Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Official Report 610KB pdf

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“Low Carbon Scotland”

Agenda item 3 is continuation of our consideration of the “Low Carbon Scotland” draft report on proposals and policies. This is the second evidence session that we have had on the draft report, which was laid on 17 November. There is a 60-day period for parliamentary consideration, and the Scottish ministers must have regard to the views of Parliament or committees of the Parliament on the draft report. We will hear from witnesses and the minister in the coming weeks. We hope to agree a report on the RPP before the Christmas recess, which will also take into account comments that we receive from other committees.

We will now hear from climate change and transport academics and experts. For anyone who was with us for the earlier part of the meeting, some will be familiar faces. I welcome back Professor Iain Docherty, Dr Andy Kerr and Professor Tom Rye. I also welcome new witnesses Anil Gupta, team leader for environment and regeneration at the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and George Tarvit, development manager at the sustainable Scotland network.

I welcome you all to the committee and I thank those of you who have provided written evidence to us. Do any of you want to make any brief opening remarks before we begin the questions? No. Okay, we will press on then. To keep this item to a reasonable time, I ask members to keep questions succinct. If witnesses can be as direct as possible in their answers as well, we will be able to get through everything.

I have an opening question about the development of the RPP. Do the witnesses feel that the document delivers the kind of revolutionary thinking that has been called for to achieve a low-carbon Scotland? How does the document relate to the wider suite of documents that were produced and published around the same time, and others that are expected soon? Do we have clarity from all those documents, or clutter?

I was involved in the project team that drafted the climate change delivery plan 18 months ago. The RPP used that plan as a baseline and developed additional work round it. I think that one of the best things in the RPP is the recognition that there needs to be a much broader narrative around what vision we are trying to achieve for Scotland. I ran some stakeholder workshops for the climate change policy team in the summer, acting as an independent for them. One piece of feedback from many different stakeholder groups around Scotland was that we need to understand what the vision is that we are trying to achieve; doing it through simply saying, “There is a target in 2020 or 2015,” will not allow that. I was therefore very pleased to see in the suite of documents—the economic strategy, the energy efficiency action plan and the RPP—the Government’s attempt to deliver a much broader narrative about the positive benefits of delivering the outcomes that we seek in a low-carbon economy and society. That was a very powerful statement of where we are trying to get to and the biggest difference that I saw—and I thought it was very helpful compared with what we did 18 months ago. I will probably leave the detailed stuff until we come on to more detailed questioning.

But, in general, if we talk about the policies in the RPP rather than about the issues that are listed as proposals that have not yet been adopted, the document does not really take us very much further into new territory; it is a statement of where things stand at the moment. Is that a fair comment?

That is a bit unfair. The fact that some of the proposals in the RPP are described as options is a step forward from where we were, say, two years ago when we were talking about road charging and speed limits. There is a range of issues there that are quite politically contentious, which is understandable. The fact that we are starting to engage with and debate such issues is moving us forward. Is the RPP revolutionary? No, absolutely not. But, from talking to stakeholders around Scotland, it seems to me that the big issue is not the technical innovation that we know needs to happen but the mismatch between what people think and the debate that is going on in political circles. We have not yet matched that mismatch—and the RPP does not match it—but we are moving in the right direction.

As a starting document, the RPP is very helpful. It provides, as has been intimated, a stocktake of policies, and I think it is the start of quite an important process. It also starts making it a bit easier to move away from documents such as that on the public bodies duty and allows us to focus on the sorts of work that will need to be undertaken in the long term. It shows the potential of existing policies and, as has been said, starts listing proposals that we will need to get our heads around to see how they will fit into the carbon reduction potential of various actions. The RPP is very helpful in that regard. One of the areas where we find it slightly more difficult at the moment is the lack of clarity about who is to do what and at what cost. Those sorts of things will be particularly important as we try to provide for, or require more money to deliver, some of the changes that are required.

At this stage, revolutionary approaches are probably not the most helpful way of encouraging people to come on board. We need people to understand what they can do currently. The 42 per cent target for 2020 will be difficult to achieve, but it seems to be almost achievable, given what is put in the RPP at present. It is a good way of getting everybody started.

Does your comment about a lack of clarity about who is to do what and at what cost relate only to the proposals or are you concerned about a lack of clarity about currently adopted policies?

My concern is primarily about the proposals.

I concur with the views that have been expressed already. Both the RPP document and the exercise that was undertaken to get to this point have been hugely useful. I attended some of the workshops and raised a number of concerns about the earlier drafts in relation to taking account of the rebound effect, how we account for consumption emissions and some of the wider sustainable development costs and benefits that we need to scope into the analysis. Not all those concerns have been addressed.

