Seòmar agus comataidhean

First, I discount the comment about Lanark. It is very important that I do not take decisions in my Government role that have any bearing whatever on my constituency. I put that on the record.

On the point about SPT, I have already rehearsed the need for all public bodies to operate as efficiently as possible, and the use of reserves is part of that. Conversations are on-going between Transport Scotland and SPT about the reserves, what they may have been previously earmarked for and whether that can be adjusted in light of the financial settlement. Provision of the running of our transport network has been a priority of mine. To the extent that it appears that that could be undermined, I am committed to working with SPT on that.

Thank you for the question—I will add to what Ms Gougeon has already set out.

In order to provide the most concise overview, I would point to the environmental services line in my portfolio budget, which is being increased across its lines by 4 per cent on average. I would also draw out Ms Gougeon’s final point about the nature restoration fund; that is our multi-annual £65 million fund, for which it is proposed to make £29 million available in the coming year for nature restoration and biodiversity strategy purposes. There has been a 5 per cent increase in that line from 2023-24.

I would point, too, to the funding in that budget line for our national parks—that is, the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs national parks. That has been slightly increased from last year, with a 1 per cent increase across the piece. It is also important to draw attention to the public bodies within my responsibility—NatureScot and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, although it is principally NatureScot that relates to Ms Lennon’s question. There is a 6.7 per cent increase in NatureScot’s funding from last year. The increase for SEPA is 7.3 per cent but, as I have said, NatureScot is more important in relation to this particular question.

Thank you very much, Mr Macpherson. I whole-heartedly—

The figure that I have for my overall budget is up 1.1 per cent, but we may be talking at cross-purposes, when inflation is taken into account in different figures. I will certainly check that out.

As I said, there is £2.5 billion on public transport, £308 million on active travel and low-carbon transport, £358 million on decarbonising our heat in buildings, £225 million on environmental services, £91 million on flooding and coastal change, and increases for both my environmental public bodies. In a very difficult budget settlement, that is a reasonable position to have come to.

You can come back to me if this does not answer the question that you asked. The climate change plan, a draft of which is due to be with the committee by no later than November this year, will set sectoral envelopes, as plans have done in the past. It will identify policies capable of reducing emissions commensurate with those envelopes, and it will set that out in detail to allow you to scrutinise that.

I will let my colleague Phil Raines come in on the costs. I am sorry—I thought that you meant the emissions reduction figures.

I will ask my climate change colleagues to say whether that would require a change in the legislation.

I absolutely appreciate the committee’s interest in providing the closest and most detailed scrutiny that it can. That helps us to improve the development of our budget and, indeed, the development of policies in the first place, before we even ascribe a budgetary figure to them. I am always interested in ways in which we can dig down into that. Considering local government spending is not a bad idea in that respect.

For example, I am very conscious that my budget line shows very little in the way of flooding, but I know that my spending on flooding and coastal adaptation will go up by 42 per cent next year, although that is in the local government budget line. I would be keen to look at how such things could be combined.

I do not know whether there are any statutory requirements that Phil Raines wants to flag up.

I will come to Phil Raines on the second part of that, if he does not mind.

I apologise up front to the committee for the delays in strand 3. I am conscious, from letters that you received from the Deputy First Minister and me in which we gave our views at the time on timetables, that there has been slippage. I apologise for that.

The Deputy First Minister and I work on this jointly. Officials in my team have been working with officials in the chief economist’s directorate, and they are looking to bottom out a methodology. Our expectation is that we will pilot a launch on targeted policies in the spring, with the hope of rolling that out by the end of 2024.

That is an update on timing, with an apology for delays to date. I ask Phil Raines to comment on that annual budget question.

I do not know. Do we?

Sorry—I was just flicking through my enormous pack of papers to get to the transport section. I am happy to give that update. Just for the record—and this relates to the points that I was making earlier about public investment to date and us being at a bit of a turning point where we have to try to use our scarce public funding to leverage private support—£65 million of public funding has so far delivered around 2,700 public charging points and that has been supplemented by 1,900 additional public charging points delivered by the private sector.

Mr Doris is absolutely right. As part of our EV vision, through our EV infrastructure fund, we are seeking to spend £30 million of public money and leverage £30 million from the private sector in order to reach our ambition of creating 6,000 public charging points by 2026. To date, £20 million of that public funding has been made available—that includes £4 million proposed for the coming financial year.