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I think that 2045 remains the correct aim, and the CCC has recently confirmed its view that 2045 remains the correct net zero target for Scotland.

I am glad to take the opportunity in closing today to restate the value that I put on following science, so that what we do is feasible as well as ambitious.

I want to come on to lessons learned, because I see the forthcoming bill as being the lessons that we as a Parliament have learned since we, rightly, set very ambitious targets a number of years ago.

It is worth first exploring a little more what Mr Ruskell rightly says about the CCC’s advice in the aftermath of the passage of the legislation. That goes to the core of the CCC’s function as a statutory adviser. It has to advise on the legislation as it is set. Therefore, it was not going to advise the Government and the Parliament to change the legislation. Elected politicians had made that decision, and its role was to give advice on how to fulfil it.

In that letter of December 2020 to Roseanna Cunningham, the CCC set out some scenarios, as Mark Ruskell says, that “could potentially reduce emissions” and that

“the Scottish Government may wish to consider”.

Among those were, as Mark Ruskell says, an early start to engineered greenhouse gas removals. That relates to what we call BECCS, which is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or direct air capture and storage. The CCC considered at the time that those would come on stream around the early 2030s. Its advice was that their coming on stream earlier could assist us in reaching our newly set targets. However, carbon capture and storage infrastructure coming on stream was almost entirely in the gift of the UK Government. The fact is that we have not seen that it could be done earlier, as the CCC advised; indeed, we have seen a slip in the deployment of carbon capture and storage. I point out that one of the first interventions was not something that the Scottish Government could directly control.

The CCC’s second recommendation was early decarbonisation of the Grangemouth cluster, which, again, clearly relied on the deployment of carbon capture and storage as a key means of industrial decarbonisation. We all know that, for a variety of reasons that we do not need to get into right now, CCS has not been deployed across the UK at the speed at which we thought it might, never mind on an accelerated timetable.

There are certainly lessons that I wish us to learn, the most important of which must be to follow the independent advice of bodies such as the Climate Change Committee when it comes to setting our targets. I ask colleagues across the Parliament to work with me in doing so when we come to look at the new bill. I will seek advice from the Climate Change Committee on the appropriate levels of the carbon budget. I intend to follow that advice and I ask the Parliament to do so, as well. We also need to set a framework that is capable of recognising that contextual issues will arise from time to time, not least pandemics and wars on the continent, which, to an extent, disrupt our ability to make transformational change.

I reflect on the fact that we are a devolved nation. We seek to implement transformation right across our economy and our society, but not all the tools that we need to do so are in our gift. I point back, for example, to the deployment of CCS.

I entirely respect Mr Ruskell’s views, but I disagree that there is low-hanging fruit left. I suggest that the actions that we now need to take to close the remaining half of our targets are some of the most difficult, as they go right to the heart of the way in which people live their lives.

On the legislation that you rightly refer to in respect of decarbonising our homes, the Government is legislating for what will happen in every home in the country. That is not low-hanging fruit; it is deeply complicated, multifaceted and not entirely deliverable by public money, and it requires genuine cross-working. It is absolutely essential for making the progress that we need to make in emissions reduction, and therefore we must take it forward.

I push back against the point that anything that must be done now is low-hanging fruit. I will never say that the Government has done everything that it can or that we have absolutely maxed out and nothing else is required. That is simply not the case, and it will not be the case until it is 2045 and we have reached our mid-century target.

However, I do not accept that there has been inaction by the Government, not least because of everything that we have achieved in recent years, but also because we all know that the target was beyond what was credibly deliverable in the eyes of climate scientists at the time.

No. The facts of the matter are there in black and white from the time when the CCC advised Parliament on what was credible and what was realistically achievable. However, the Parliament, on a cross-party basis, set the targets. Thereafter, it was the Government’s responsibility to do everything within our power to see that we got as far towards meeting them as we possibly could, hence our desire to strain every sinew to find policies that would meet the targets and to herald the fact that Scotland had been so ambitious. That reminds me that it was not necessarily a bad thing for the Scottish Parliament to have done, because it drove progress. However, I now have a legal obligation to produce a plan that can—like for like and policy for policy—meet that target.

That target was never within a pathway that the CCC could find. If I do not change it, I will not be able to produce a climate change plan that is capable of fulfilling my legal obligations. I have to do that now. The target drove progress in the past, and setting it was not the wrong thing to do at the time to demonstrate ambition, but I have to undo the impediment now so that we can keep moving forward.