I do not think that the RPP has achieved its potential yet, but it is an excellent step forward. It starts to provide some of the clarity that our members are looking for about what policies and proposals should be considered locally. A lot of detail is still to be added to it; the process will be critical in that respect. The balance between revolution and reality will play out all the way through this. The climate change targets are ambitious, but we have to be realistic about what we can put in place, what will be politically feasible and how we can put it into practice. There is a huge challenge in transposing the level of analysis in the current RPP into local and regional versions.

I will limit my comments to the transport section of the RPP. I find it rather disappointing, primarily because it places a lot of emphasis on the proposals and seems to have a very small number of policies. Given that transport is the second-fastest growing contributor to climate emissions in Scotland, I am concerned that the RPP does not go far enough in setting us down the road, as it were, to reducing those emissions.

I, too, will limit my comments to the transport section of the document. I agree with what Tom Rye just said. The document is very much an indication of the political realities of how difficult it will be to do something about transport emissions. The Stern review, which was done for the Treasury three or four years ago, noted the difficulty of achieving both the technological innovation required to electrify the vehicle fleet, for example, and the behavioural and cultural change that is assumed necessary to get to where the forecasts say we have to be in 2020 and 2050.

The document talks about a very ambitious implementation of its proposals—bringing about a 13 per cent reduction in transport emissions by 2020, based on the 1990 baseline. However, that is quite a modest achievement in overall reduction terms. That is certainly consistent with what Stern told us about the difficulty of achieving meaningful reductions in transport emissions in the short term. The Government should not be wholly blamed for that. One of the biggest problems that is alluded to—perhaps not as strongly as you might have expected, given the authorship of the report—is that many of the really big policy levers that would make a big difference to transport emissions quickly are not held at Scottish Government level. The document talks a lot about EU policies and factors them in as the baseline, particularly on emissions from the vehicle fleet, which is fair enough, but if we were to seek a more ambitious trajectory of quick, deep cuts in emissions, the taxation mechanisms that are held at Westminster level would achieve that. There is of course a separate question about whether we would want to use them if they were available in Scotland. Currently, we do not have the power to do that.

Thank you very much. We will come on to some of those specific topics in a moment. I have one final general question and, unless any of the other witnesses are keen to come in, I will direct it to Andy Kerr—partly because he has commented on the issues already.

The Scottish Government has asserted that it can and will become the destination of choice for low-carbon investment—I think that that is the phrase that is used. Is that assertion realistic? Is the Government doing everything it can to achieve its ambition and turn it into a reality as opposed to a slogan?

Climate change is a global problem. As the targets of 42 per cent and 80 per cent are our contribution to solving that global problem, should the question on low-carbon investment really be, “Who gets to be the winner?”—should we consider the issue as a shared endeavour rather than merely consider how well Scotland can do out of it?

16:00  

I will answer those questions in order.

Yes, Scotland can be the place for investment. In other parts of the world, people are genuinely aware that Scotland offers fantastic resources and a good location for investment.

Is the Scottish Government doing everything it possibly can? I cannot really answer that question. It is certainly doing a lot, and it is certainly making a big noise about the issue. However, I think that the Government needs to back that up with the frameworks that will encourage investment. I know that it is considering different ways of doing that. The investment community is looking for what it would call a de-risked environment: it is looking for a location where it can invest—whether in energy efficiency, asset classes, wind or whatever—and where there would be a secure return over a period of time. Of course there will be uncertainties about the future, but we have to ask whether we can create the longer-term frameworks that will attract money in. The Government has done a lot to encourage that endeavour.

The third question was whether it is a race. No, I do not think that it is. There is a danger of our going off and saying how wonderful we are, at the expense of somebody else who has not had the same opportunities—and we can turn the question round. Given where Scotland is—with our resources, our engineering and financial nous, and our political, business and community intent—if we cannot deliver a low-carbon society in the next 10, 20 or 30 years, I do not think that any other country in the world can. Rather than consider the situation as a race of which we are a winner because we get there, I would say, “If, given our current opportunities and the talent we have available, we cannot be an exemplar, we have a real problem around the world.”

It is important to recognise the role of local authorities. Through the community planning partnerships, all local authorities have produced single outcome agreements. Every one of those authorities acknowledges the potential of a low-carbon economy to its local economy. Some local authorities are working closely together to maximise benefits, and they would like to see further developments—I am thinking, for example, of the “Sustainable Glasgow Report 2010”—so that powers can be given to local authorities to allow them to provide an element of de-risking to the environment into which they want people to invest. Local authorities, as well as the Government, have a role.

