Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Official Report 564KB pdf

---

“Low Carbon Scotland: Meeting our Emissions Reduction Targets 2013-2027”

Agenda item 2 is a round-table evidence session on “Low Carbon Scotland: Meeting our Emissions Reduction Targets 2013-2027—The Draft Second Report on Proposals and Policies”. This is the third such session with stakeholders. Today, we will concentrate on climate change governance, on the development of RPP2 and on some technical issues.

I very much welcome our witnesses. I ask everyone round the table to introduce themselves, so that everyone knows who is who. When we kick off the questioning, anyone who wants to speak should indicate to me, and I will bring them in.

I am Rob Gibson, the convener of the committee and the MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross. To my left is our clerking team.

I am an MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife.

I am the chief executive of Buccleuch and I am also a member of the 2020 climate group.

I am an MSP for South Scotland and I am shadow minister for environment and climate change.

I am Susan Rice, from Lloyds Banking Group Scotland. I also have a connection to the energy company SSE. I was one of the founding members of Scotland’s 2020 climate group.

I am an MSP for Central region.

I am director of Friends of the Earth Scotland and I am a board member of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland.

I am the head of Oxfam Scotland and I am a board member of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland.

I am the MSP for Angus North and Mearns.

I am from the Committee on Climate Change, where I head up the work under devolved Administrations. I also work on buildings and carbon footprints.

I am the MSP for Galloway and West Dumfries.

I am the director of energy and low carbon with Highlands and Islands Enterprise.

I am an MSP for South Scotland.

I am a policy officer with the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations.

I am the MSP for Falkirk East and parliamentary liaison officer to the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment.

I work for the Met Office. I have a long title that says that I am “Chief Advisor to Government (Scotland and Northern Ireland)”.

I am the MSP for Angus South and I am the deputy convener of the committee.

Welcome, everyone. I will kick off by asking about the science and emission trends, just so that we can set the picture. Perhaps I could ask Alex Hill and Ute Collier briefly to update the committee on the latest climate change science and on global emissions trends.

Alex Hill can answer that.

The science is continually developing and is huge. Papers on climate science and climate change come out virtually daily. In recent years, that work has looked more at somewhat shorter-term climate change, over the next 10 to 15 years, which is crucial for RPP2. The original driving force was UKCP09—the United Kingdom climate projections project from 2009—which is now nearly five years old, so it is getting terribly elderly.

The work that is going on at the moment is principally around two things: the attribution of extreme events globally—that is based on work that we are doing along with many other organisations—for which the first report for 2011 was published just recently; and getting a lot more detail for the next decade that, we hope, should provide a focus for people in thinking about what we can do at the moment in weather.

For me, the thing that makes RPP2 a little curious is the focus on annual targets. That makes it a little easy to get thrown off course because of one year’s difficulty, such as when we had that particularly chilly spell in 2010. Taking that into account requires a little bit of thought and effort. Putting all that into a box and saying that we will deal only with emissions is, I think, a bit of a problem. We need to be able to link those to adaptation measures and we need to be able to see that the adaptation measures are going in the right direction by providing not only greater resilience for the Scottish economy but a reduction in carbon output at the same time.

The latest work by Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall centre for climate change research suggests that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ambition to limit the increase in global temperature to a rise of 2°C is probably not achievable. He reckons that we should in fact aim for a 1.5°C rise in order to reduce the impact. There are lots of sciency things going on in the background that continually need to be updated, so that should be taken into account.

I do not have the numbers on global emissions trends at my fingertips because I was not sure that we would discuss that today. However, the overall trend is still upwards. By the end of the Kyoto protocol first commitment period at the end of 2012, some countries had achieved their commitment but many others had not.

Another problem, of course, is that many countries are not in a global deal, including big developed countries such as the US and Canada and developing nations. People may have heard some slightly more positive stories about US emissions falling because of the switch from coal to shale gas, but we need to be careful about those figures given that we currently understand very little about the life-cycle emissions of shale gas. In addition, China is still building lots of coal-fired power plants. As the Committee on Climate Change has pointed out before, even though we have seen some falls in emissions in the UK, a lot of that has been due to the recent recession. Time and again, we have said that we still need that step change.

That sets us up. There will be plenty of room for people to come in during the questions. If you allow us to move into some of those areas, we will bring in as many people as possible.

Angus MacDonald has a question on the missed 2010 targets, which Alex Hill alluded to.

As you will be aware, the draft RPP2 includes text that sets out proposals and policies to compensate for the missed 2010 targets. Although the targets were not met, Scotland’s emissions are reducing. In fact, I believe that we have had the biggest fall in the European Union 15. The challenge is increasing—everybody is aware of that—but it is worth noting that we are over halfway to achieving our target of a 42 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020.

Does the draft RPP2 adequately outline the response of the Scottish Government to the missed 2010 target, and is the explanation of that within RPP2 adequate?

The document says a couple of things on the missed target. It says that we missed the target partly because it was a cold winter. During the formulation and passage of the bill, there was quite a bit of discussion about annual targets and whether they would be difficult, because weather can cause a considerable variation from year to year. Stop Climate Chaos Scotland said that of course that was true and that we would be somewhat sympathetic if Scotland missed a target because of exceptional weather, but that it would be much better to have annual targets to know whether or not we are on track. We made that compromise: we would have annual targets because they would be a useful way of ensuring that civil servants, politicians and the rest of society concentrated on trying to deliver, but we would need to be at least somewhat accepting of exceptional circumstances that might mean that we missed a target.

We missed the 2010 target partly because of weather and partly because of other factors. Temperatures in 2011 were more normal, so we think that we will probably scrape through to meet the 2011 target, but it will be quite close. It will be harder for 2012; we have either missed or hit the target. I suspect that we have just missed it, although we will not know that for about 18 months.

When the bill was being put together and when it was passed unanimously by the Parliament, we expected that if a target was missed, ministers would say, “Well, we’ve missed this target. Here are the things we’ll do immediately to make up for that problem.” What RPP2 says, however, is that the Scottish Government will “over achieve” over a number of years to get back the ground that has been lost. If a target has been missed by 1.4 million tonnes and the Scottish Government overachieves in a number of years, it actually means that it is very much in danger of missing several more targets while it is getting back to where it should be.

