work within its charitable purposes to do many things.

Matt:  So at its heart, it’s got a very, very strong social mission statement but also a very strong environmental mission statement. It’s trying to do these two things at once through individually or, at least, a portfolio of projects. Just for our listeners, because I guess we’re going to keep coming back to this, it’s worth just beginning on community benefit payments. Obviously, this was set up to manage these and so from your perspective, what are these community benefit payments? How did they come into being and what are they to you?

Ian:  I’m quite new to this... not to this kind of job but to this organisation. I came into it about a year ago and I had to figure out myself what I think community benefit payments are [laughter]. We have a number of wind farms in this area and so we benefit from around about four of those wind farms currently and a hydro scheme. The benefits are basically a form of payment to the community that reflects the visual impact or the impact of those developments on the community that they’re within. Usually, a community would be defined as a community council area. We have the same boundary as the Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Council which was actually the organisation that set this company up to receive those benefit funds. The guidelines from Scottish Government say it’s £5,000 per megawatt hour generated and that’s the community benefit payment that comes to us. They aren’t compulsory. They’re negotiated. There was a lot of work done in the early days by the community council and some very strong characters in the community council to get a good deal for the community. I suppose the best part of this deal is that we get the money straight into our bank account. With a lot of other communities, the money will go to another foundation or trust, like Foundation Scotland, and then those communities within that area will have to then bid into Foundation Scotland to get grant funding from them; whereas, we get the money directly. We’re like a Foundation Scotland for this area almost.

Matt:  Are we talking big sums of money or small sums of money? Many folk who listen to this podcast will either be directly or indirectly engaged in some form of community action and if not, they’ll maybe be involved in something or other in terms of fundraising and understanding the cost of a project and the value of money. For you and yourselves, how much are you tending to receive through these community benefit payments per year, for instance? 

Ian:  Grouping them all together, it should be in the region of £600,000 a year. Currently, we don’t get just as much as that but we’re also able to negotiate during the 25 years that we’ve got an agreement that, at times, if the need is great, we can draw down advanced years. So we can project five years in advance and say, ‘Can we get that five-year advance payment?’ which is what we’ve currently done for one of our projects. We’re under the £600,000 but in five years’ time, it will be back up to £600,000 a year. I suppose there’s more on the horizon. There are new farms and the extension to wind farms.

Matt:  Maybe before we get into what you’ve done with this money... I’m a chair and trustee of an environmental community charity on the Southside of Glasgow called South Seeds. I’m assuming that £600,000 is unreserved funds. Is that correct?

Ian:  It’s not and I know South Seeds. That’s a great organisation. It’s not unreserved. No, it’s not unrestricted. It is restricted funding. It does come with terms and conditions from the funder. To be honest, everything that we want to do with our charitable purposes can be done within their terms and conditions but if we want to spend, say, more than £25,000, we then have to just go back to the funder and say, ‘Is it okay if we award this amount of money or we spend this amount of money on a project over and above that?’ They just want to check that their money is still being used responsibly and for the right purposes.

Matt:  I mean that’s important, I guess, as a failsafe but it sounds to me, in general, from their terms and conditions... has that been a fairly symbiotic relationship to date? Have they tended to support your actions or have there been certain projects that maybe haven’t been able to go forward?

Ian:  No, they’ve supported what we’ve gone with. Say we had a grant coming in for over £25,000 from another community group, we, as a board, would assess that grant and approve it. We would then recommend approval by one of the funders, whichever funder it was, with SSE Renewables being the biggest one. They have, up till now, said, ‘That’s fine. You can go ahead and do that.’ It’s just a checks and balances thing, I guess. They just want to make sure that we’re still being responsible with the money that we’re getting.

Matt:  On average, £600,000 a year. As I was saying and being with a charity, I know that is a huge sum of money for a community charity. What has that enabled you to do in the local area?