I have been thinking about the delivery of policies and proposals. In particular, will the voluntary approach be able to deliver enough, in enough sectors, to allow Scotland’s climate change targets to be attained? How much does the RPP rely on other partners? Anil Gupta has just mentioned local government. Stop Climate Chaos Scotland has mentioned housing, waste and agri-environment as key sectors in which the voluntary approach may not be delivering well.

Earlier in the meeting I mentioned the freight industry. The RPP has policies relating to the freight industry and its management of emissions by voluntary methods such as best practice and eco-driving by freight drivers. The Scottish Government put some money into training in those areas, but that was several years ago. I am not aware of any monitoring of how far the voluntary programmes have been taken up by the freight industry. Without monitoring to measure the impact of programmes that are already notionally in place, we can have only limited confidence that such programmes will have an effect in the future. I have given an example of a voluntary measure that may not be as effective as we hope.

I will offer a broader view. The answer to your question depends on one’s take on the role of the state and the extent to which it should intervene in the market. Economists would define much environmental damage—for example, greenhouse emissions—as a negative externality of economic activity. Everyone in a market economy seeks to maximise their surplus and to get someone else to pay for negative externalities; usually, people do not mop those up voluntarily. The role of Government is to intervene either by using the pricing mechanism to change the costs and benefits of particular actions or by regulating so that people produce fewer negative externalities.

Coming from my admittedly dirigiste view of the world, one can point to several areas in transport and the environment and across the gamut of public policy where for a long time we tried voluntary arrangements that could, perhaps unfairly, be characterised as asking people nicely to do different things. Eventually, when the problem became serious enough, we decided to act through pricing or regulatory change. For example, a big public policy success for which the Parliament has been responsible in recent years is the smoking ban. We intervened to change people’s behaviour directly because, collectively, we decided that the negative externalities of that behaviour—its terrible impacts on public health and individual lives—were no longer worth it. We made the transition from asking nicely to intervening and doing something about the issue. That is the direction in which we must move. My reading of the trajectory question that has been ably put by my colleagues is that if we ask nicely, through voluntary arrangements, for a long time, we will not start to get on to the trajectory that is needed.

At UK level, over the past 10 or 15 years, when we have identified a problem we have tended to apply an economic instrument—a stick—which has resulted in a price hike. We have found that that is a necessary condition—that we needed to do it—but that it is not sufficient, as it does not change radically what we need to change. As a result, we have added one instrument after another and ended up with a hugely complex policy framework.

Agriculture is one of the few areas in which we have not applied such sticks. Instead, everything is done through subsidies and grants—in other words, we have turned around the whole problem and given people money to be nice to the environment. I cannot speak about waste, but there is a challenge in how we address issues such as agriculture. That does not mean that we must apply taxes to agriculture, but we need to be aware that it is not clear that simply trying to increase voluntary uptake of existing grant schemes—which is at the heart of some policies—is sufficient if we are to hit some of the agricultural targets. The answer to your question is that there may need to be some mandatory frameworks to drive change in agriculture, in particular, and land use.

If we start to look at the support that we provide to agriculture, we open up a lot of questions about whether agriculture should be treated differently from other kinds of business. Under the common agricultural policy or some son of CAP, the position is likely to remain the same, but your point is taken.

Is academia in a state of readiness to meet the requirements that the Government and the private sector will expect to deliver a low-carbon Scotland? Are you academics geared up to provide the best and most practical advice?

Tomorrow I will take up my new post as director of the new Edinburgh centre on climate change, which is supposed to be an innovation centre explicitly aimed at delivering what the academic community has not delivered in the past. We cannot solve the problems by research alone or by Government action alone; we have to get the various groups—representatives of civil society, business, policy makers and the leading researchers—together to solve the problems.

We need to train people to develop the relevant professional skills effectively, and that is exactly what we have set up the centre on climate change to do. That presupposes the fact that the academic community has not delivered in the past. In short, we are getting better at it, but we have been very poor at it in the past.

Might you recommend that other parts of the country have similar centres, or is it too early to say?

The University of Strathclyde is setting up a technology innovation centre, and the research pools have been very useful in pooling talent across Scottish universities. We in Scotland have far more effective frameworks for delivering what is required than elsewhere in the UK—certainly compared with England and Wales. We need to build and deliver on that to achieve a real impact. That is what is emerging at the moment. That work has not delivered yet—but it will.

