Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee

Meeting date: Monday, June 15, 2020

Official Report 566KB pdf

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Green Recovery

Welcome back. Agenda item 3 is an evidence session on Covid-19 and a green recovery. We welcome back the cabinet secretary, who is now joined by the head of the policy and implementation unit in the Scottish Government’s climate change division, David Mallon.

We thank the cabinet secretary for coming to us with the concept of the green recovery and for giving us an outline briefing on that. We appreciate that that was only two months ago, so we are not expecting much in the way of specific actions. This is our last committee meeting before the recess, so we wanted to check in with the cabinet secretary on how the Government’s thinking on the green recovery has progressed.

In the interim, between when we last spoke about the matter and today, there has, of course, been Committee on Climate Change advice. The cabinet secretary will know that, last week, we had an informal discussion with Chris Stark from the Committee on Climate Change, in which we talked about some high-level ideas on how we could recover from the pandemic economically, while bearing in mind our ambitions for emissions reductions.

I will ask about the immediate opportunities that might be available to us. I am conscious of the fact that one of those immediate opportunities, in the form of the energy transition and innovation funding, was announced on Friday by the First Minister. Chris Stark talked about taking forward some of the positive—maybe “positive” is not the right word, given that we are in a terrible situation, right now—behavioural changes that we have seen as a result of the pandemic, and about holding on to the good stuff as we move forward out of the pandemic and into a different type of—[Inaudible.] What are the cabinet secretary’s thoughts on that?

That is a very general question. One of our challenges at the moment is in understanding the exact extent of behaviour changes and how they will manifest themselves in the future. For example, there has been a lot of discussion about transport changes. There are aspects of the transport changes that we would all want to continue—for example, increased use of active travel including walking, cycling and so on. Obviously, money has been committed to local authorities very quickly and straightforwardly in order to maximise its use and make it more accessible. There is also a real issue in relation to people’s ability and desire to go back on to mass public transport.

We have to be a little careful about some of the potential outcomes and about what behaviour change might drive—I do not mean that as a pun. In the transport sector, there will be welcome aspects in what has happened, but other aspects might cause issues. That is why it is extremely difficult to assess the behaviour change in some areas right now.

We will want to build on behaviour changes that we think are good and helpful, but there are other behaviour changes that we will want to find ways around. One of my concerns is about there being a rapid return to use of single-use items and regrettably careless disposal, which you will all have seen.

10:45  

We were making good headway on some issues and we were building in some fantastic behaviour changes that have, to a greater or lesser extent, now been pushed into reverse. It is not as simple as just asking how we can build on behaviour change; we must ascertain which aspects of behaviour change we want to sustain and which we do not want to sustain. It is a complicated area.

As I said to Chris Stark last week, because people have not been flying for the past two months, and not so many car journeys have been made, there is a danger that we might look at the resulting emissions reductions and think that we can bank them for when people start to use their cars more than they use public transport, and when they start to take advantage of flights when they start again, such that we go too far in the other direction. That has to be factored in. We have not made the gains that some people suggest that we have made since we have been in lockdown.

No—which is why real analysis of what has been happening is important. However, when we are in the midst of management of a crisis, that is quite hard to analyse. To an extent, there is a challenge for us all in that. I guess that every Government will be struggling with that challenge.

Because the transport issue covers so many different aspects of our lives, it is a real struggle. If people are not happy about getting on a train carriage or a busy bus, they will probably not get on busy flights, either. I think that the areas of transport that are more fundamental to daily life will have to find ways around the situation.

Aviation is in a particular place; we often speak about it as if it is not really a transport issue. When we talk about transport, we are talking mostly about day and daily commuting, transportation of goods from one place to another and how best they can be managed. Aviation is always seen as more of a choice than a necessity, and a lot of the focus is on reducing its use.

I genuinely do not know the answers to some of the problems. It is fair for us to admit that we cannot be certain how some areas of human behaviour will look in six months, a year or two years.

You are right to say that there is a danger of just banking reductions and making presumptions about what that means when the behaviour change is not what will happen in the future. I go back to my concern about people’s willingness to be on mass transportation.

I note in passing that I have heard that car salesmen and car manufacturers very much want to be back up running and open because they believe that there is a big pent-up demand for motor vehicles, as people will prefer to drive in their own cars rather than take public transport. Managing that is going to be quite difficult.

We heard before Covid-19 that we need to go further and faster, but we have had a long period of lockdown, which in some instances will have been habit forming. Are you planning to propose any emergency legislation or new policies to get us over some of the hurdles—for example, through councils recycling more? In my constituency, we moved back from fortnightly collection to one bin being collected per week, but the council will need to review that once we are out of lockdown and people return to normal working. Do you foresee policies to ensure that councils get back up to speed, given that they have had to deal with rubbish in different ways?