Ian:  If we start back and kind of do a bit of a timeline... I might forget things but it will give you a rough sense. Early on, they took ownership of the community hall which is where I am and sitting in an office there now. I suppose taking on any kind of public building costs money just in terms of running it and carrying out some improvement works to extend it. That was helped to be funded through the wind farm benefit money. At various stages, things have happened in Fort Augustus. Fort Augustus is quite a – what shall we say – I wouldn’t say wealthy but there’s a lot of activity in Fort Augustus and there’s a lot of tourism, so there’s a lot of income knocking about. I suppose the population of the whole area, and not just Fort Augustus, is around 1,200 to 1,500 people. They are served by a surgery. We’re lucky enough to have GP surgery. Unfortunately, that GP surgery burnt down a number of years ago. It was a privately-owned surgery and the GPs, I think, weren’t going to rebuild it and the NHS weren’t going to rebuild it. It was a bit of a no-brainer really. The community company that had resources and capacity decided that they would purchase the site of the old burnt-out building and build a nice, new medical centre which we did and it’s now leased out to the NHS, NHS Highland, which then leases it to a GP. We have our GP back. It’s actually a two-floor building and so there’s a bit more space than a GP needs, so there are some upstairs treatments and consulting rooms for visiting practitioners, a community room and a community office which is currently in use by our Sunflower Home Care Workers which is the community care team for the area.

Matt:  That’s incredible being able to take these renewable farm payments that were explicitly for community benefit and you’ve essentially put medical care back into the community. From previous discussions, you mentioned that also you’ve been very involved in affordable housing.

Ian:  That’s right, yeah. Around the time that the surgery was being built, a piece of land came up. It didn’t really come up. The community decided that they wanted to be able to buy a bit of land that used to be owned by the Abbey. There were 19 acres of ground towards the South side of Port Augustus. Actually, a developer was interested in building around 70 houses on it and there really wasn’t a desire for 70 houses. That was felt to be too much and it was out of people’s hands if that developer went in there. So the community submitted a Community Right to Buy which was registered and accepted. They then activated that right to buy and they purchased that land through Land Fund funding. Around the same time, as there was a lot happening all at once here with the medical centre and buying land, a community action plan was being carried out. Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company helped to facilitate that action plan and a consultant was brought in to complete it. We were just one of the participants in that action plan. Various actions came out of that as it’s an action plan after all. We took our share of them and one of those was a clearly identified need for affordable housing. Like other parts of the Highlands, we struggle with holiday homes and people down South retiring up here with more money than local people. So there’s a definite need here for affordable housing that wasn’t being filled by the council. There are council houses here but there are just not enough of them. We took that, built on that and had Rural Housing Scotland complete a housing needs survey. It kind of focused it down a little bit more and explained the type of houses we needed and what exact sizes of families there were. The upshot was that we took a small piece of the 19 acres and built 12 new affordable homes on it. It’s called Caledonian Court. I suppose one of the great things about our housing is that it’s ours. We own it, we manage it and we control who goes into it. Control is maybe the wrong word. We have a policy and procedure for letting those properties. It means that we can allocate them to the people within the community that we think are most in need rather than it being someone from a list that’s held in Inverness, for instance. We make decisions about who gets those houses. They’ve gone to local people and two of those properties are young people who benefited from another of the schemes that we have which is an apprenticeship scheme. We have an apprenticeship scheme for young folk in the area who can apprentice with some smaller firms; not with the likes of SSE or the NHS but with the smaller firms working here. It benefits the small firms and it benefits the young people and gives them a future here, hopefully, and now we’ve given them homes as well.

Matt:  You’re outlining, I guess, projects here which have looked to enrich the lives of some more elderly residents but also younger residents. I know, speaking to colleagues who are located in the Highlands and, indeed, the islands, one of the big problems for these communities is often losing younger folk to the cities in the Central Belt. Is that something that you recognise in your community that you needed to create a centre of gravity there in terms of employment, skills and housing, of course?