For the SSN, this illustrates the importance of partnership and collaboration to getting us through whatever the RPP actually produces. Although the SSN is a network of local authority officers, we never work in isolation. We have gained a huge benefit from collaboration with academics. At your evidence session just a week ago, you heard about dialogue between our network and Scotland’s 2020 climate group. There is an appetite for collaboration here—a sense of different sectors approaching the agenda and saying that we are in this together. That will buoy up the voluntary approach, and we have an opportunity to work on the voluntary effort through the RPP.

Monitoring is a critical issue. We can only let a voluntary approach run for so long, at which point the various stakeholders have to establish whether it is actually delivering. That is a critical aspect of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009. The targets are there—they are in statute—so there is only so long that this stuff can be ducked.

We are in a lucky situation in Scotland at the moment, with the different sectors, including the private sector, the public sector and academia, rising to the challenge. The Government is starting to identify a route forward. More detail needs to be added, but we have the means to proceed. The critical thing is how long we let the voluntary approach run before we cast a sharp light on it and ask whether it is delivering what it should be delivering.

It is as much a matter of how the private sector rises to that challenge as it is a matter of how the public sector does so. Sustainable procurement, for instance, is an absolute headache for procurement officers in the public sector—certainly in local government. They have to specify what they are trying to procure, with the private sector responding appropriately in order to achieve common objectives.

The voluntary approach means different things in different contexts, but when it comes to local government it is important to emphasise that, with the 32 councils having signed up to the Scottish climate change declaration process and to the reporting, we are considerably further ahead than England is with the Nottingham declaration. We are also much further ahead in comparison with the European Union’s covenant of mayors, which covers fairly similar territory. There are virtues in the voluntary approach, but it depends on the particular part of the process and what is subsequently done when we feel that not enough progress is being made.

So it is possible for a unit the size of Scotland to have such partnerships and synergies.

One important thing for local authorities is whether we can frame the relationships with academia well enough to achieve the rapid progress that will be required if the various targets are to be met. We are in a very strange position, where we have duties to do things although we do not have a strong hinterland of past achievement to draw on—achievement that helps us to decide unambiguously what best practice is. We are getting closer to forming an idea of what some good practice is, but at this early stage we need to rely much more on advice from academia.

Gentlemen, low-carbon technologies have to be funded. I think that Dr Kerr alluded to that in an earlier answer. Do the carbon forecasting and cost techniques in the RPP take account of risk and uncertainty in the field? Do they reflect best practice? How can such forecasting be made more robust to allow decision makers to make well-informed choices?

16:15

Let me start with the last question, which is about how we can better forecast carbon accounting, say. Over the past few years, one of the challenges that everyone has faced is how the emissions impact of doing something is determined. At the moment, this is the way in which we frame things: our economy has some emissions, which we set as a baseline; to that we add a series of policies; and then we add them all up—and that where we are going to get to.

Typically, certainly within Europe, Governments have tended to be a bit overoptimistic about the baseline, because it has gone up unexpectedly, and a bit overoptimistic about the ability to add up all the policies to get to something. In practice, they are not all additive, they do not all work and they never deliver everything that they are expected to deliver. Governments have said, “Oh, we think we can get down quite low,” but in practice that is not where they have ended up. That is why we do not appear to have made radical emissions reductions over the past 15 years or so, despite having lots and lots of policies to do so.

Part of that is to do with the assumptions that are written into some of the models, and part is to do with the quality of the models. For example, we have only had for a year or two a Scottish building model that tells us useful information about the impact on energy use, and therefore the impact on emissions, of, say, insulating the Scottish built environment. We are refining a lot of those models, but they are still pretty ropey in parts, so uncertainty is an issue.

On specific technologies going forward, a lot will depend on what is commercially viable. It is all very well to say, for example, that we will put photovoltaic cells or panels everywhere, but if that still costs an absolute fortune, or if the planning regulations are not there—there is a range of different reasons—you will not get PV or solar thermal technologies in place across Scotland as anticipated. The only way that we can make progress is to start to knock down the costs, knock out the technology innovation and deal with a lot of the stuff around what might be called social or business innovation, which is all about ensuring that the planning system is aligned with what we are trying to achieve and that communities buy into the idea that they can save energy and money if they go down particular routes.

What we are not seeing necessarily in the RPP is a pulling together around packages, with people saying, “Actually, in this space it will all work only if we look at things in the round and if planning, building regulations and local authority works are all aligned.” Only if that approach is taken will we start to see the delivery on the ground of the abatement potential that is set out in the RPP. Over the past 10 or 15 years, we have discovered that a lot of the abatement potential has not been delivered in reality because of all those other things—planning regulations, for example—that exist around the space. If we could align those things, I would have a lot more faith that the potential reductions will actually be delivered.