Arrangements have been put in place during the emergency because of difficulties around staffing and people maintaining proper social distancing. They have been put in place on what most people anticipate will be a temporary basis, but how long “temporary” will become is a question that we cannot answer yet. We are in a phased process in which some restrictions are being eased. We might anticipate that we will, at some point, be able to reinstate pretty much what was there before, which we would welcome.

If Finlay Carson was asking in the earlier part of his question whether there will be emergency legislation to accelerate a return to what might have been a pre-Covid normal, I cannot see what such legislation might look like. We are still in the phase of determining what will become the “new normal”—I guess that that is the phrase that we are using. We might then begin to think about whether there are other legislative requirements that could come into play.

The primary thing for us is the climate change legislation, and we are not moving away from it or dialling back on it. We cannot ignore the fact that society and the economy have taken a massive hit, so we have to wrap that into how we proceed. I am not clear about what kind of emergency legislation Finlay Carson envisages might be required.

I guess that it would be legislation to prevent local authorities from going back to the old norm, given that they had plans to upgrade their recycling and so on. For example, in Dumfries and Galloway, we have plans for a new recycling scheme, but it is staged for 2021, 2022 and 2023. Would it be sensible for local authorities to go back to the old norm before upgrading their recycling to what they had planned? It seems that that would involve additional costs. Should they accelerate the roll-out of new recycling schemes rather than revert to the old ones?

Until we know what the new norm will be, we cannot be specific about what might be done.

In more general terms, if what Finlay Carson is angling at is that there might be areas in which we could accelerate action, I say that there might be areas of activity or the economy in which, as a result of what has happened, we could accelerate changes that might otherwise have taken longer to come into play. That might happen.

In a sense, the specific thing that Finlay Carson is asking about is emergency legislation.

I will move on to your pet topic, which is peatland restoration.

We can see that there will be quite a change in our job situation. In some sectors, people will not be returning to work as quickly as they might like to. Can you see the Scottish Government accelerating roll-out of tree planting and peatland restoration by using a new workforce that could be trained to deliver those things more quickly?

I certainly hope so. Outdoor working has begun again, and there is great potential for increasing workforce skills and training in a number of outdoor areas. I would always argue for increased resource in those areas, but I do not want us to forget the enormous commitment of £0.25 billion over 10 years, which generates in the industry confidence that there is a point in training and in increasing employee numbers. There is a point to that funding, because we know that it will be sustained and consistent, which is the key. I do not want us to slide past the funding of £0.25 billion and forget what an enormous commitment that was.

I am absolutely certain that my colleague Fergus Ewing would also want to argue for increased funding for tree planting.

We always have to make sure that we have the capacity to do what that Finlay Carson is asking about, which is the capacity to grow some aspects of the rural economy. Over the past two or three months, I have been consistently saying that that is incredibly important. There are parts of the economy that we can actually grow and build on, which is very important—in particular, for areas where jobs might be more difficult to get and are in shorter supply.

This seems to be a good point at which to cross over to Stewart Stevenson, who has questions about transition.

On Friday, I had an excellent meeting with the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre, which focused on capitalising on some of the vacuums in behaviours in our population that have been brought about by the Covid crisis. Less travel is the most obvious one, but the dramatic reduction in the price of crude oil is having an effect on the north-east of Scotland in particular and is likely to lead to a change in employment patterns.

The £62 million that the Government has just brought forward will help the transition to some extent. In your brief, cabinet secretary, are there particular behaviours on which we should be taking a lead and actively engaging with the general population, in order to try to reduce the possibility that they will re-engage with behaviours that are not very helpful for the climate change agenda? We have talked about the positive benefits of walking and cycling and so on. Although it is great that people could become established in a new norm, they could resume the old norm. How can we help individuals, as distinct from bodies, to sustain some of the good habits that they might have acquired?

11:00  

I am not sure that there is an easy answer to that question. However, we need to be careful not to assume that, on one side, there is Government action and that, with everything else, it is down to the action of individuals. Obviously, individuals make their own decisions about their behavioural practices on the basis of what is most applicable to them and what they can and cannot do but, as Stewart Stevenson will know, in a very rural area, some individuals’ transport decisions are made for them by other people. That is just a reality.

Therefore, I would not want to presume that, when we talk about behaviour, we are talking only about individuals’ behaviour. We are also talking about the behaviour of, for example, companies and employers, which are now involved in a real-time experiment on the capacity to increase the amount of remote working that it is possible for people to do. That has been forced on employers by the current situation, but it represents a learning experience for them about what is and is not feasible. I hope that that is a kind of behaviour that people will be able to engage in, if not on the full-time basis that they are having to work in that way at the moment, at the very least on a much more flexible basis than companies might otherwise have been willing to allow for.