We expected a much more urgent response, to say, “We have actually missed this by quite some way. The weather is part of that, but we will do some extra things immediately to get ourselves back on track so that we don’t endanger any future targets.” However, the way I read RPP2, it says, “For the next five years we may just miss all our targets because we are still catching up from 2010.” I find that very unsatisfactory.

We have had a very clear presentation from a theoretical point of view to add to that.

I can give you some figures on this. On 12 March, the Committee on Climate Change will produce its latest progress report on the Scottish targets. Richard Dixon alluded to the problem that we have on data delay. We have firm 2010 data only now, but that is what we are concerned with to assess whether the first target has been missed. We agree with the Scottish Government that it has been missed by just more than 1 million tonnes.

The issue really is the cold winter. When you break down the data and look at it you see that residential sector energy demand went up by 15 per cent, which was mainly gas demand. In fact, the Scottish figures are exactly the same as the UK-wide figures, which showed exactly the same thing.

10:15

Weather adjusting can be done. We have looked at that at the UK level, but we are also looking at it for Scotland for the latest report. If the residential energy demand is weather adjusted, we find that the underlying trend is falling, which is good news. In relation to residential energy demand and energy-efficiency measures, Scotland seems to be getting more than its share from the UK-level measures—the big measures such as the carbon emissions reduction target.

We are probably not so concerned about the 2010 target; the issue is the situation going forward. I am sure that we will discuss the fact that the Scottish Government suggests that Scotland will miss all the targets unless the EU moves to a 30 per cent target.

I take on board Dr Dixon’s point about overachieving, but I hope that we will not miss the targets over the next five years. As he said, RPP2 shows that it is possible to compensate for missing the 2010 target by beating targets in future years. I hope that we will not have such a dire winter as we had in 2010 for a number of years.

Ute Collier commented on the EU setting a target of 30 per cent. I believe that more than 14 million additional tonnes of CO2 could be cut from Scotland’s emissions from 2013 to 2020 through the EU emissions trading system. Does any panel member have a comment on that?

Are you asking whether that level of abatement is possible through the EU ETS?

Yes—if the EU target is set at 30 per cent.

The way in which annual targets are set in Scotland is based on taking whatever the EU ETS is set at. If the EU moves to a more stringent target, Scotland will automatically get more abatement from the power sector and heavy industry, which means that slightly less can be done in other sectors.

Whether the EU will move to 30 per cent is a key issue in relation to RPP2. The 2009 act says that the RPP needs to set out

“the Scottish Ministers’ proposals and policies for meeting the annual targets”.

RPP2 obeys the letter of that, but we will meet the annual targets only if every policy delivers exactly as envisaged, if every proposal is turned into a policy in a timely fashion and delivers everything that it should deliver and if Europe goes to 30 per cent.

There is absolutely no slack. If anything goes wrong—if any policy does not quite deliver, if any proposal is implemented six months late and particularly if Europe does not move to 30 per cent—we will miss some targets. RPP2 obeys the letter of the 2009 act, but what it really defines is how the Scottish ministers hope—on a wing and a prayer—to squeak through and meet all the targets, if they are lucky, rather than providing a sensibly prudent and comfortable plan that gives us enough slack to say that we will definitely meet the targets.

We all very much hope that Europe will move to 30 per cent. It will be pretty embarrassing if the actual reduction by 2020 is well over 20 per cent and approaching 30 per cent, but 30 per cent was never set as a target—that is quite likely to happen if 30 per cent is not set as the target.

However, the Committee on Climate Change gave Scotland advice a year ago, which must have been in the previous progress report, that said:

“Given uncertainty over whether the cap will be changed”—

over whether Europe will go to 30 per cent—

“the Scottish Government should explore scope for further emissions reductions across the non-traded sector.”

A year ago, the Committee on Climate Change told us that, when RPP2 was written, some slack should be built in so that, if Europe does not move to 30 per cent or we do not move as quickly as we would like, there is enough in RPP2 to ensure that we can still meet all or at least most of the targets. My concern is that there is no slack in RPP2.

A number of people want to come in on this point.

I think that what I want to ask is on this point, although I am taking a step back to Dr Dixon’s first comment. You feel that the Scottish Government should have come up with other things to do immediately—and I understand that point within the mathematical scheme of things. What might those things be? It is very easy to make the point, but what should we be doing?

There are policies on which we could move faster. Across all sectors, I find that different civil servants have different attitudes. Some sectors are very enthusiastic, know exactly what to do, and would like to do more than they are doing today. Housing is a good example of an area in which a lot more could be done if we just put more money in, and it would give us social and economic benefits as well as climate change benefits. Some sectors are rather resistant, and transport is the best example of that. It kind of knows what to do, but it does not talk about some of it because it has had reports about policies that are deemed to be politically unacceptable so they do not make it into the further discussions. More could be done in every sector. In housing, there is stuff that we could quite easily do because it would mean moving with the grain, whereas although there is stuff that we could do in transport, we would be pushing against the grain to some extent.

Obviously, it is impossible to turn everything around on a sixpence. I am looking for a specific set of proposals in RPP2 saying that, because we missed the 2010 target, the Government will spend an extra couple of hundred million pounds on insulating people’s homes faster than it had otherwise planned to do, or it will invest in more cycleways or do more smarter choices work to help people to travel in different ways. Plenty of things could have been included in the RPP, but are not in there.

This committee is one of four that is looking at the RPP, so there are other, appropriate places for discussing transport. Although you were led into discussing it, Dr Dixon, we will have to park it for the moment. We need to look at some of the things for which this committee is responsible.

I have a couple of brief comments to make. I am the layperson among today’s witnesses, who are all experts in one way or another, so my comments will be general.

The RPP states the two main reasons for the shortfall in 2010, which were rebasing the start point and the weather. There are also other reasons and, although it would be helpful to understand them, it would be even more helpful to understand some of the possible challenges to future targets. I will name one that I do not hear people talking about. In the 1990s, the population of Scotland gradually shrank, which was not a good thing economically or socially. About 10 years ago, the population started to grow again, which was a good thing for Scotland in social and economic terms. However, more people means more energy usage, so it would be helpful to look forward and to understand some of the other pressures and challenges that might come along so that we can anticipate and address them.

That relates to my other point which is simply that it would be good to have a plan B for shortfalls. The document lists a number of policies and propositions, and we have RPP1. With my businessperson’s hat on, I would say that those will never come out as planned. We must do our best and try to reach our goals, but we should have a plan B; let us have some other ways of dealing with potential shortfalls.