There is a supplementary point about the usefulness of scenarios as a thinking approach. The problem with forecasts is that they are precisely that: forecasts. People focus on one particular future view of the world that has all these uncertainties built into it and which almost gives us a kind of average of all the uncertainties. Scenarios are potentially much more useful because they open our minds to very different futures and how we have to react to them very differently and straightaway.

The one that always comes to mind is the price of oil. If I knew what the price of oil was going to be next year, let alone in five, 10, 20 or 30 years, I would not be sitting here today, because I would be making money from that. That variable is utterly crucial and could blow apart all our cleverly calculated forecasts on so many fronts if the things that we think of today as unthinkable actually happen. Do we really know what oil at $300 a barrel in 2020 would mean? That price is outside most people’s cognitive zones today, but it could happen. The point has already been made about the second half of 2008 being something of a rupture in our nice, settled view of economic development. Equally, if the price of oil were to crash to $5 or $10 a barrel for a significant period during the lifetime of the forecasts, they would be wildly wrong for the opposite but equally important reason. The problem with a forecast is that it is precisely that—a single forecast.

The draft budget covers one year. Could a one-year horizon have negative impacts on the medium to long-term planning that is outlined in the RPP?

That goes back to the point about there being a disconnect between the budget and the RPP. Tables in the back of the RPP show that £207 million a year will be spent on walking and cycling over the next five or six years. That is totally at odds with what we see in the budget. If your question is about the budget and its links to the RPP, my answer is that there is a very difficult disconnect. We have a one-year time horizon for spending, but a much longer time horizon in the RPP. It is not clear whether many of the measures in the RPP have funds attached to them.

I am not sure that it is all that important. The RPP comes off the back of the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill, which was passed unanimously. It requires investment over a much longer timescale than the timescales that apply to any individual Government. We are talking about investments over 20 or 30 years. Each successive budget will need to frame what is going on over a longer period. I am not sure that just having a one-year budget is a problem, as long as it is followed up by another budget that follows the same trajectory. Any four or five-year budget—or any budget that looks ahead four or five years—still has to deal with changes that are going to take place over 10 or 20 years.

Our view is that it is not as important for this RPP as it will be for later RPPs, by which time we will have a much clearer focus of where we want to go and what resources will be required. As Dr Kerr said about the ability to draw in external moneys from the private sector, such things need to be painted into the tables so that we know what is going where. If, this time next year, there is a comprehensive spending review that seeks to take us ahead three or four years, it will be essential for the gaps to be filled in.

I will explore that point a bit further. Dr Kerr touched on the dangers of overoptimistic assumptions in the proposals. There is also a real danger around the need for investment to support the intentions that have been set out. I get the distinct sense from commentators on the subject that it is still business as usual, but that that is okay because we will get there eventually. We need to get started, basically.

Does the panel think that there are contradictions or misalignments between the RPP and the proposed funding in the draft budget? We have heard about some aspects from the previous panel, but it would be useful to hear from this one, too.

The transport proposals in the RPP are of the order of a few tens of millions of pounds, over the period 2010 to 2022. In comparison with the sums of money for transport that are set out in the budget, those RPP costs are rather small. I find it disappointing that the RPP and the budget commit us to so little spending in this area to secure some of the policies in the RPP. More needs to be spent on the policies and the proposals in the document, but the budget does not provide for that. The amount of money that we need to fund the transport proposals in the RPP is not great in relation to the overall size of the transport budget. That is a major issue.

It is quite difficult for local government to know at this stage the likely cost implications. All we have is the independent budget review figures, which are also reflected in the RPP and which indicate that about £800 million needs to be spent in this area each year. We can assume that a third of that is ours, as local government spends roughly a third of the public budget in Scotland, but we do not know where that money is going to come from. That is a big deal for us. However, as I said, it is perhaps not so much an issue for this year, but it will become a much more pressing issue later on.

I will pick up on what Tom Rye said and make a more general point about the apportionment of our available moneys between different transport modes and solutions. On the assumptions of modal shift across the range of our public transport projects, around a doubling of the total capacity of the public transport network would be required to reduce road traffic by 10 per cent. Therefore, public transport investment will not solve the carbon problem. The only way in which we can deal with that is either to reduce the need to travel substantially or to electrify the vehicle fleet—the high-tech, attractive thing to do. We have already discussed how much of that worthwhile and useful money is perhaps being hidden under some other budget headings.

