Scotland has set itself one of the most ambitious climate targets in the world: net zero emissions of all greenhouse gases by 2045, five years ahead of the wider UK’s 2050 goal.
For the country’s construction plant industry, that target is no longer an abstract policy aspiration — it is a live operational challenge being worked through machine by machine, fuel tank by fuel tank, and balance sheet by balance sheet.
The Scottish Plant Owners Association (SPOA), whose members contribute an estimated £6.4 billion to the UK economy annually, established a dedicated Policy, Sustainability and Decarbonisation Working Group specifically to help member companies navigate this transition.
Its findings, published in the association’s 2025 Annual Review, offer a rare and unusually candid look at how far the industry still has to go — and why the road to net zero is proving far messier in practice than it looks on a government policy slide.
For African contractors, plant hire firms and equipment importers watching global decarbonisation trends shape manufacturer investment and future equipment availability, Scotland’s experience is a useful case study in both the opportunities and the very real operational constraints of the energy transition.
The Red Diesel Problem That Started It All
Much of the current pressure traces back to a single policy change. The removal of the tax rebate on red diesel in April 2022 significantly increased fuel costs for plant operators across the UK, immediately squeezing margins in an industry the SPOA describes as “very competitive” and operating on “low margins.”
In response, the SPOA has spent the years since proactively researching alternative fuels and technologies to help members make informed decisions rather than reactive ones.
That research has produced a sobering, evidence-based picture of just how far current alternatives are from being simple, drop-in replacements.
Alternative Fuels: Promising, But Not Problem-Free
Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) has emerged as the most immediately viable diesel substitute.
Trials conducted by GAP Hire Solutions — the UK’s largest independent hire company — found that HVO is fully compatible with existing diesel hire equipment, requires no fuel tank cleaning before switching, and allows customers to simply refill and continue operations without damage to machinery.
But the SPOA review flags two persistent concerns among member companies. The first is cost: HVO remains more expensive than diesel, a meaningful barrier in a sector already operating on thin margins.
The second is more troubling — an active UK government investigation, prompted by BBC reporting, into claims that some HVO supply is not being produced from genuine waste sources such as used cooking oil, but instead from virgin palm oil and other non-waste materials marketed as sustainable.
If substantiated, this would undermine the entire environmental rationale for switching.
Biofuel in the form of FAME (Fatty Acid Methyl Ester) has also been explored, but with less encouraging results.
The SPOA has found evidence that FAME use results in significant engine damage, including blocked filters and fuel lines — a finding serious enough that the association has published direct advice to members about the risks involved.
The common thread across all alternative fuels, the SPOA notes, is a lack of manufacturer clarity.
Plant owners are being asked to make expensive, long-term decisions about fuel strategy without clear guidance from equipment manufacturers on warranty implications — a gap the industry is urging manufacturers to close.
| Fuel/Power Option | Key Advantage | Main Barrier Identified by SPOA |
| HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) | Fully compatible with existing diesel equipment; no tank cleaning required | Higher cost than diesel; sourcing/ethical supply chain concerns under investigation |
| Biofuel (FAME) | Diesel alternative requiring minimal equipment changes | Evidence of engine damage, blocked filters and fuel line failures |
| Battery-electric | Zero tailpipe emissions; increasingly viable for smaller plant | Charging infrastructure gaps, heavy battery weight, unproven resale value |
| Hydrogen | Zero-emission with potential for heavy-duty use | Very limited fuel availability; mass production not expected before small-scale 2026 rollout |
Table: Alternative fuel and power options assessed by the SPOA, summarising advantages and barriers identified in member trials. Source: SPOA Annual Review 2025.
Electric Plant: Three Unresolved Questions
Battery-electric machinery is often presented as the default endpoint of construction decarbonisation, but the SPOA’s review lays out three unresolved practical questions that are holding back wider adoption, particularly for heavy-duty equipment.
- Charging infrastructure: Many sites — especially rural ones — lack adequate charging infrastructure. The traditional backup, a diesel generator, can cancel out much of the intended carbon saving if it is used to recharge batteries, undermining the environmental case for switching in the first place.
- Load weight and runtime: Heavy-duty machines required for major construction projects need battery packs so large that they compromise both runtime and load-carrying capacity, making electrification currently far more viable for smaller plant categories than for the heavy machinery that dominates major infrastructure projects.
- Resale value: Plant hire businesses typically operate a new machine for up to seven years before reselling it and reinvesting in new fleet. Almost nothing is yet known about the resale value of electric plant or the long-term durability of its batteries — a critical gap for any business trying to make a rational long-term capital investment decision.