We have had increasingly erratic weather, but relying on the hope that more bad winters will not stop us from achieving targets is not an adequate way of dealing with contingencies. I want to reinforce Stop Climate Chaos Scotland’s point that unless we build in increasing levels of space and flexibility, and have more measures rather than just enough, given a lot of other contingencies, we will fail.

Speaking with my Oxfam hat on, I suppose that we are interested in ensuring that this is done in a socially just way; that the costs are not, as they currently are, borne by some of the poorest people either in Scotland or globally; and that the targets are met. After all, we see the immediate impacts of climate change all around the world and how people are failing—and are failing to be given support—to cope with them. Certain things that are not in RPP2, such as the Scottish Government’s climate justice fund and international development fund, are positive global measures. The adaptation processes that have been referred to must also be recognised in Scotland.

It would also be very good if, in RPP2, the Scottish Government could be very explicit about its role in lobbying with the UK Government in relation to the EU’s 30 per cent emissions target and the action that it can take in Europe in that respect. Given that plenty of people are lobbying against the target, we need an explicit statement of the steps that we are taking to support it and that aspect of the report could be strengthened.

We were going to ask about that issue later, but I wonder whether Jim Hume will follow up that question just now.

I could do that. What are the implications of the calculations set out in pages 166 and 167 of the draft RPP2 that hitting all the annual targets to 2027 will require the 30 per cent EU emissions cut as well as the implementation of all the policies and proposals?

Does no one wish to respond? That’s fine—we will move on to the next question.

I found Dr Dixon’s comments enlightening and thought provoking, but the fact is that because of the cuts to our budgets we cannot really find £300 million right away for housing. Have ministers struck the right balance between policies and proposals in RPP2?

No. It is reasonable to think of something that might be—and can only be—done in the far-away years as a proposal; after all, this Government cannot commit a future Government to doing something very far in the future and, in any case, there would be many uncertainties surrounding such a policy, such as how much it would cost, the technology that would be involved and so on. Although I think it reasonable for the document to contain some proposals, I feel not only that the balance is wrong, but that we have gone backwards and that there are more proposals and fewer policies in, for example, transport than there were in RPP1. Having moved on two or three years and delivered some of these things, we should have more firm policies and fewer proposals for the decade or so that we are dealing with, but the fact is that more uncertainty is arising in some sectors. I hope that through this parliamentary process you can make a difference by persuading ministers to turn some of the proposals into policies, so that we can have a plan that has a bit more certainty.

What do you recommend in that respect?

On transport, which is a subject that I have looked at in some detail, certain measures that the RPP calls proposals are things that we are already doing quite a bit of, but not enough to call them a policy. We are quite close in some respects. For instance, the smarter choices work, which can result in quite a bit of emissions reduction and goes to a certain extent to the heart of the problem in transport—car use—is very good, but we are not doing enough of it to be able to call it a policy that will deliver the numbers in the document. If we did a bit—or, indeed, considerably—more of it, we could call it a policy. In such areas, there is the potential to do just a little bit more and then be able to say, “This is not a proposal but a firm policy. We are really doing this.”

10:30

It is nice to know that 400 people have offered car-sharing for people who are trying to get across the Kessock bridge in Inverness. People are taking action.

Alex Hill wants to talk about the European angle and RPP1 and RPP2.

I was interested in what Judith Robertson said about creating a space that will allow new systems to be developed quickly. RPP2 does not do that particularly well; we need to think a bit further ahead and use what science is available to us. In fact, I am talking about abusing the science in some ways, so that we can get to some much clearer definitions

I can give you a couple of examples. In paragraph 1.5 of the draft RPP2, there is lots of talk about insulation, renewable heat and so on, but there is nothing about cooling. In city centres, many offices run temperature maintenance, so if the summers get warmer, the amount of energy that will be needed to cool buildings will be much greater than the amount that is necessary to heat them. We need to identify the kind of space that we can use to consider how we can adjust the overall policy in the broadest fashion. We have a long way to go; 15 years is a long time. The weather will change dramatically and climate change will impact on supply chains all the way down the line, so we need to think in a broader way and use realistic science.

The chapter on waste and resource efficiency does not mention sources of waste, such as multibuys in supermarkets and fixed-size packages—when you buy 500g of mince and only use 350g of it for a particular recipe. Such issues are not mentioned, but in them we could find the space that Judith Robertson was talking about.

I absolutely accept that point. We talk about creating wriggle room in the plan for the future. Surely the greatest potential for creating wriggle room lies in creating mass behaviour change. Are we doing enough to encourage people to change the way in which they go about their lives?

From SCCS’s perspective, one of the biggest behaviour change options would be transport. I appreciate that this committee’s focus is not transport and that another committee deals with it, but the committee’s focus is on climate change and one of our biggest emissions creators is transport. We need the space to discuss the implications of RPP2 in relation to transport. We need more initiatives on cycling, walking, car-sharing and travel planning. Such initiatives exist, but could be supported much more strongly.

There are also mixed messages from Government because of massive infrastructure projects that encourage car use as opposed to putting in investment that could limit car use or which could support public transport, green energy use and buses, which seem to me to be much more positive processes, although they require that we look across policy rather than just at climate change targets.

It is not just about Government going where we need it to go; it is about all of us making our contribution. What does SCCS feel is its responsibility? It is a mass membership organisation, so what practical things is it doing to get over to the public the message about what simple changes in their behaviour patterns could mean for the environment?

The organisations in Stop Climate Chaos do a huge range of things to encourage their members and the public to take carbon-reducing action. We have a vast range of organisations so, for example, transport specialists focus clearly on reducing car usage, and Oxfam is interested in a range of quite small-scale activities around food use and food waste. That approach applies to all our members. We have not assessed what that would add up to in terms of emissions reductions.

The Government has a really important leadership role because it sets the scene and tone, and it gives direction. If the messages that are coming from the Government are mixed, that effectively lets the public off the hook as far as participation is concerned.

It is the Government’s role that we are scrutinising in this conversation. From our perspective, it is a matter of ensuring that the message is being given out across Government. We talked about the procurement legislation, for example. We have taken the word “sustainable” out of the legislative process; that sends another message. Why are we withdrawing that word? Why is the Government taking it out of the process? I am talking about the Government’s biggest spending process, and we have withdrawn from building sustainability into it explicitly in the title. The Government’s role in providing a consistent message is important to the public; it is important for them to see and hear that message and then to feel its impacts on their lives.

