Chamber and committees

Dear Convener,

Thank you for making it possible to communicate directly with your committee and I do so in an entirely personal capacity.

Your December 2021 meeting reviewed progress towards the Scottish Government’s net zero targets and in his evidence Professor Bell made reference to the costs of decarbonisation of the power sector, which are being levied on to consumer’s bills, as ‘barely being noticed’. In the context of current energy costs, the regressive nature of the subsidies and the objective of a just transition, I don’t regard his assessment as adequate.

Climate change is driven globally and is beyond our policy choices but the costs of change and mitigation are not. From what I can glean, the Net Zero policies have been subject to an EQIA but not to any kind of distributional assessments of costs and benefits and that, if correct, doesn’t seem right given the policy objectives. It is, I know, a requirement of UK-wide regulatory interventions that they have distributional assessments made.

I note that, with the exception of the Net Zero target itself, there are neither measures of inputs nor outputs attaching to either our net zero or climate adaptation policies. That is done, I understand, to ensure cross-government and agency alignment with policy but I cannot see that it is possible to assess the efficiency of initiatives or of policy trade-offs without them and that is a point that your committee members made in December. I have been able to link policy objectives to financial line items in the Scottish Government Annual Budget but nowhere that I can find is there any determination of what carbon abatement or added resilience to climate effects is being bought.

Bringing these matters together, I find myself concerned that the Net Zero targets have been set without any clear data supporting the carbon or cost efficiency of the underpinning policies and without any framing of the likely distributional effects, particularly on vulnerable or economically disadvantaged people. That may be wrong but, if it is, it is analysis that I think should explicitly sit side-by-side with our discussion of abatement and mitigation targets and trade-offs.

My only request is that the committee give consideration to these matters.

Yours sincerely,

Keith Lough