Seòmar agus comataidhean

The Scottish Government wants to keep pace with the EU generally, so we always factor that into our decision making.

It is a very small number. Philip Raines might be able to help me on that. East Renfrewshire Council was the one that came back and said, “We’ve done this exercise, but we don’t know how much it can influence what we’re doing.” Philip Raines might have more information. I do not have a list.

We are proposing a couple of mechanisms. First, as I said in my opening remarks, we will still have annual reporting, which will be important. Instead of annual targets, we will have annual reporting on the progress towards the five-year carbon budget ambition.

The bill will retain our current rhythm of reporting on greenhouse gas emissions and on where we are with the climate change plan and how that has been embedded.

Reports on the climate change plan will be unchanged. When we were taking forward the bill, we were clear that we wanted that aspect to be retained completely as it was in the 2009 and 2019 legislation. Under the 2009 act, ministers are required, each year, to lay before the Scottish Parliament

“a report on each substantive chapter”

of the most recent CCP.

We are also required to lay in Parliament a report on emissions reduction every year, indicating the percentage by which the net Scottish emissions are lower than the baseline. That has happened every year, and it will continue to happen every year—nothing in the bill will change any of that.

Your point about how important that is is not lost on me at all. A five-year carbon budget is not about waiting five years before reporting on it and then saying, “Oh, we have not managed to make progress on that.” Work is also taking place to embed those actions more deeply in every portfolio in Government.

I was listening to your evidence when it was suggested that an approach would be to report on key performance indicators in the climate change plan. I am open to considering anything. Work is under way on our having sectoral envelopes in the climate change plan. Obviously, Ms McAllan or I will be reporting on them every year, once the finalised climate change plan, as consulted on, is available.

That checking in on how we are doing every year, with Parliament scrutinising how we are doing annually, and being able to ask me or Ms McAllan questions on that, is fundamentally important. Perhaps changes will need to be made; things might need to be accelerated or there might be blockers to things happening. Conversely, achievements might have been made in certain sectors due to innovation that we did not anticipate. Whatever the position, we are able to report on which sectors are doing particularly well and which ones perhaps need some other assistance and support.

Let me take that away. Obviously, my officials and I will talk about the trajectory of the timescale. I do not think that we will have a climate change plan available at the same time as the secondary legislation; I just do not think that that is doable. However, we want to make it available as soon as possible after that point.

Yes—hence the need for the targets to be in secondary legislation, as that will give future Governments a chance to assess how far they have come in five years and what needs to change with regard to those targets.

I made the point earlier that, in certain sectors, things might go really far down the road of emissions reduction in a way that we did not expect—there might be some kind of change or something might happen that enables that to be the case. Other areas might not be able to go far enough—the picture might change and might need to be examined flexibly. That is another reason for setting the targets in secondary legislation. It is not just about what the Government does but about future Governments aligning with the 10-year climate change plan and the long-term setting of three budgets to cover the period up to 2040. That will be crucial.

Well, it is, because that looks to see how we are meeting the five-year carbon budget and where we are on it.

It is important to mention that one of the reasons for having a five-year carbon budget is that there are fluctuations in year. All bets were off during the Covid pandemic. Straight after Covid there was a massive reduction in car use all of a sudden because, during the pandemic, people had not wanted to go on trains and so on. Having the assessment over five years allows for such fluctuations to be ironed out.

When it comes to scrutiny, two reports will come out every year: on greenhouse gas reduction and on how we are meeting the provisions in the climate change plan.

The greenhouse gas emissions figures will show you how they are matching up with the carbon budget.

Obviously—because I would not be sat here putting this bill forward if we had said that we could not go for a 75 per cent reduction by 2030. However, as Ms Lennon will remember, it was during the process for what is now the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019 that Roseanna Cunningham put forward a draft for a 65 per cent reduction by 2030, and Parliament voted in favour of a 75 per cent reduction. Roseanna Cunningham was very clear at the time. She said that the Parliament voted for a 75 per cent reduction by 2030 and that we had to recognise that action to get us there would have to follow. The target setting is not enough. That was a very challenging target, and the Committee on Climate Change at the time said to us that it was not in line with its advice. It did not think that it was achievable, and it thought that it was extremely challenging.

In this country and in the wider UK, we see not meeting a target as failure. However, the way that I like to look at it is that, if we do not set challenging targets that change our culture, change our mindset and show that we have bold ambition, action may not accelerate as fast as it could.

If you are asking whether I regret the fact that Parliament moved away from the advice that we were given by the Climate Change Committee, which said that we should have stuck to the 65 per cent reduction that Roseanna Cunningham put forward at the time, the answer is both yes and no.

We would certainly be nearer to a 65 per cent reduction than a 75 per cent one, but we should ask whether the target accelerated our actions and whether net zero is now far more deeply embedded across Government, local government and society. It has embedded itself in the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill and in national planning framework 4. It is embedded across policy making, although the CCC gives advice on targets and not on policy.

In summary, we did not take that advice in 2019; we went further.

No, because the new climate change plan will result from the changes in carbon budgeting. That needs CCC advice, which we have always committed to having. I am not going to change that or turn it back to front.

Frankly, I am surprised that the idea of publishing a draft climate change plan without having CCC advice has even been mooted. I am not going to do that. The plan needs to be informed by CCC advice if it is to have credibility.

I have misunderstood you. The CCC says that it will give Governments advice in the spring. The advice that it would ordinarily have given us, per the 2019 act, would have taken a different shape. It would have been recommending targets for a 75 per cent reduction by 2030, a 90 per cent reduction by 2040 and achieving net zero by 2045—the advice would have been on that mechanism.

However, the advice that we are waiting for the CCC to give us, if the bill is passed and if we introduce carbon budgeting, will relate to the different mechanism of carbon budgeting. The CCC knows where we want to go. It has seen the bill and is in support of it. It has recommended that we go to five-year carbon budgeting, so there is certainly no pushback from it in that regard. It is pleased that we are taking this action and changing our processes. It just means that the advice that we get will dovetail into that five-year carbon budgeting process.

I am not saying that our changing anything here will delay that advice. However, the reason why I cannot give the convener and the committee a definitive date for the draft climate change plan is that I do not know—neither does the UK Government or the Welsh Government—exactly when in the spring we will get the advice, because the CCC has not yet said when it will be. The sooner the bill can be passed and royal assent given, the sooner we can say that the Scottish Government is now working on a five-year carbon budget mechanism, and the sooner the CCC can give us its updated advice, once we have gone to a different system.