We must soon wrap up this session on RPP1 and draft RPP2, but Jim Hume and Susan Rice want to come back in.

Yes. We have not heard from all the committee members, and perhaps it would be interesting to hear from some of the other witnesses, particularly on the points that Alex Hill made about RPP1 and whether it provides an adequate overall policy framework, and whether the draft RPP2 adequately reports on progress. Does the draft RPP2 contain sufficient details on policies and proposals and who is expected to lead? We have already heard what Judith Robertson thinks.

I think that we have got the message.

Many measures in the draft RPP2 will require voluntary action in order to achieve the necessary abatement. I am interested in hearing the witnesses’ thoughts on whether there is the right balance between incentives and regulation in the draft RPP2.

The latter point is very good.

My comment relates to that last point. I thank Jim Hume for teeing it up.

I very much endorse the view that behavioural change is absolutely fundamental to our ability to achieve what is needed in this venture and to get to where we want to be. That is up to everybody: it is up to the business community and up to us as individuals. In a sense, the 2020 climate group has taken that on as its brief by bringing together people from across business sectors and other sectors, and by challenging, sharing ideas and coming up with new ways to do things and specific ways to engage the population and the community.

I know that you do not want to talk about transport, but an example of a new 2020 project is the travelwise project. My company—Lloyds—has the largest fleet business in the United Kingdom and is making electric cars available to companies that want to try them out. That is how to get behaviour change. We must dig down and not pontificate at a high level, but go in on a specific level. There are many other such examples. This is a body of people whose voice spreads out to those with whom they work, and who do such work as well. I do not know what the balance is, but it is very important.

We should try to move on to costs. We must get a clear idea of whether RPP2 deals with them.

There has been a lot of talk about behaviour change, which underpins meeting the targets. There will have to be winners and losers on all fronts. The draft RPP2 does not quantify the distribution of expected costs across groups such as the Government, businesses and individuals, but the technical annex describes in broad terms who might be expected to meet the bill for several policies and proposals. Is the draft RPP2 sufficiently clear on where the financial costs of the document will be incurred?

To address also Jim Hume’s question about the level of detail, I think that there is some frustration that there is less detail in RPP2 than was in RPP1. That is particularly a frustration in the context of comparing what Scotland decides in the budget process every year with what we need to do to achieve the targets. Committees flagged up that frustration with RPP1; I think that it is even more of a frustration with RPP2. That is partly because RPP2 has lost some of the detail on milestones. For instance, RPP1 showed how many lofts we would try to insulate, but most such detail is missing from RPP2, so it is hard for us to track.

Another frustration is about the financial side. There is a fair amount of detail about how much it all might cost, but information is sketchy about whether it will be public expenditure or private expenditure, and whether it will be a cost that will come back to individual members of society. It is important for us to know that.

It is even more frustrating that although there is an attempt to talk about benefits, the document acknowledges that it is very incomplete. We have one large figure for implementation and a smaller figure for the benefits to society of doing all this stuff—whether that is better health, or less air pollution, or more cohesive communities—but the numbers are incomplete. From the figures in RPP2, we could conclude that there will be a net benefit, but if it contained a full benefit analysis, we might conclude that what it contains is the right thing for Scotland to do socially and economically as well as for climate change. Obviously, civil servants have worked hard to get the benefits numbers into the document, but because the numbers are not complete, it is difficult for Parliament and the committee to see the full picture.

To come back to Jayne Baxter’s points about winners and losers, one of the most important things for all the members of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland is that, if we make fundamental changes that create winners and losers in society, we absolutely have to make sure that we protect the most vulnerable. That message runs through RPP2, but it is hard to see in the detail of practice and policies how it will be done.

Richard Dixon partly made my point. There will be winners and losers, financial costs and economic benefits, but RPP2 does not report much on additional social benefits. The environmental assessment goes some way towards addressing environmental concerns about better air quality and so on, but there is not much about how, for example, if a home is insulated, bills will reduce and it might prevent the household from going into fuel poverty. There is not enough about the health and other social benefits that will come from the policies and proposals. It would be nice to see those in an annex.

I come back to the question of addressing costs. One thing that is missing from the RPP is to do with behavioural change. If you want individuals or organisations to own behavioural change, we have to feel that we are engaged in a process in which we understand the trade-off. We are somehow papering over a lot of the trade-offs—which might be real or might be fictional and exist only in people’s minds. We need to have that discussion and get some clarity about the trade-offs, then get people to own their action.

At the moment RPP2 feels like very much a top-down exercise. We can get all heated because behaviour has not changed, but the people whom we are asking to change do not own the process. We can regulate it and force them to change, but if you want people to do something voluntarily, you have to get them to own it. If a person or an organisation is to own something, they have to feel that they have had a look at the trade-offs and that it has the appropriate priority in the hierarchy and ranking of things that they are trying to manage. I do not feel that that is adequately addressed in RPP2.

I just want to come back on the point about behaviour change and whether the RPP is top-down. RPP2 feels very much like that. It should be top-down as far as strategy, legislation and finance are concerned, but we would get much better behaviour change from the bottom up—from the community, voluntary organisations and networks that already exist. People in the community are much more likely to believe in and buy into something that is delivered locally by people they know and organisations that they trust. That is missing from RPP2. Hopefully there will be more detail when the framework is published. There needs to be a better behaviour-change strategy overall.

10:45

I back up what has just been said. I have seen the work that is being done at community level in Comrie, for example, or up your way, convener, in Transition Black Isle’s let’s go greener together campaign. An awful lot of community work goes on and we need to examine whether there is a disjoint between that work and the RPP2.

It struck me that one of the Scottish Government’s long-term objectives is some form of wellbeing. That is not entirely financial, and we need to think a little bit in RPP2 about the social benefits in many different arenas. If you feel better and your health is better, you spend less money on energy. However, that is simply not measured because we are into measuring carbon only, how much it costs and what the benefit is. There is no social context to say that it is better because you will feel better.

We need to keep in mind the fact that RPP2 goes to 2027. Although it is true that there is not so much detail on costs as there was in RPP1, that is acceptable to some extent. When we do such analysis, our economists come up with ballpark figures. One sometimes wonders how meaningful they are because of the lack of detail. What do we know about how technology develops or incomes develop? The further into the future we forecast, the more uncertainty we have.