Ian:  Yeah, absolutely and, like you say, it’s that whole holistic side of things. In some ways, we’re encouraging the young folk to go off to universities by offering an educational grant. It used to be called the Travel Grant and now travel is pretty much free if you’re a certain age. We still offer a £600 annual grant for young people going off to study and it could be they’re off on a daily basis. It could be they’re off to Glasgow or Edinburgh.

Matt:  Absolutely. A huge wealth of what I would primarily refer to as social and also economic support there and trying to not just fortify the social welfare and support systems in place but also to kickstart these companies, the skills and the start-ups that you see here. One question I have is... these payments are coming from these renewable power generation installations and you’ve mentioned onshore wind. If you stand, as we were last time we met, on the banks of Loch Ness, you’re surrounded by these onshore wind farms, so you can actually draw quite a clear connection there between the installations and the benefit payments. Is there any work that you’re undertaking that has a very strong environmental and sustainability focus? Obviously, sustainable development is economic, social and environmental benefits tied together but is there anything that’s particularly environmentally focused that you’ve done with these environmental community benefit payments?

Ian:  That’s a really good question. We’re also a grant funder and so we have awarded grants to local organisations that do smaller environmental projects around and about and Trees for Life is one of them. We’ve awarded them some funding for a project in Dundreggan and also in Glenmoriston, there’s a very active group called Glenmoriston Improvement Group. I suppose those smaller groups don’t have a focus on the environment. Trees for Life obviously does but the smaller community groups don’t; however, they do more of that kind of thing than we do. We take a more strategic look at things and do the bigger stuff. That said, when we built the houses, we built them to very high standards of energy efficiency. They all have air-source heat pumps. We purchased two older house properties within an old school and we also retrofitted them with air-source heat pumps as well and improved the insulation and the general energy efficiency of those homes. We work on that kind of level and the same would be true of the medical centre. That also is looking at air-source heat pumps. We’ve got solar panels on the roof here at the hall as well.

Matt:  So those environmental credentials come through to the more tangible investments. One thing I’m really interested there is this kind of ecosystem of different community organisations and that actually, you recognise that you can’t necessarily do it all or, at least, you want to prioritise a specific kind of work and, as you said, more strategic and larger types of investments. You actually partner with other community organisations to maybe reach the areas you otherwise wouldn’t be primarily operating in.

Ian:  That’s correct. I suppose that goes back to when we were first set up as the main focus then was just as a funder. We took the money and we funded people to do things. We didn’t do a lot ourselves, other than very small things. It goes back to that really. We don’t have a big staff here. We kind of, intentionally, keep it quite low because that keeps the staffing costs down. If we were to start delivering more of those smaller environmental projects, it would take more of the money that comes in from the wind farm. You’ve got to balance it somehow. I mean we do have 17 acres of what we call the Old Convent Land remaining which is mixed woodland and meadow. We have plans there for community gardens and to improve the woodland to take out some of the more invasive species, make access better and just a better place for people to go and get fit, play or whatever they want really. There will be no further concrete development on that other than possibly a few sympathetically-designed small workshops, a composting site and that kind of thing. There is small-scale stuff going on there.

Matt:  What’s keeping you busy in terms of plans for what you’re going to do with other community benefit payments? You’ve £600,000 coming in every year and I guess it’s important to have a pipeline of projects which you no doubt have.

Ian:  We do, yeah. We’ve got a busy year coming up. We’re submitting a Community Asset Transfer for two properties. One of those properties is from Scottish Canals and that’s a Glentarff house and that’s a property that’s been vacant for about 12 years. We hope to take ownership of that and turn that into two more affordable homes.

Matt:  I have just a question here, Ian, about the community governance of these benefit payments. Just in terms of how the Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company is incorporated, to what extent do the residents of Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston actually have control over the types of projects that you’re outlining? What’s the arrangement there to ensure that the decisions are made by the community for the community?

