As David McGill mentioned, I chair the sustainable development board, which includes many of my colleagues from across the Parliament. We worked collaboratively to set out what our session 6 strategy was going to be. Our role is to recommend that strategy to the leadership group, and to the corporate body for final approval. Once the strategy is approved by the corporate body, which we expect to happen early next year, it will become a published document. It will be published on the Parliament website and accessible to anybody who wants to see it.
In developing the strategy, we were cognisant of the fact that we are moving out of a purely environmental plan, which has been operating in the Parliament for quite some time, and expanding into more sustainable development thinking. We are very aware of the recent changes in the regulations and our requirements under them. As David McGill said, and as is set out in our plan, four pillars are defined in the strategy, which are still under development.
The first pillar is around climate change. Our carbon management plan will sit under that and make up a large part of the climate change plan. Although we are not yet ready to publish our targets on that, which will be done through our governance strategy, we are aware of our requirements under regulations. Our session 6 strategy runs until 2026, which is clearly very close to 2030. Under the requirements of the regulations, we need to have achieved a 75 per cent reduction in our net emissions by 2030. That is our thinking behind the targets that we will set ourselves under the climate change pillar.
Our scrutiny strategy is focused on how, as an institution, the Parliament holds the Government to account, and how we can do so through the lens of sustainability. That involves consideration of how we can expand some of the approaches that I know the committee is already using in its scrutiny of legislation across other committees and strengthen our capacity in those areas.
The third pillar—our engagement pillar—focuses on our external engagement; it involves recognising the role of the Parliament as an institution and how we engage with others. In the short term, the focus will be on how we take advantage of the Parliament’s role as we move into the 26th conference of the parties—COP26—and share that internationally and with our peers in the UK. The engagement pillar also focuses on our visitors and how we can run our education programme in a more sustainable way. We want to be more accessible to a wider range of people than those who, traditionally, have been able to travel to the Parliament.
As has been mentioned a couple of times, behavioural change will be one of the biggest issues that we need to tackle. That is why we have a separate pillar of embedding sustainable development thinking. That is about recognising that changing people’s behaviour and embedding those changes will be one of the most difficult things that we do. Our aim is to ensure that people across the organisation have a base-level understanding of sustainable development thinking and, on the back of that, that all the actions we are taking around climate change scrutiny and engagement have a change management programme to support them, so that we can really embed those behaviours.
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