As Stop Climate Chaos has pointed out, one of the things that makes assessment difficult is that we do not get a clear view because Scotland is not acting on its own: some of the measures are UK or Great Britain-wide measures and some are European Union measures and we do not get a clear sense of who is responsible for what. For some measures, we may have had cost assessments by the EU or the UK, but we cannot see them. That sort of detail would be helpful. We still need to keep in mind the fact that cost assessments for 2027 will be very uncertain.

It is important to realise the behaviour change that can come from strong economic activity on the back of decarbonising Scotland’s economy, although it is difficult to legislate for it.

In the part of Scotland I come from—the Highlands and Islands—there has been significant growth in community resilience on the back of low-carbon activity in Orkney, the Western Isles and Shetland, where real jobs and real opportunities are being created. That is being driven by the Scottish Government’s 2020 electricity generation targets, which are driving forward a significant change in the industry throughout Scotland and doing on the ground what the committee has been talking about.

There is a need for segmentation of the types of changes. There are changes in behaviour that we are looking to achieve at a very disaggregated level—individual behaviour—and there are others that involve adjusting a current stream of behaviour. Other measures that are completely changing behaviour are different in nature and the tools that we use to effect the changes are different. Other changes are not about many people individually making decisions, but are about decisions that are made further up a chain. If there were a bit more segmentation of types of changes and the tools that are relevant to each type of change, accountability might be better.

We are measuring everything by an output, but it is not clear to me whether that output is a consequence. Whether we did the things that we said we would do and whether they had the consequences that we thought they would have are two different things. If we could clarify whether we did what we said we would do, we could then also consider whether we need to revisit the correlation between an action and the consequence, if the output is not what we thought it would be. We need to be able to dissect the results analysis into whether the outcome was the result of not doing the promised action, of the consequence of the action not being what we forecast or, for example, of the weather changing. Work could be done to make RPP2 a better document by which to hold people to account with a bit more clever segmentation of the nature of change.

Perhaps we can hear a response from Richard Dixon before Jayne Baxter moves on to the next part of her question.

I will follow up on that briefly. Having read the Scottish Parliament information centre briefing on the RPP2, I would say that, if SPICe cannot understand what is proposed in some areas, there is little chance of us mere mortals understanding it. Clearly, more work needs to be done to spell out what is proposed and to include some of those milestones that John Glen suggested so that we really understand what we are trying to deliver. I hope that the committee will press the minister on that when you get the chance to speak to him.

Convener, I think that my second question might have been covered, but I will ask it anyway in case anyone feels that they have more to add.

Can the witnesses outline how the costs—not the financial costs, which we have already talked about, but the social and economic costs along with the options and issues—of implementing the policies and proposals could have been incorporated into the draft RPP2? I think that we have covered that, but people might want to add to what has already been said.

I will make a brief point about how RPP2 is integrated across Government policy beyond the climate change legislation. It seems to me that the national performance framework, for example, is intended to look across Government policy at what Government’s outputs and indicators are. There is nothing to stop Government using RPP2 to look at the national performance framework through the lens of the climate change legislation, and vice versa. However, we have an issue with the national performance framework having as its principal driver economic growth rather than the sustainable thriving of Scotland.

To come back to Alex Hill’s point on the wider implications, Oxfam has produced a humankind index of prosperity in Scotland, which is a broader measure of prosperity that includes a range of environmental, social and economic factors. A broader range of measures—I am not seeking to reduce the scientific nature of carbon emissions reduction measures—could give scope for a broader range of steps to be taken on behaviour change, including behaviour change on the part of Government, the public sector and the private sector. An interesting point is that everyone wants to put the responsibility on to the public without considering who is leading that public behaviour change. A range of actors could do that effectively.

There is scope for integrating more measures across Government and to have a more iterative process.

That point is backed up by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which has done a lot of quite strongly evidenced work on the subject. Its report—which is short, pretty and certainly worth reading—is about measuring not just how much money we generate but the broader feeling among individuals in society.

On the complements to gross domestic product—or however one wants to term them—do the witnesses believe that it would be relevant to have those highlighted within annual targets or parallel to gross domestic product in order to help us to assess not just the carbon emissions but the social impact and wellbeing to which Judith Robertson referred? Should those measures be disaggregated when they are reported on, so that people can understand what they mean?

Oxfam sees such measurements as a guide to policy decision making. Annual reporting would prove that, but it seems to me that those factors come into play up front, prior to decisions being made. If we took into account the environmental, social and economic outcomes across society for any decision that was pending, we could more accurately make decisions that led to a range of benefits rather than just make an assumption—that we would question—that an economic benefit will provide a wide range of societal benefits.

I will—yet again—use the example of a transport decision. If we decide to have a replacement Forth road bridge or build an extension to the M74, we must consider a range of economic and carbon impacts. That is the case particularly for big one-off infrastructure spends. It feels like we have genuine choice with such projects, whereas education and a range of other budgets are fundamental expenditure in which it is not possible to do that. The forthcoming procurement legislation has the potential to do that but, at the moment, we do not see that coming through.

A lot of things could be said in response to that. However, we must stick to interrogation of RPP2. Although it is a fledging document, it is possibly a world leader in grappling with the problems, and we are dealing with things that are important.

I will give another example of how we should deal with some of the issues. The RPP2 includes an ambition on the country’s heat profile and how we deal with it. A solution is to go down the biomass route. We would ideally want that at an appropriate scale, with delivery of the fuel from a particular radius. What is the link between that and a woodland planting target of 10,000 hectares a year, which is a target that I think has been migrated to 100,000 hectares over 10 years? There is a lack of definition in that to say that there is a big difference between what is for carbon sink purposes and what is for commercial forestry that would support an ambition on the heat side. When you go down that route you must say that although local communities may not want an entire farm planted for commercial forestry, that is what is needed to meet the biomass ambition. They may well feel differently about putting sensitive native woodland planting in the valleys, which cannot be harvested.

Some of the thought processes need to be linked to asking what the genuine cost is when you get down to local level. I am not aware of the space of where the debate takes place. Unless you get that, you will not get ownership.

We can note those points. Wellbeing and how we interpret it is a wide matter that concerns us. We will reflect that in how we question the minister.

I must return to carbon for a minute or two. Is it reasonable to conclude that the cost for each tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent abated is expected to reduce over time?