On reducing the need to travel, the document says that the Government will undertake further analysis of options for community hubs—and that is it. If we are serious about translating rhetoric into action, we need to do so much more than that. The document does not begin to outline the scale of the challenge. It is not just about money, because reducing the need to travel is about supporting particular choices and, I would argue, regulating out others.

That is very helpful and clearly relates to the earlier discussion about planning systems and long-term planning decisions, on which you think the RPP is silent.

Yes.

I will come in again, partly in response to the last point. Quite a few councils are considering reducing travel because it is clearly an issue that is significantly impacted on by the drive for efficiencies and cuts in local government budgets. If you can go through a building rationalisation programme, as in Fife, and reduce the amount of office space that you need, you start working in different ways. For example, people could probably hot-desk and use office accommodation three days a week, spending two days at home. That would help on a number of fronts—buildings emissions and the like. We could perhaps look at reductions as part of our mainstream business in certain areas that would not be approached in any other way.

Coming back to investment, I fully accept that in an ideal world the budget would have laid out exactly where it was going. However, given where we are, that is less of an issue for me than the concern about the RPP’s reliance on the green investment bank and other things that will come in at some point some years ahead. This is where we are just starting to see a slippage in timescales. In practice we need to get people investing, looking to invest or creating frameworks to invest right now. My concern is that by relying on a UK-based green investment bank, the green deal and so on, we are talking about things that will come in in 2013 or 2014, and it will be 2015, which is halfway to 2020, by the time that they are up and running. We will have missed the opportunity that we are holding right now.

That is a real issue that is not addressed in the RPP or in the draft budget. Stuff will be coming along at some point in the future, but what are we going to do right now? Who is going to do what now to deliver the investment? I do not see that clearly laid out, and there is a gap. That relates back to our earlier discussion on the draft budget.

That is helpful and has covered what I was after.

16:30

Could any other things have been added to the RPP specifically to incentivise renewable and low-carbon thermal generation?

Do you mean thermal generation in the heat markets, or thermal electricity generation in power stations?

Thermal electricity generation.

Given the current electricity market, the market drivers and the Cockenzie plans, for example, that we know about, it is not clear to me what could be further incentivised that would make any difference to Scotland’s medium-term carbon accounts.

As I have no expertise in the specifics of the question, I will adopt the usual tactic and rephrase it as a question that I would have preferred to have been asked.

That is a fair tactic.

It is usually ministers who do that.

Perhaps I should not pursue that analogy.

One potentially really disadvantaging dilemma that we have is that our least sustainable buildings in Scotland are in our most sustainable locations—in small towns and city centres and the older parts of our built environment. For understandable policy reasons, we have focused on intervening in greening the newer building stock first, which, by definition, tends to be in less sustainable locations. That is going to be a difficult issue to crack if we are not going to generate a whole set of perverse incentives by locating new housing and new economic activities in precisely the places where we would not wish them to be, from the perspective of reducing the need to travel.

I am not sure that I know the answer to the question, partly because the cost of trying to intervene in our old buildings is often substantial as a result of their structure and nature. There are also cultural imperatives around, for example, not permitting the installation of photovoltaics in Edinburgh’s new town on the basis that the environment could not possibly sustain such a level of visual change. However, I am sure that the number of parked cars in that environment was not envisaged in the original architectural plans 250 years ago. That is a slightly frivolous point, but I make it to illustrate the fact that the policy process puts assumptions in the way of doing things that we know need to be done, and they keep certain very difficult questions, such as what we should do with our historic building stock, in the too-difficult basket. Edinburgh is perhaps as good an example as anywhere of a place where that happens. We need to do something radical with Edinburgh quickly.

I was going to touch on older building stock as opposed to historic buildings. Can the RPP play any part in addressing the problems that you have just referred to? You say that we should do something quickly. What are the quick options for elderly building stock?

There are things that we need to address in Scotland in particular that relate to tenement buildings and solid wall insulation. The issues are big and tricky. The UK-based grant mechanisms tend to go for the easy hits and tend to be for semi-detached houses in Sheffield, for example, rather than houses in Scotland. We tend to get a lesser share of those funds.

There is no easy answer to the question. There are many good ideas floating around out there about how to make much more effective use of the way in which buildings are planned and regulated—so that, for example, people can make the most of shared ownership options relating to solar thermal or heat networks that would run through tenement buildings—and about trying to find much better technical fixes for solid wall insulation that do not destroy either the outer facade or the inside of the building. None of those is an easy option, but they require to be done in the very near term if we are going to deliver not only in Edinburgh, but in Scotland’s other old cities. There is a lot of work to be done in that space.