Ian:  The company itself has to elect a Board of Directors. The make-up is nine elected from the membership and the membership is from the community. There is one other appointed from the community council who is also in the community obviously and then we can co-opt three more directors on as we see fit. We’ve just recently had our AGM (Annual General Meeting) which went really well. It was a good turnout. I didn’t expect it. We have a full complement of nine elected directors. We have a Community Council Director, so that’s ten and we have three others sitting in the wings who we’re going to co-opt all from the community. In terms of what we do and why we do it, I think I mentioned the community action plan. We reviewed that action plan in January or February of this year. We completed a review of the action plan and that just confirmed that nothing had really changed from before. We’ll do another new one, probably, in a year’s time but we just wanted to confirm that, post-Covid, people’s priorities hadn’t really altered. They hadn’t which was good.

Matt:  I guess I maybe just wanted just to end on this, if possible, which is your reflections on the process. What works well? What maybe would be good for possibly Scottish Government and Highlands and Islands Enterprise to reflect on and maybe look to reform some of the processes that are in place?

Ian:  Like I say, we’re not allowed to get involved in the negotiations. That’s seen as a conflict of interest. The community council tends to do that part and then there’s a point at which we can then speak to wind farm companies about it. I haven’t really been involved in the negotiations or anything but looking from the outside as to how it works, I suppose the Scottish Government set this kind of voluntary £5,000 figure and the expectation is that you’ll just get £5,000 and that’s it. It would almost have been better if they hadn’t set a figure, so it was actually compulsory that you had to pay community benefits and then a negotiation would start. They’ve set this £5,000 and, in some ways, I think the ease with which the renewable generation companies give up £5,000 per megawatt hour makes me think it’s not very much money to them.

Matt:  So that £5,000... you mentioned that that’s actually negotiated by the community council which, for those who aren’t aware... in Scotland, because the local authorities are so massive, particularly the Highland Council which covers a huge area in Scotland, community councils are set up to offer the smallest unit of formal governance there. You’re saying the community council is the one that negotiates with the electricity supplier, wind farm or hydro developer, on the actual price they’ll get. So £5,000 per megawatt installed is guidance but actually, it could be higher or lower than that.

Ian:  It could be or it could be nothing, yeah.

Matt:  Wow! Yeah, because it’s voluntary, of course.

Ian:  There’s usually an initial disturbance-type payment as well while they’re building it and all the lorries are coming through and making a mess and noise. There’s a payment negotiated over that as well and I’m not sure how they go about getting that one. The other thing to remember here is that if a wind farm is built, it’s £5,000 per installed but if that farm impacts two different community council areas... so, for instance, say, us and Stratherrick & Foyers or Glengarry, you share that £5,000 and it’s a bit of a bun fight as to who gets what.

Matt:  Which isn’t conducive to communities working together and learning from one another about what works and what doesn’t in this regard. I guess the final point is are you finding that some communities are winning from these benefit payments and others are, sadly, losing out because obviously, they’re not next to a wind farm or hydro? Are there winners... I don’t want to say losers but they’re not winning and they’re not enjoying the benefits?

Ian:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean I’ve seen it in other places. I haven’t been here long but I’ve worked in this sector for quite a while and I’ve it in other places. This is the first community I’ve worked with that receives community benefit money of this level of income, so it’s quite a novelty for me. I’ve worked supporting organisations where a number of groups receive community benefit money from wind farms within an area and for geographic reasons, because somewhere doesn’t quite fall within the circle, a community can miss out. It is desperately unfair. I don’t necessarily believe that the impact of a wind farm is entirely an impact on my community. This is everyone’s country out there. So I think it’s quite bad and maybe one day before I retire, I might suggest here that those communities like ours that do get a lot of money coming in actually put money aside into a strategic wider fund and it’s something that can be used to cover a much wider area. The thing is that the wind farm benefit agreements tie you into spending your money within this area. If we can get that out, it means you can maybe spread it a bit further. It does seem desperately unfair to me sometimes when I see it. The other thing that seems, to be honest, desperately unfair is that it’s only wind farms that have to make the payment. Hydro does as well but there are other industries I see that have, I would say, a greater impact on a daily basis that don’t pay anything.