The answer depends on which economist you read, to be frank. Certainly, the evidence from America is that if the carbon cost is increased to about $300 per tonne, there would be a huge impetus to reduce carbon use. However, at its present level, the impact appears to be relatively small.

We certainly build in assumptions for considerable cost reductions. It depends on what we are looking at. Some energy efficiency measures are cheap, but some are expensive, such as offshore wind. With fairly new technology such as that you can make assumptions about the technology improving—people are already finding ways of making foundations cheaper, for example. However, we still need to make a huge jump, because unless we assume that it will become cheaper, we have little hope. We must make the approach reasonable and accept that the costs of mitigating the impacts of climate change may well rise. Things will balance themselves out.

I will follow up on that point about cost reduction and electricity generation. Offshore wind costs £150 per megawatt hour installed, which is similar to the figures that are being talked about for nuclear power. Clearly, the ambition right across the industry is to get costs down to the same level as onshore wind, which, at £100 per megawatt hour is the cheapest form of no-carbon electricity generation. The whole industry is focused on that. To be blunt, unless the industry and the Government—through legislation—solve that problem, we will not reach the target. The target has to be reached, rather than there just being an ambition to reach it.

11:00

There are two issues that we must consider: embedded carbon; and the consumption elements related to China expending carbon and our consumption of it. The RPP2 talks about our actions, but we cannot, in the overall picture, change people’s behaviour unless the wellbeing concept gets through to them and they think about how the wellbeing of people in other parts of the planet is affected as a consequence of their actions. Carbon price and so on has quite a bit of relevancy in this area. We are learning quite a bit as we go along.

We move on to the issue of climate change governance.

We have heard today that there is a possibility that mixed messages are coming from the Government—my comment on that is that that is probably the case at all levels of government in all countries. We have also heard about the need for a step change. Do you think that the Scottish Government and its agencies are appropriately structured and resourced to deliver the transformational outcomes that are necessary?

On messages, I will say something positive about the RPP—I have not done that so far. There are some strong and good messages in the document. The ministerial introduction and other parts of the document contain good messages about the importance of a 2°C limit on temperature rise on the planet. There are some strong messages about the importance of action in Europe. Further, it is good that a number is put to the previous commitment to largely decarbonise the power sector. Those are all good steps forward and are strong messages from the Government that it wants to deliver on the plan.

I meet senior civil servants who are embarrassed about having missed the 2010 target and appear to want genuinely to try extremely hard to meet the rest of the targets. There is no question that the RPP is greenwash or a sham. There are definitely people in Government—on the civil service side and the political side—who absolutely want to deliver on the plans and meet the targets.

Where things fall down is when it comes to the detail. As Claudia Beamish points out, we have not had the necessary step change, which is a phrase that came from the Committee on Climate Change. We need a step change in policy to ensure that we can meet the targets. We have lots of incremental targets, but we have shied away from some of the difficult ones.

Although ministers have had bilateral discussions about what each is doing in their brief with regard to climate change and what they can do to help each other, I am not sure that that has translated into the document in many cases, and I do not think that it has translated into a discussion about how we think about Government finance.

There is a study down south that shows that, if you spend £1 insulating someone’s home, you will get nearly 50p back in savings in the health budget, because you have made those people healthier. I do not think that the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment has spoken to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing and said, “Give me some of your budget so that I can spend it on insulation, which will save you money.” That is the sort of conversation that people need to be having. The costs and benefits in the RPP are separate from the discussions that the Government and Parliament have about the budget. Particularly when it comes to money, we need to be much more joined up.

That is partly why we have four committees considering the RPP2 at the moment.

What do you have to say about the issue of resources that Claudia Beamish asked about? Do you think that the Government and its agencies are appropriately resourced to deliver the changes?

I will offer an observation as somebody who works at the heart of the decarbonisation of the electricity sector, in an enterprise agency. I have worked in the public sector in enterprise for 25 years, and my experience is that the step change and shift in resource within Government and the enterprise agencies to deliver the 2020 target has been dramatic, particularly in relation to delivering wave and tidal energy, onshore wind and, crucially, offshore wind, which will decarbonise the whole energy sector, but with a focus on economic development. That shift has been the best that I have seen in 30 years, particularly in relation to the Scottish Government resource that is now allocated to the large infrastructure that is required to deliver offshore wind.

Are there any other comments on resources?

I can give a couple of examples that go across the border between Scotland and England.

The report does not talk about hydrocarbons, but unconventional gas is perhaps a temporary solution to get us part of the way. However, at the moment the configuration of the Coal Authority and the oil and gas function does not manage the reality of the way in which hydrocarbons are evolving. They both sit under the Department for Energy and Climate Change but they do not really talk to each other.

There is a clear difference of view between England and Scotland on the renewable heat incentive. The scheme incentivises large-scale developments much more than small-scale ones, because they go into the renewables obligation certificate system. At the smaller end, we are incentivising inefficient ways of spending taxpayers’ money to shift energy consumption, and we are ignoring that most of Scotland’s interest is in economic approaches to schemes in the 1MW to 10MW heat footprint. That is where the consumption is easiest to access and where the bang for our buck is if we want to change. However, that is a blind spot right now, because it is not the priority in England.

That is a matter for the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee to interrogate, I hope.

I have told Fergus Ewing about it.

Thanks for that.

The report seems to lack an awareness of the interdependency that has been mentioned. It is a matter of joining all the dots. If we increase the amount of local food, we improve our agricultural economy and then we get behaviour change. If we improve the broadband system, particularly in rural areas, people can work more from home, which reduces transport requirements. We need to build in that interdependency. The recognition of that is crucial, but I am not entirely convinced that we have managed that.

Similarly, with the work on housing, there seems to be a gap between the tremendous work on pre-1919 buildings by Historic Scotland, which is fantastic, and the very modern work on design standards. The gap is what, when I were a lad, we used to call overspill housing in places such as Glasgow and Edinburgh. That is where the gap lies and that is where fuel poverty is. Again, that links back to the wellbeing index.

To what extent do the business interests that are represented feel encouraged and empowered by the Scottish Government and its agencies to behave in a way that makes an appropriate contribution to reducing emissions? To what extent should you need to be pushed? What moral responsibility do your organisations and similar organisations feel to do your bit? Can you provide examples of the actions that you are already taking or plan to take, accepting that Susan Rice has already spoken about electric cars?

