Scotland 2050 calls for cross- party summit on Grangemouth

The Petroineos refinery at Grangemouth has now closed - but funding promises for its future must be honoured, writes Barrie Cunning | PA

Scotland 2050 is a non-partisan platform for long-term policymaking that tackles the issues affecting Scotland today for a better tomorrow.

Our 2026 Scottish Parliament manifesto recognises the critical role that economic growth plays in addressing all other priorities that government wants to achieve. It sets out policies to improve Scotland’s economy, health, housing and key infrastructure issues and it starts from the view that the UK, including Scotland, has invested too little for too long.

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Raising investment, whether from public sources, the private sector or foreign direct investment, must be the central priority to ensure that we have a robust and resilient future economy in Scotland and we welcome the Scottish Government’s Programme for Government, which has a renewed focus on Scotland’s economy.

This week team Scotland 2050 made an official submission to John Healey MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer ahead of the UK budget on 28 October. Our letter has seven key asks, and I want to make it clear we aren’t asking for large sums of new money. Instead, we ask that existing funding is reprioritised, that commitments already made are honoured, and that the Scottish Government is given the powers to deliver more. I would encourage anyone reading this piece to go to the Scotland 2050 website where you can read our submission and learn more about our key asks, and if like us you agree with us, write to your MP and send us an email showing support.

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I’m a proud Scot and patriot and I want to see Scotland become the best country it can be, and sometimes that means calling out failures by government or putting forward an alternative policy suggestion. In our submission, we highlight the need to focus on what can be done to ensure that the Grangemouth plant is not left behind.

The closure of the refinery removed several hundred skilled jobs from a community built around the site. Scotland 2050 welcomes the £200 million response through the National Wealth Fund, £25 million from the Scottish Government, and the nine options set out by Project Willow, including production of Sustainable Aviation Fuel. The funding envelope has been committed, but no investment from the £200 million National Wealth Fund allocation has yet been drawn down.

National Wealth Fund investment depends on propositions meeting the fund’s commercial criteria, which include delivering a positive financial return (which can be challenging for a first-of-a-kind project), supporting the transition to net zero and crowding in private finance.

Those tests are hard to meet on a site where the Project Willow base case identifies around £3.5 billion of capital expenditure, and where the site’s operator has said that if low-carbon manufacturing made commercial sense today, industry would already be doing it. In our submission, we do not ask the Treasury to set aside the fund’s discipline. We ask it to publish what is currently in the Grangemouth pipeline.

We also ask the Treasury to state what happens to the £200 million, and to the site, if no proposition meets the criteria by a defined date, and to explore scope to flex the conditionality of the funding so that potential projects can be secured for investment and development to maximise the opportunities that exist.

I’m going one step further; I’m calling for a summit on Grangemouth to take place this side of Christmas with representatives from the UK and Scottish governments, opposition parties and the private sector to agree on a plan for Grangemouth that will focus on delivery which will ultimately benefit the community of Grangemouth as well as a wider benefit for Scotland.

Barrie Cunning is the founder of Scotland 2050 and the Managing Director of Pentland Communications.