Matt:  Yeah, I maybe won’t force your hand on naming them [laughter] but I can imagine a couple that comes to mind. Ian, that’s incredibly insightful and I wish you all the very best going forward and executing the next stage of your plans because what you’re doing is absolutely amazing. Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing more.

Ian:  Thanks for the opportunity, Matthew. It’s been good. I feel like I could probably do another half hour but I won’t [laughter].

Matt:  We’ll have you back [laughter].

[Music flourish]

Wonderful to hear from Ian there about how a community is taking these community benefits and doing something really meaningful on the ground. Now to hear from the other side of the coin, from SSE Renewables’ Lindsay Dougan, to understand how funders are approaching this and the types of projects, more broadly, that they’ve invested in.

Lindsay:  Thank you so much for having me here today, Matt. My name is Lindsay Dougan and I am SSE Renewables’ Community Investment Manager.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Wonderful to have you along, Lindsay. It’s a real pleasure. We’ve heard from Ian about a particular project in a particular community but, of course, at SSE Renewables, you have a bird’s eye view across the whole piece and understand all the different types of renewable projects and the different types of communities that are taking these. We asked Ian the same question but just to maybe get this from the funder’s perspective or the renewable developer’s perspective, what are community benefit payments and under what conditions do communities receive them?

Lindsay:  Yeah, absolutely. We think it’s a very important part of the renewable business within Scotland and community investment is when a developer reinvests part of the profits from either their hydro, solar or, prominently in Scotland, their on and offshore wind farm developments and reinvest that back into the local community.

Matt:  Excellent. How much are we talking typically? I know this can vary because it typically depends on the size of the project but from your perspective and dealing with all these different communities and different renewable projects, how much do communities typically receive?

Lindsay:  This is where it’s very helpful in Scotland that the Scottish Government have given good practice principles that the industry should follow. What they’ve stated is that developers should give away £5,000 per megawatt of installed capacity per annum to the local community. That’s something that SSE Renewables is fully committed to. To give you a scale from us, now we’re obviously only one developer within Scotland but we are the largest. We, to date, have given away £51 million to communities in Scotland and over the lifetime of our current funds, we are due to give away £260 million to Scottish communities.

Matt:  So a big slug of cash and I think just on this question around the £5,000 per megawatt installed renewable power per annum, which is quite a mouthful to say, we can see the bigger the project, the more money that the community gets. Can this be higher or lower than this figure? Because this is voluntary, and as I understand it, guidance around the figure. Have you seen a variation around this?

Lindsay:  I think most within the industry recognise the value that Scottish Government figures have given to us and certainly, the larger developers are committing to that figure. Within SSE Renewables, we have made it clear that this is the figure we would support. Since 2012, that has been the position. There are some developers that would look at different mechanisms but across Scotland, we are trying to create consistency and making sure that it’s a fair donation into the communities and so most developers do commit to the £5,000 per megawatt.

Matt:  With these variations, obviously, you’ve spoken about SSE’s model and maybe you can’t speak necessarily about competitors and other industry partners but what kinds of variations are we seeing in general terms? Are people approaching this in different ways? Ian did mention models out there where there was almost like a top-up. I think he mentioned a royalty on how much that site generated in that year, for instance.

Lindsay:  I think that’s referring to some historic sites that have been supported before the Scottish Government guidance came out. The Scottish Government guidance came in 2012 and we were fundamental to helping shape that within SSE Renewables and committing to it. Before that guidance, there was incontinence within the market because different developers were working on the market. We were one of the early adopters of the £5,000 per megawatt and the Scottish Government giving the guidance has helped there to be more standardisation across all communities in making sure they all get a fair investment into them.