I will move on from electric cars. I speak from the perspective of banking and finance and to an extent energy, and the short answer to your question is that there is a moral obligation on companies and particularly large companies, which are sometimes better equipped to initiate programmes, have conversations with Government and get things going.

As a bank, we draw our custom, customers and staff from all over Scotland, so we will have a better proposition as a bank if we serve the needs in all ways of the whole of Scotland. The need that we are considering is hugely important—there is no doubt in my mind about that, and I know that colleagues would echo that view.

How does one do that? I often make a distinction between larger and smaller businesses. It is an important distinction. A large company, such as SSE or Lloyds, has staff that can look at these matters, engage with Government officials, talk about legislation and advise. Small businesses do not have that luxury.

You asked for an example. Lloyds has said that, as the biggest banker to the small business community, we have an obligation to our customers to help them in this sphere. A specific example is planning for small-scale renewables. It takes a lot of time, when applying for a loan from a bank, for the whole process of consents and so forth that has to happen. There is a lot of wind measurement, even for a tiny placement on a farm—we see a lot of successful examples of that in Scotland.

We have worked hard over the past several years. We have 600 relationship and environmental managers, who have been trained and accredited by a University of Cambridge course to go out and speak to small businesses and help them to understand what their options are, what they can do in their particular business and particular location with their particular resources, and what the costs and benefits are to them. That is not selling anything; it is truly guiding small businesses and giving them the information that they are unable to get for themselves. It is a trusted adviser focus.

We looked at the smallest end of small businesses—small and medium-sized enterprises with turnover of up to about £15 million—and decided that the product that we might provide to a large borrower is unsuitable for the small-scale borrower. We have designed a product specifically for the small-scale borrower. That has been available since last year, and the take-up has been very good.

We are now looking at companies at the more medium end of SMEs. We are trying to ease the burden—we sometimes call it due diligence in a box—and make it easier for those companies to get through all of the steps that they have to get through before they can get people on the ground installing a turbine. We then get a product out to them that is affordable and which they can use to borrow and then to see some benefits.

Those are specific examples. SSE, which is strong in the venture space, has 40 or more ventures that are experimenting in different spaces. It is doing work in district heating. As large energy companies do, when it puts up a wind farm, it puts money into local community funds. We then work with those communities and give them advice and guidance.

There is a huge amount that can happen. A lot is happening and I have given just a few examples. I have more but I will not take up the committee’s time.

It would be interesting to know how much of that work is influenced by Government. Is it something that Lloyds would be doing anyway?

That is a good question. The answer is a bit of both. We always have to keep the Government in mind. We have national targets that are agreed initially by Parliament, and as a responsible business we have to pay attention to them. That is one aspect.

Another aspect is the issue of how we then begin to put things into play. It is important that we are able to talk to people in Government, ask questions, share ideas and see what links up and what Government wants to achieve, because we can sometimes align things. We have found that the doors are open and that there is tremendous willingness to engage in those conversations. There is also a good deal of knowledge in Government when we have those conversations. That is very important, and it reinforces our desire to do something.

Another example in Lloyds is the cycle-to-work initiative that is part of our benefits package. Staff who are able and willing to cycle to work benefit, as an employee of the business, from doing that. We know that that leads not only to wellbeing, better health and so forth but to other goals. There are always a number of motivations, not just one.

I call John Glen, and then we will move on to some technical issues.

I reiterate a little what Susan Rice was saying about the private sector. In the sector in which I am involved, there is a great deal of interest in and a sense of responsibility for trying to move the climate change agenda forward. We are involved in renewable energy, unconventional gas and conventional hydrocarbons, as well as affordable housing, so we are trying to do a lot of things in this space.

In the rural economy, just about any land use is subsided by Government somehow or other. There are some exciting things that we can do, but for us to make some of the changes that we would like to make requires an atmosphere of confidence and transparency. I am not sure that some of the political imperatives that are floating around at the moment are doing much to foster an atmosphere of confidence in the rural sector. If I had a plea, it would be for choices to be made that show that the agenda is more important than some of the more political dimensions to the issue. I do not feel that the choices are being clearly made.

11:15

We move on to the input from the Committee on Climate Change.

Members of the panel will be aware that the draft RPP2 states that targets for 2023 to 2027 were informed by advice from the Committee on Climate Change. However, since that advice, new emissions data and projections have become available that show that the effort that will be needed to meet the annual targets from 2023 to 2027 is much greater than was set out in the CCC advice. How does the panel—in particular, Dr Ute Collier from the CCC—respond to the view that the 2023 to 2027 targets in the draft RPP2 are even more challenging than the CCC envisaged?

I am happy to take that—I expected such a question.

When we gave our advice two years ago, we knew that new work was going on. The difference is all to do with agriculture and land use change. The model that the Scottish Government used for all the other sectors is exactly the same as the one that we used; in fact, it is the model that we originally commissioned from Cambridge Econometrics.

I think that we discussed with the committee previously the fact that agricultural and land use change data and projections are incredibly uncertain nationally and, in particular, at the devolved level. Extra work was done by the centre for ecology and hydrology involving the new Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute model. That is what has made all the difference.

My colleagues have looked at that work, and we are confident that it is providing better data and better forecasts, although there are still uncertainties involved. Therefore, we feel that what the Scottish Government says is probably true and that the effort must now be greater because there is suddenly a gap of 4 million tonnes of CO2.

As no one has any further points to raise on that, we will move on to the changing of the 2020 target.

This is one of the areas that Richard Dixon referred to when he said that if SPICe cannot understand what is proposed there is no chance that others will. That is certainly the case as far as I am concerned, although I am sure that someone around the table will understand the proposed change.

I am aware that the draft RPP2 states that

“the 2020 annual target now equates to a 43.66% reduction in emissions.”

That represents quite a change from the 42 per cent reduction that was set out in the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009. Would anyone like to comment on the rationale behind that change and—more important—the implications of it?

That change has been made because the baselines have changed: the numbers that we start from, which are those for 1990—and 1995 for some of the gases—are now different. The 2009 act says that we will reduce emissions by “at least 42%” by 2020, so 43.66 per cent still fits the bill very nicely.

The Government could have changed the 2020 target and all the annual targets in between to make up for the fact that the baseline was different, because the secondary legislation locks in actual carbon numbers—for example, it specifies 57 million tonnes in a certain year. It would have been a lot of bother to take that through Parliament, but the Government could have done it. I welcome the fact that the Government did not decide to do that and is sticking with the fact that we must now reduce emissions by 43.66 per cent to meet the targets.