There is also a safety dimension the SPOA raises directly: many members have expressed concern about the potential for increased fire risk associated with lithium batteries, a factor that feeds into insurance, site safety planning and equipment storage considerations.
Hydrogen: Years Away From Scale
Hydrogen-powered plant machinery remains, in the SPOA’s own assessment, further from commercial viability than either HVO or battery-electric alternatives.
The most immediate obstacle is fuel availability, which is currently extremely limited outside of pilot projects.
While manufacturers have suggested hydrogen-powered machines will officially reach production lines in 2026, the SPOA believes volumes will remain very small and is not expecting mass production in the near term, citing many of the same infrastructure and cost challenges facing electric plant.
The Policy Fight Behind the Scenes: Business Property Relief
Decarbonisation has not been the only pressure point for Scotland’s plant industry in 2025.
A separate and arguably more urgent battle has been playing out over changes to Business Property Relief (BPR) and Agricultural Property Relief (APR), announced without consultation in the UK Budget in October 2024.
The changes left family-run plant and farming businesses facing inheritance tax of 20 per cent on assets worth over £1 million from April 2025 — a policy shift the SPOA describes as having provoked “a fierce backlash from family businesses,” with farmers driving tractors through central London in protest.
Throughout 2025, the SPOA responded to HMRC consultations, met with MSPs and MPs, attended lobbying meetings, and was interviewed by the press on the issue.
“These changes have the potential to disrupt generations of hard work, putting thousands of jobs at risk and undermining decades of progress built by dedicated families within our industry.” — David Jarvie, SPOA President
The association’s core demands were to align inheritance tax liability with an actual cash crystallisation event — such as a sale or disposal — within a seven-year window of transfer, and to remove the Capital Gains Tax uplift on the transfer of privately owned shares, which currently increases future tax liability if a business is sold later.
A partial government U-turn in December 2025 raised the threshold to £2.5 million, or £5 million for married couples, but the SPOA maintains this still leaves many member businesses facing uncertain futures and inheritance tax bills that foreign, public and investment-owned companies are not required to pay.
Why does a UK tax policy matter to African readers? Because it illustrates a pattern relevant well beyond Scotland: family-owned plant and construction businesses — the backbone of much of Africa’s own equipment hire sector — are frequently exposed to policy shifts designed with large corporates in mind, and the SPOA’s coordinated lobbying response offers a template for how industry associations elsewhere might organise in defence of similar businesses.
Skills Shortage: The Constraint Behind Every Other Challenge
Underpinning every decarbonisation and policy challenge in the SPOA review is a workforce problem.
The association estimates that Scotland’s plant industry will need nearly 18,000 additional workers within the next five years to meet demand, a gap it attributes to Brexit, the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on recruitment, and a persistent, longstanding shortage of skilled workers in the sector.
In response, the SPOA has continued to fund apprenticeships, sponsor Youth Sports as a recruitment and community goodwill initiative, and invest in a Tenstar plant simulator used at careers events and schools across the country.
The association has also secured funding to recruit a dedicated Skills and Training Officer, a role focused specifically on promoting the plant simulator at career engagement events and helping members access CITB-funded training courses.
The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) itself has committed £868 million to construction skills investment for 2026–2029, alongside plans to expand its network of training providers and new entrant support teams.
For decarbonisation efforts to succeed, new fuel types, electric machinery and digital fleet systems all require operators and technicians trained to use them safely and effectively — meaning the skills shortage is not a parallel issue to net zero, but a direct constraint on how quickly the transition can happen at all.
What Scotland’s Experience Signals for African Markets
Scotland’s construction equipment industry is not struggling with decarbonisation because its plant owners are reluctant to change.
The SPOA review makes clear that member companies have actively trialled HVO, biofuels, electric machinery and simulation-based training, and are engaging constructively with government and manufacturers alike.
The struggle is instead with the practical, unglamorous realities of infrastructure, cost, warranty clarity and workforce capacity — the same realities that will shape how quickly any market, including those across Africa, can move toward lower-emission construction operations.
The clearest lesson for African plant hire operators, contractors and policymakers may be this: successful decarbonisation strategy depends less on selecting the “right” technology and more on building the surrounding conditions — reliable charging or fuel supply infrastructure, transparent manufacturer warranties, a trained workforce, and stable, well-consulted government policy — without which even the best equipment cannot deliver on its environmental promise.
Source: Scottish Plant Owners Association (SPOA) Annual Review 2025.
Published by CCE News — Construction, Civil Engineering & Heavy Equipment News for Africa | ccenews.co.ke | ccenews.co.za
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