A series of broad policies to do with specific technologies and grant mechanisms is set out in the RPP. It is less clear from the RPP how they will all be put together. How do we deliver that approach on the ground in Edinburgh, Glasgow or Dundee, where we are tackling some of those hard-to-heat homes? That is much less straightforward. There is a lot of work to be done, but the RPP does not contain a package that shows how it will all be delivered in the future.

Is that possibly because some of the funding mechanisms are at the UK level, as you just said? Which funding mechanisms address Scottish housing less well?

The standard one is the carbon emissions reduction target supplier obligation. That is what we electricity and gas users pay through our bills, although we do not know it, to suppliers, which then have an obligation to deliver a certain number of energy-efficient homes around the country. That rightly focuses on the cheapest ways of insulating homes. Some are in Scotland but many of them are not, so the attention tends to be focused elsewhere. Measures are afoot to rectify those issues, with which the Scottish Government has been engaged.

However, it is a wider problem. We talk about what a win-win insulation is. In many parts of the country that is true, but there are some real challenges for Scottish cities, in particular, to deliver in a way that is cost effective and socially acceptable. Householders need to accept people coming into their homes to insulate them.

The RPP is quite light on traditional building stock—it just mentions some research that Historic Scotland is doing. We have yet to see real solutions being proposed.

There is quite an emphasis in the document on technological fixes. It assumes that people who are living in old properties are somehow going to retrofit them to a standard where they can live a comfortable and warm lifestyle. I do not know if the RPP needs to focus more on behaviour change and lifestyle emissions. People who live in buildings that are hard to bring up to existing building standards might be able to do other things in the short term. Perhaps the RPP’s emphasis on technofix and retrofit should be balanced with more emphasis on lifestyle changes.

I will stay with the homes and communities section for a while. I will come on to energy-efficiency measures and Dr Kerr’s comments about insulation schemes in a moment, but some comments were made earlier about the other measures that could be taken. Alasdair Allan talked about how we could decentralise a great deal of thermal electrical generation through combined heat and power systems that could save people money as well as reduce emissions. The RPP contains little about what needs to happen for those to be rolled out in the future.

There must be significant opportunities in relation to tenements. They were built to house communities but, because of the changes in the housing market, they have turned into buildings in which everyone has their own little box but no relationship with the rest of the people in the building. Tenements must give us opportunities to return some of those services to being on a collective and shared basis. Does the RPP sketch out how that transformation can happen in buildings that offer so much potential?

The RPP reflects the history of where we have got to. For years we have talked about grant schemes or economic instruments that apply to individuals, but, of course, we do not operate as purely independent individuals with no reference to the world around us; we operate within communities. Certainly at the UK level, there has been a gap in the policy framework around delivering change at the community level, particularly around things such as CHP and decentralised heating.

Tenements are a good example. A tenement with a good-scale ground source heat pump out the back could deliver baseload to a lot of tenements without raising the efficiency issues that are often thrown up by single houses. There are lots of opportunities in that area. However, our mindset is not focused on groups of individuals; instead, we focus economic instruments on an individual as if he or she has no reference point beyond themselves and makes decisions without reference to anything else. A huge amount could be done, but the RPP does not articulate that particularly well.

I know that the University of Strathclyde, the City of Edinburgh Council and the University of Edinburgh are doing various bits of work on how to engage groups in the different cities, but there is a lot to do in that regard.

The climate challenge fund was intended to create community effort or enterprise and to support communities that are ready, geared up and keen for collective action. I do not want the fund to be closed down. However, rather than just reproduce it, can we build on it to enable it to engage or connect with communities that do not yet see themselves as being at a point of readiness?

At issue is how the CCF will move forward. It is fantastic that in the current budget the CCF has been committed to and has received increased funding. The fund is also being reviewed at the moment. It will be important for the committee to look at some of the lessons that can be learned from the first round of the CCF. There has been a lot of pressure on the programme just to get money out to communities and to get things happening. The number of communities and individuals who have risen to the challenge is encouraging, so the opportunity is there.

We probably require a sense that the CCF is a pot of money for investment and sustainability in communities, rather than a traditional grant-making scheme that seeks a carbon impact from spending money in the course of a financial year. As some CCF groups mature, we will be able to pursue a dialogue with them that shifts the CCF from being a grant process into being a community development fund, with a view to scaling up developments.

Those comments are helpful.

I return to the issue of insulation. There is widespread agreement that much more can be done and that some of the more basic measures are very cost effective. Would we not get much greater economies of scale if we ramped up that activity and aimed to complete the job over a much shorter period? Would we not achieve more for our money if we did the work more quickly and allowed the industries that supply it—which include many small businesses—to benefit from economies of scale?