Let us consider the consequences of that. By 2020 we are supposed to reduce emissions by at least 3 per cent a year, according to the 2009 act, so 43.66 per cent is just over six months’ extra. Basically, to meet the target, we have to take policies that we have already thought of and do most of them six months earlier or do them a little harder. It will be more difficult, but not very much.

I welcome the fact that the Government has decided not to mess with the numbers but to go with them. It will be more difficult, but the Government should not make too much of that.

To make an obvious point, I note that that reinforces what we said earlier. Having no wriggle room or latitude around meeting the current targets is not necessarily a recipe for success. That is a real concern.

Thank you. That explained it nicely.

I am sure that Dr Dixon will enjoy this question. The Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 places a duty on the Scottish ministers to ensure that reductions in net Scottish emissions of greenhouse gases account for at least 80 per cent of the reduction in the net Scottish emissions account. There is a limit on carbon units that can be purchased to count towards the Scottish targets.

Ministers have said that this would never happen, but can you envisage a situation in which the Scottish Government would have to seek to buy carbon units on the international market in order for Scotland to reach its targets?

Again, there was a lively discussion about that during the passage of the bill. I am sure that Judith Robertson will talk about the moral case, but as Stop Climate Chaos Scotland we are keen that Scotland should meet its targets by doing things here both because there is a moral obligation to reduce our emissions here and because there are social and economic benefits to making many of the changes that we need to make here. We are pleased that there is a limit in the act and we hope that the ability to purchase credits will never need to be used.

In the case of the 2010 target, we cannot buy units to make up the difference because the act says that we cannot do that for the first three years. It is true that, if we miss some targets in the future, the act says that we could purchase some international credits. However, we would much prefer that we urgently try to make up any shortfall from domestic effort rather than buy credits from overseas.

Some of the credits are legitimate. They might be about making an Indian factory more energy efficient or about electrification in an African township or village, so they do social and economic good and they really do save carbon. However, with many of the credits, there is significant doubt about whether the thing that is being paid for would have happened anyway. That is a big concern.

I am sure that Judith Robertson will want to add to that.

I remember the discussion at the time about whether we should push for there to be no scope for international trading because we fundamentally need to reduce our emissions. From Oxfam’s perspective, trading is delaying the inevitable and it does not fundamentally help the global situation. If we consider the weakness of the process and the reliability down the line of what happens internationally, in developing countries for example, it is clear that the evidence on the good examples is vastly outweighed by the evidence on the not-so-good examples.

What happens is that, on the ground in poor communities, the fundamental change in emissions does not take place. From Oxfam’s perspective, if the work is not done in the developed nations, it is not going to happen. A major responsibility lies with us not to buy in credits from elsewhere. In Bangladesh, for example, individual emissions responsibilities are of minuscule proportions compared with what we are doing. In fact, developing countries need to increase their usage in order to have enough energy for people to live decent lives.

There are a lot of issues. We are glad to see that carbon reduction is being sustained. We hope that it will continue to be sustained and that the responsibility will not be taken up by international trading.

I am happy with that—thank you very much. Finally, we have questions on measuring effectiveness.

How does the panel feel we could better monitor emissions reductions and the effectiveness of the draft RPP2? Is the monitoring robust enough?

As at the UK level, our Welsh colleagues have put quite a lot of emphasis on having a monitoring system that does not rely just on carbon emissions. As I said earlier about the 2010 target, we need to look at underlying trends.

At the UK level, we have quite a comprehensive system of indicators in that we have picked a number of things for each sector. I think that someone said earlier that RPP1 had numbers for the installation of insulation measures: we have that to 2027 and we can measure against it. We can therefore see whether we are making progress in each sector on the crucial things, which need to be the big-ticket items, for example, in transport and the power sector.

As I said, our Welsh colleagues have something similar. We suggest that that kind of thing is necessary to help achieve better monitoring. It would help us as the independent adviser if we could review it annually, especially given the current problem of the emissions data being 18 months behind.

We can consider matters such as the reduction in carbon emissions from the decarbonisation of energy. Calum Davidson might want to address that.

We are getting much more sophisticated modelling now. For example, just yesterday some information came out from Scottish Renewables on work that it has been doing, which highlights the fact that 1 gigawatt hour of onshore wind generation displaces 99.82 of gas generation. Some solid information is therefore now coming out that proves that we can measure in different ways and, crucially, highlight the decarbonisation of the electricity market and the move to a much more renewables and low-carbon future in Scotland. We should therefore keep the types and focus of measurement structures open and flexible over the next few years.

I want to explore Dr Collier’s point about what is happening in Wales, of which I am not aware. As has been said, the targets were missed in 2010; this is now 2013 and we do not know what happened with regard to the targets in 2011 and 2012. The Stern review report, which is a bit aged now, said that acting as soon as soon as possible is always best. I am interested in the Welsh situation. Has the Welsh Assembly Government taken responsibility for providing interim reports? Is that the situation? How time-lagged are such reports?

The Welsh have not produced any such information yet, but they have developed a framework. The Welsh system is slightly different in that it does not have a legislated target, but they have set themselves targets. I think that 2011 was the first target year. To underpin monitoring in the future, they have set up—I think as of 2013—a comprehensive monitoring framework that is similar to that at the UK level in that it looks at a range of underlying things, from insulation measures to average car-fleet emissions and so on.

The key point is that some of the data is relatively easily available. For example, under the energy company obligations, we have relatively up-to-date data on insulation measures, which are produced by the Office of the Gas and Electricity Markets every three months, I think. Ofgem now also gives us a breakdown of data for the devolved Administrations and for renewable heat installations.

We must be careful to pick things for which we have up-to-date data. When the committee gets our progress report for Scotland, it will see that we are already looking at some of the available data to allow us to assess what happened not in 2010 but last year. It does not work for every measure, but it is a better approach.

I think that we will have to take up many of these things with the minister. I am sure that it would be interesting to discuss the issues for longer, but we do not have the time, as the next item on the agenda will take us a while. Interestingly, we will be asking the minister about the measurement of land use and soil emissions as part of the RPP2, which is one of the positive parts that we have not had time to talk about in this session.

I thank all the panel and the questioners for what has been a challenging and interesting session. I thank the panel for their welcome work.

We will take a short break before the agenda item on biodiversity.

11:31 Meeting suspended.

11:37 On resuming—