Under the current statutory regime, we obviously have to produce a climate change plan, but I need to change that statutory regime to tweak the 2030 target and a few other bits and pieces. However, it is still very much my intention that, once the bill is passed, the obligation to produce a plan will remain and we will do it against the new carbon budgets as set.

As it stands, my intention is to use the new legislation to, among the other things that I have noted, change the timing for the production of the climate change plan so that it can come once we have the new trajectory and the new targets. A huge amount of work has already been done to produce a plan against the existing framework. I cannot solve the existing issues and, therefore, I cannot publish that plan. However, it is my intention that we should move very quickly to recast the emissions targets around carbon budgets and, very soon after, have a climate change plan that meets the targets with policies that are capable of reducing emissions.

Yes. I was not in Parliament when the act was passed. I joined Government shortly afterwards, however, so I was involved in the pandemic response and, of course, in the exit from the European Union, which we all remember happened right in the middle of the pandemic. I do not think that it should be forgotten how much of a drain on capacity and resource that was for the Scottish Government, local government and the UK Government, as resources were pivoted to quite extraordinary and—at least in one of those cases—unexpected events. There is no doubt that that had an impact, not least on Government capacity, public finances and the public’s ability to absorb further change and shock. We were talking earlier about the very important—albeit complicated—work on heat in buildings, and I have to consider the extent to which households are currently grappling with the cost of living as we work to take that forward. It must be considered.

However, I will end by saying that climate change and our associated goals have remained a front-running priority of the Scottish Government. Our economic recovery plan from Covid was about a green recovery; I know that the deputy convener will remember some of that work, too. We have, at all stages, put our actions in pursuit of climate and nature at the very front of the Government’s commitments, even through that difficult period. We continue to do so, not least with the First Minister setting out last week that tackling climate change is among his four top priorities.

Thank you very much for inviting me along to the inquiry.

As you have noted, the committee has already received a written submission. Members will also have heard my statement to Parliament, which I delivered just prior to the Christmas recess and which was very much about what you have just been talking about, convener—a forward look at completion of the A9. The committee has also taken a considerable amount of written evidence from ministers and from current and former chief executives of Transport Scotland, along with a range of stakeholders.

Given the extent of the first-hand evidence that has been collected on historic events, convener, I expect that, today, I can add most value by doing just as you have suggested and looking forward. That said, I absolutely want to be able to assist the committee with its retrospective look, too, to the extent that I am able. As I noted in my submission, I have considered all the previous written statements and have taken advice from my officials on the period leading up to my appointment last year. I hope that you will appreciate that my reflections will be just that—reflections, not first-hand experience.

That said, I am very pleased to have published the refreshed delivery plan for the A9, which was, as I have said, delivered in December not only to foreground certainty of delivery but to balance delivery very carefully against the need to minimise disruption, to take account of market capacity and, indeed, to work within the financial constraints that we face.

My final comment is about the criticality of safety and how important that issue has been for me. I put on record my heartfelt sympathies to everybody who has lost a loved one on the A9 or who has been injured in an accident, which is something that has been pointed out to me as being of great importance. Dualling, as far as I am concerned, is the key safety mechanism, but as we cannot wait for it to happen, interim safety measures are being pursued, too.

I will conclude there, convener. I very much welcome this opportunity to restate the Government’s commitment to the A9 and to look back, in so far as I am able to from my own experience. I very much understand the committee’s interest in this—and of course, given its nature as the committee with responsibility for public petitions, the public’s interest, too.

I look forward to members’ questions.

Again, I am straying slightly into the territory of interpreting what Alex Neil thought. We have to remember that his comments, quite understandably, were made within the four corners of the time that he was involved with the project. That was very early in its development. The advice that he received was, “Yes, minister, this is how we are taking it forward; this is how we propose to do it.” However, that was heavily caveated by saying, “There a great many things to be worked out here.”

Some of the other ministers’ comments on this, including Nicola Sturgeon’s, are, I hope, helpful to the committee. Ms Sturgeon pointed out that Mr Neil was correct to say that, for his purposes at that time, funding had been identified, and her view was that that funding was for a one-to-two-year period during a long project. That is not uncommon for major projects; at the very beginning of such a complex project you will seldom have certainty over delivery and funding right through to the end. That was Mr Neil’s impression of that one-to-two-year period, rather than the whole thing.

I do not deny that there are delays. The principal reason for that is the two things that I pointed out to the convener: first, the ONS reclassification of the non-profit-distributing model in 2014 and a one to two-year delay on statutory processes.