When we talk about behaviours, I want us to be careful that we do not talk only about the behaviour of individuals, who will often have to make decisions about specific aspects of what they are doing on the basis of what other organisations, whether private or public, have decided is appropriate. It is sometimes the case that a behavioural choice that is made is not really much of a choice at all, and we need to bear that in mind.

I think that those specific areas of behaviour and the sectoral basis on which we—[Inaudible.]—are the ones that we want to achieve. However, we need to understand what is a genuine choice and what is a choice that has been forced on people. Those are two different things.

Angus MacDonald has a supplementary on that line of questioning.

I want to follow up on the cabinet secretary’s point about behavioural change by companies. I, too, had an excellent meeting on Friday with the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre, or IDRIC. We had some good discussions, in the course of which the need for behavioural change by companies as well as individuals was mentioned, along with the need for transformative innovation to achieve industrial decarbonisation. Grangemouth in my constituency will play a big part in that.

Has there been any constructive dialogue with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on making progress in that area, notwithstanding the current health crisis?

We have written again to the UK Government on the back of the advice that we got from the Committee on Climate Change, reminding the UK Government of the significant areas in which we need movement at Westminster level if the UK as a whole is to reach its 2050 target and if Scotland is to reach its 2045 target. The decarbonisation issue is precisely one of those areas where we require significant movement on the part of the UK Government. I have written again to the UK Government on that basis. As yet, I have not seen a great deal on that. Obviously, we continue to attempt to have that conversation—[Inaudible.]

We will certainly watch that space.

I want to explore recovery planning but, before I do so, I want to highlight one point. I completely agree with the cabinet secretary that none of us knows all the answers. She highlighted the possibility that people will, understandably, want to use private cars more after Covid. I wonder whether that might be an opportunity to accelerate action on electric and other low-emission private cars.

I am sure that my colleague Michael Matheson will already be looking at what we can do on that in a Scottish context. However, there are significant areas where the UK Government could help, if that was to be considered an appropriate way to go. I see from some reports that other countries are beginning to increase support mechanisms for people buying ultra-low-emission vehicles, so clearly other countries are considering that possibility. That is important and we want people to make that switch, but that does not remove the challenge with mass public transportation. It changes the nature of the cars that are bought, but it does not deal with our concerns and questions about the willingness to re-engage with mass public transport.

I completely agree, and nor does it solve the issues with congestion, although we might learn lessons from other aspects of Covid on issues such as home working.

More widely, I want to ask about recovery planning. What processes are in place across the Scottish Government to ensure that we deliver a green recovery as we go forward with our economy and society?

A green recovery is being progressed through all existing workstreams. That includes the early action on economic recovery that has been discussed. We know that there will be a new normal, so we want to develop plans for a green recovery now. A big part of that is building towards publication of the refocused climate change plan update in December. Work has begun on that, and it will be a key strategic document for the green recovery, as well as existing in and of itself and showing the pathway towards the 2030 target.

I am working very hard with my cabinet colleagues to ensure a joined-up approach to sustainable recovery. We have a cabinet level economy sub-committee, which meets weekly. We are trying to co-ordinate that conversation and understanding across the Government, its agencies, all sectors and local authorities. All contributions to the conversation are very welcome.

As Claudia Beamish knows, we have reconvened and slightly rejigged the working group that was previously in place to attempt to account for the change in circumstances that we are facing. The group has already met once and the next meeting will be held next week.

Thank you. I was going to ask about the co-ordination of the green recovery across the Government, public authorities and Government agencies, including Highlands and Islands Enterprise, South of Scotland Enterprise and Scottish Enterprise, as well as the new Scottish National Investment Bank, which has a low-carbon commitment. Can you tell us a little more about how those connections are working in the current circumstances, including using Zoom and other such tools?

We are trying to establish a way for the conversation to be held without everyone having to be in various versions of the same Zoom meeting. I had a conversation with Benny Higgins and other members of the advisory group on economic recovery. I am having another conversation with him this week. I have also had discussions with people from the investment bank about how they can be more directly connected to the sustainable recovery group, of which Claudia Beamish is a member. We are trying to have those conversations.

We are trying to ensure that we are not replicating everyone’s Zoom meetings in slightly different formats. We want to ensure that there is an effective network in place. I hope that Claudia Beamish is reassured by the fact that I am about to have my second discussion with the chair of the economic recovery group. We are actively considering how the investment bank can link directly to the work that the cross-party group on sustainable recovery does. One of the Scottish National Investment Bank’s fundamental purposes is to work towards the target of net zero by 2045. It is really important that it is part of the discussion and is not seen as being completely separate and sitting on its own.