Matt:  Fantastic. Many people will be sitting here, particularly in areas without wind and hydro on their doorstep and without these payments, and maybe asking the question why do we have these payments in the first place? What’s the rationale underpinning why these communities should receive these payments?

Lindsay:  I think that the payments are a very important part. Many of these communities are highly rural and are being challenged by many issues that those of us in urban areas aren’t faced with, like particular issues around skills and the ageing population. They’re losing some of their core services and also these assets are within their community. They are visible, in some senses, from their homes when the wind farms are being constructed. They are working with the developer as those are put forward. So it’s very important that these investments reinvest into the areas in which the wind farms are located because they are the ones that have this asset and that are working with it day in and day out.

Matt:  Do you get a sense from your work over the years that the communities recognise the connection between these funds and the projects or sometimes does that need drawing out a little more?

Lindsay:  No, it is part of the relationship with the developer. We are a big believer, at the start when we are building a wind farm, that we consult strongly with the community. We liaise with the community on how they would like the funds to be set up. For example, sometimes they would choose to have a local panel where we will facilitate local people coming together and making the decisions on how the funding is spent in their areas. In others, we would use a trusted partner like the Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston Community Company that you referenced. Communities are very aware of where the funding comes from and they’re also very protective of that funding. They know that this is an investment in their area and they want to be utilising it to the best possible mechanism for their community. They trust within that and they are wanting to make the most of the investment that is being made in their areas. I must say, they overdeliver. It’s incredible what communities can achieve with this funding.

Matt:  That’s great. Yes, please, tell me what kind of projects are you most proud of, I guess?

Lindsay:  I’ve mentioned before that these are particularly highly rural communities. One of the things that we speak about at the first point when they’re establishing a fund is doing a community consultation. It’s so important that they seek the views of everybody within the community to identify what their main priorities are for them. Now every community is unique but there are some themes that are particularly important across all communities. For a long time, it has been improving the assets that they have within their communities. I imagine Ian has spoken to you about the medical centre that they have in Fort Augustus but all communities are trying to make sure that they have the assets that are most important to them. For example, in the South of Scotland, in Abington, they had a derelict school. They’ve been supported through the wind farm funding to reinstate that back into life and have it as a working hub that can be utilised for remote working for local residents. It has a gym within it and it has a warm and safe meeting space for the community. That will be something they’ll be able to benefit from for years to come. It is so important within rural communities that you have that central space where you can come together and you can meet and you have the assets and the materials that others would have on their doorstep in more urban areas.

Matt:  Fantastic. I mean Ian listed a number of them but most of the stuff Ian was coming to us with was interesting in that a lot of it was about the social fabric which isn’t surprising because these are communities and they’re social beasts. I guess, naively, I maybe came to this expecting these green payments, for want of a better word, to invest in other green stuff. I’m sure that happens but it appeared that a lot of this was actually filling this void (these aren’t his words but my interpretation) and that these long-term cuts in council investment had left these gaps. It’s actually these community benefit payments that are filling some of these on the communities’ terms. Is that a fair synopsis of what you’re seeing or not?

Lindsay:  I don’t think it’s necessarily always filling gaps. I think it’s about how communities can enhance themselves. A lot of these communities have been faced with depopulation and people moving away from their areas and this fund has been a mechanism to make sure that their communities remain attractive to families moving forward. For example, one of the common themes we have is around housing. A lot of the communities don’t have houses that are affordable for young families and also that are of the correct stock for an ageing population. So we’ve worked with communities like Morvern and Staffin on the Isle of Skye and that’s been where they’ve been developing highly efficient homes that people would want to stay within that local area. The community of Glenurquhart and the Great Glen have built houses for people that are needing to downsize and have fully accessible homes that are near the daycare that’s available within that community. Housing is a very common theme. We’ve supported 23 homes to be built in the last year alone. Some of the other themes that are particularly important to these communities are skills. They want to make sure that young people don’t have to move away to be able to get high-quality jobs. They’re also facing, at the same time as wanting to make sure young people are there, that some of their key businesses are reliant upon the ageing population within the local community. A lot of our communities chose to develop apprenticeship programmes where they can link a young person with a local business. They can get high-quality training and then as they develop, there is the capacity that they could take over that business and retain that service within that local community. That’s something that we’ve found has been very effective and is really recognised by the young people as part of what will make them stay within those local areas.