We are trying to ensure that the conversation works as well as it can without ending up crashing everyone’s system by holding replicated Zoom meetings all over the place. It is not easy in circumstances in which, for big sections of the economy, there is a particular and critical need for support and thinking.

Finally, how will you engage with the Scottish Parliament?

We will engage with the committee—this is part of that engagement. The group that I set up has party spokespeople on it for a very good reason, which is to ensure that the spokespeople are able to advise their own parties about what is being considered. That is already happening.

Other than answering questions in the chamber, I am not sure what else is planned at present. Tomorrow morning at 9.30 the greenhouse gas emissions statistics will be published, so I will be making a statement on that. I rather suspect that a lot of the questioning will be about economic recovery rather than the statistics, but those opportunities will continue.

11:15  

We move to questions from Mark Ruskell.

Cabinet secretary, I was listening to what you said earlier about the behavioural choices that people are able to make or are sometimes unable to make. I guess that a lot of that comes down to the systems and infrastructure that we have around us. I want to ask about the infrastructure investment plan. The Infrastructure Commission for Scotland was clear in saying that we should be maintaining the infrastructure that we have got and should not be building infrastructure that locks in emissions for the long term. What thinking is happening in the Cabinet on reviewing some of the capital infrastructure programmes?

You will, of course, be aware of the controversies around the cross-Tay link road, the Sheriffhall roundabout, the A96 and so on. Some of those projects might have more or fewer economic advantages and social benefits, but they will have an environmental cost and they will lock in emissions. Where is the Government at on that? Is there a major rethink of those capital projects, or are we trundling on as we have been doing?

There is considerable discussion of infrastructure projects. They are discussed fairly frequently. Capital projects will be seen as pretty fundamental to the recovery. There is a desire not to have them lock in bad behaviours or our changed view of what might be required. Decisions are obviously having to be made quickly, because the economy needs to be stood up as quickly as possible.

That conversation is constant. I do not want to tread on the toes of some of my colleagues who have important roles in this, such as the infrastructure secretary and the finance secretary. Announcements have been made already about various aspects of that, and they will continue to be made. Suffice it to say that there has been a real look, right across Government, for potential investment and where that would fit into our broader desire for green economic recovery.

Is the Government having that conversation with individual councils at the moment as part of the city deal partnerships? I guess that every council will now be looking at its own capital programme and thinking about whether it should be investing in schools infrastructure rather than in roads infrastructure or maintenance. To what extent is the Government having those active discussions with local authority partners about their own capital programmes?

You would probably need to speak to individual cabinet secretaries who might have some of the capital projects that you are discussing within their portfolios about the extent to which such discussions are on-going. I would be astonished if that conversation was not constant and current. I am pretty sure that local authorities would be knocking on doors if they thought that they were not open, but, as far as I am aware, those doors are all open.

As Mark Ruskell is probably aware, I am not directly involved in such conversations, so I do not want to say what is or is not happening. All that I can do is tell the committee that that conversation is happening constantly and frequently across all portfolios right now, because all of us are extremely concerned about trying to establish the best way out of the crisis that we are in.

We are running out of time, so I will make my question brief. From the answers that the cabinet secretary has given, I will probably get the answer quite quickly.

My question is about housing retrofits and building new homes that are fit for the future. We know that those things would have the direct social benefit of more comfortable homes and improved health and wellbeing, and that retrofitting can be used to improve carbon and water efficiency. Have there been any discussions on that particular matter with the Minister for Local Government, Housing and Planning?

The Minister for Local Government, Housing and Planning is pretty much looking at all aspects of housing in that respect, and the issue of retrofitting has been a consistent part of the conversation for many years. Annie Wells will know from her own experience that retrofitting works better with some pre-existing housing than it does with other housing. It is a question of establishing where and in what way one could get rapid benefit from it.

There are some real challenges with retrofitting, but I am absolutely certain that Kevin Stewart will be looking closely at it where it is possible.

We have time for one very short question from Finlay Carson. We will then have to let the cabinet secretary go.

Last week, we had a very helpful discussion with Chris Stark from the CCC—[Inaudible.]

—a Scottish office base for the CCC. We know that the CCC gives exemplary independent advice on, for example, the low-carbon economy. Chris Stark said that there would be an advantage in having a Scottish office on climate change to give advice to the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government. I understand that the current funding is based on population and that the cost of a new office—it would be in the region of £500,000—would be greater than the Scottish Government’s current contribution. Would having a Scottish office on climate change be worth while? Will the Scottish Government look at potentially funding that in the future?

I have said publicly that we would welcome a Scottish office of the Committee on Climate Change. We are discussing with the UK Government how best that might be achieved.

I thank the cabinet secretary for her time this morning, and I thank her officials who have joined us.