Matt:  That’s great to hear. As I was mentioning before, are there examples where you’re seeing some of these community benefit payments from renewable green projects, for want of a better word, going into other types of energy or even sustainability projects?

Lindsay:  Yeah, absolutely. As we said at the start, it depends on the communities’ action plans but it’s something that we have really noticed, over the last two to three years, that there’s been a particular drive within communities about how they prepare themselves for the transition to net zero. It’s something that we recognise is important but they’re leading on and developing the solutions for. For example, one of our largest donations has been to the community of Raasay which is an island off Skye. We’ve provided £300,000 to help them have a community-owned hydro system. The island was off-grid and by them developing this hydro system, it provides the security of local energy that they’ve needed to attract businesses onto the island. We’re also finding within other communities that what they’re looking to do is improve the energy efficiency of their community assets. For example, we’ve got a lot of projects that are looking at air-source heat pumps. They’re looking at solar provision. They’re looking at how they reduce the carbon of their transport because, obviously, they are highly rural and so they do rely on transport as a key mechanism. For example, there’s a hub within Glenurquhart where they are allowing people to trial having electric bikes. Also within the Great Glen, we are moving some of the care providers within that area so that they have electric vehicles rather than diesel vehicles but it’s very much been a growth area. What is also very interesting about the green economy is that these funds are able to test innovation. We’ve been really encouraging communities to think differently. There’s a community on the West Coast of the Highlands and it’s an organisation called Grow for Good and they’re actually testing what the capability of aquaponics would be.

Matt:  Aquaponics is on-land fish farms, isn’t it?

Lindsay:  Yeah, it’s a cyclical nature where the waste from the fish can be utilised into the growing of the foods and then the waste from the foods can help with the fish. It’s highly efficient as a mechanism.

Matt:  Fantastic. So real rich tapestry of projects. One thing that was mentioned earlier by Ian is that there are some terms and conditions that are associated with this funding. So without getting too detailed, are there any kinds of projects that have maybe come to you that you weren’t prepared to fund or you didn’t feel were in keeping with the ethos of the community benefit payment funds?

Lindsay:  I think within the community benefits, we take it very responsibly. Although we don’t have many conditions on the projects, we do need some of the core fundamentals of a project to be in place. We need things like their planning permission. We could give an offer of a grant but we wouldn’t allow them to draw down unless planning permission was in place. We would also be supporting community groups to develop very robust business plans, particularly if they’re developing a new asset because we want to make sure that these assets leave the communities in a much stronger position in the long term. We do a lot of work supporting them to make sure that these projects are viable and we’ll continue to support the projects but we have very few limitations on what we wouldn’t fund. We try not to replace statutory funding. We don’t pay on a provision that’s already happened. It must be for something that’s going to happen in the future. We don’t fund political or religious provisions but there are very few limitations that are on the funds.

Matt:  A couple more questions, Lindsay, because this is really interesting. I think one of the grumbles I hear all the time from community groups, and I must say that I’m a member of one myself, is about capacity. They have all these wonderful ideas but these tend to be small groups and very volunteer-based more often than not. Do you think these community benefit payments could be spent on capacity building within these groups? Because without the capacity, the projects can’t happen?

Lindsay:  No, absolutely. One of our core funding principles within SSE Renewables is that we are facilitating project development. We are very focused. We recognise communities are incredible. They have the strength of ideas. They are proven time and time again to deliver but they do need the capacity to be able to do that. We don’t want to overstretch the volunteers and we want to help them get the specialist skills they would need to deliver some of these projects, so we’re very supportive of funding core costs for provision. We do a lot of work where we are facilitating networks between communities and between different organisations so that they can learn from each other. We embed training and support for these organisations so that we can enhance what they’re able to deliver but it’s very important and it has to be recognised that they need support. We can’t expect volunteers to be doing this alone. They do need to have the support to make these projects happen.

Matt:  Quite right. There are obviously so many examples here you’ve outlined of lasting community benefits across social, economic and environmental areas. Maybe turning this on its head to developers such as SSE but also, more broadly, that sector, what do you see as the benefit to yourselves of making these payments or building these relationships? How do you, for want of a better word, benefit?

Lindsay:  I think that it is about being a responsible developer. We view ourselves as being part of these communities. Our assets are there for up to 25 years and we want to be working within these communities. We want to be making sure that these communities are left in a better place thanks to the renewable assets that they have in their local area. So for ourselves, it’s about building that trust. It’s about building that relationship with communities and for them to be seeing that we want to be working with them and we want to be making sure that they are thriving and they’re a place that people would want to live and work in.

Matt:  That’s really important to hear. If I may just end on this question before I let you go... you mentioned that in 2012, some of the key fundamentals of how these benefit payments work in Scotland, we might add, were laid down. I guess there have been reflections and learnings on how well this has worked. It sounds like a lot of benefits have come out of this, not just hearing from yourself but also from communities such as those in Fort Augustus and Glenmoriston. Are there any final reflections on what works well about this versus what maybe is right for reform and areas where learning could be applied to generate even more community benefit in the future?

Lindsay:  Absolutely. We have just completed a wind farm fund for Beatrice which is an offshore wind farm in Scotland and we did do an evaluation there to understand what the communities felt about it and it was overwhelmingly positive. 92% of the projects funded have a lasting legacy within the community and 100% of the people that participated in the programme would recommend it as a funding scheme but there is always learning that we could have. I think probably, as an industry, we need to be better at sharing the success of these programmes. They are highly impactful and make a real difference within the areas that we’re operating within but sometimes they aren’t known outwith those host communities and so we need to be doing more about sharing that learning and that benefit with people. Going forward, the funds are very flexible. We can’t expect communities are going to stay still. We need some to be able to move with the times and with the priorities of the communities. We saw that during the pandemic when we were able to release emergency funding. That’s changed what some of the communities want to be able to deliver upon and we need to focus on that but it is very clear to us that you need to trust communities. They do know how to deliver these funds well and it needs to focus on the communities that are nearest to those wind farms.

Matt:  That begs a final follow-up about the communities that aren’t necessarily in the backyard of these wind farms but maybe aren’t necessarily able to tap into these benefit payments. Is there a sense of how we might be able to support those through these funds in the future?

Lindsay:  I think if you look at the reach of Scotland and what they’re able to achieve, the funds do cover large proportions of Scotland. We have funds that are available across local authority areas. The whole of the Highlands is covered and the whole of South Lanarkshire. Other developers have them across Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway. The whole of Scotland is also able to benefit from things like the investment we make in the Crown Estate through our offshore wind farms. That is available across Scotland but we also need to make sure that these communities are able to test how to deliver services within rural areas and then they can share that learning with other communities.

Matt:  Lindsay, thank you so much for your time. It’s fantastic to hear about the work you’re undertaking. It would be wonderful to have you back again soon to hear how these communities have got on.

Lindsay:  Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate it.

Matt:  Well, a big thanks to Ian and Lindsay. What a fantastic episode and exploring a subject which is very close to my heart and one that I’ve wanted to learn a lot more about for a very long time. You’ve been listening to Local Zero. If you’d like to contact us, connect with and provide us insights and thoughts about this episode and maybe things you’d like us to cover in the future, please, please follow us on Twitter at @LocalZeroPod. Leave some of your thoughts there. If you want to send a longer email, please do so at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com but until the next episode, thank you for listening and goodbye.

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