Yes, but the work also needs to be tied into much more effective area-based schemes. The committee will be aware that such schemes have been developed over the past year or two. Instead of doing an individual house and leaving, we should proceed street by street. The way ahead on efficiencies of scale must be to put up scaffolding down the whole street, do every house and move on. However, that cannot be delivered with public funds alone. It comes back to the point that, somehow, we must mobilise investment from elsewhere.

Getting community buy-in is an issue. One problem with energy-efficiency schemes is that, if you improve the quality of the building stock, you get a rebound effect, as people simply turn up the heating and get used to a different lifestyle. The CCF process, which involves engaging the public in a long-term societal shift, is critical. People need to understand why changes are taking place and to be involved in the process of scaling up developments. The 2020 climate group may be contemplating work to turn the policies and proposals into key performance indicators—how many houses we need to do, over what period and who will respond. SSN and other organisations like it are looking for that kind of dialogue over the next year or so.

Understandably, the RPP relies a lot on the public sector leading the charge to drive down carbon emissions. Are changes to the structure, funding and leadership of the public sector required to deliver a low-carbon Scotland? You cannot duck that question.

A large number of transport measures in the RPP will have to be delivered at local level. However, as Anil Gupta indicated, it is not clear that the local level has the money or the capacity to do that or that the activity ties in with local authorities’ commitments under their single outcome agreements. That is a significant problem. There is a real disconnect between what the higher level of government wishes the lower level to do and what the lower level can or will do.

16:45

How would you fix that?

As an academic who has examined different governance systems, I think that if the centre has the desire for all levels of government to achieve certain outcomes, a system of incentives and funding—and perhaps even a little command and control—must be put in place to make that effective.

A governance system that I have considered and which takes that approach is the one for London’s transport. A fairly clear path of responsibility and funding goes from the mayor down through local transport implementation plans to the London boroughs. To an extent, the boroughs must do what the mayor wants them to do. The money that they receive relates to what they do and how much that achieves what the mayor wants them to do. I am not necessarily recommending such a system; I am merely saying that it tends to achieve what the centre wants to happen more effectively than does a more distributed system, such as that in Scotland.

Pretty much everybody on the panel is indicating that they would like to speak. I ask people to keep their comments reasonably brief, so that we can try to get through everyone.

I should declare an interest, as I am part of a team of academics that one of the research councils has just funded to consider the changes that will be required in the public sector’s structure, funding and leadership to implement low-carbon policies. I have the classic excuse of saying that it is too early to tell.

In six or so months’ time, when the committee and others have the task in the post-election environment of discussing how we should reform the structure of the public sector in Scotland, that thorny old question that we always say is too difficult, too costly or too whatever will finally have to be grasped. We must remember that our current local authority structure was brought in by a UK Government that had competition between those authorities for investment, jobs and activities at the forefront of its mind.

Our voluntary structures for creating the collaboration and partnership that we would like between authorities for public policy reasons might well be reaching the limits of their endeavour. Given the urgency of the carbon issue and the varying incentives for different locations in different local authorities, particularly in the central belt, where the system is more fragmented, we need to ask the serious question whether our local government structure is fit to deliver low-carbon policies.

I return to the question whether local authorities have the skills sets. I do not think that they do. What the RPP does not say but associated documents do say is that one of the big gaps in the next 10 or 15 years will be in skills, whether in senior decision making or in installing renewables technology. That is a huge gap that can be addressed only if we create partnerships between the higher or further education sector and the relevant authorities to support and build short courses and executive courses to meet those needs.

Our focus is not on structural change in local government, because there are bigger issues on which to focus. Local government is reasonably well structured to focus on some issues in the RPP. We have done a huge amount of work to support network members in getting their heads around the agenda. However, we could be criticised for the pace of change and the skills that are available locally—we need to skill up.

Political commitment and leadership will also be required, and we have been putting in a huge effort to shore that up. Local partnership working will also be critical. Much work has already been done at regional level. In the local footprint project, the SSN has increasingly been working with a sort of collective of local authorities. For example, in the Lothians, we are not working with East Lothian Council, West Lothian Council and Midlothian Council separately, we are working with them all together; and they are considering how they can collaborate with the likes of the regional transport partnership and the regional economic development partnership. Even at local level, people acknowledge that they will need to use leverage and consider regional approaches, perhaps considering the city region.

Within SSN, we are already discussing how resources can be allocated for central skills as part of that agenda. For example, rather than every single local authority having the capacity, there could be a centralised climate change unit that would service the needs of a city region. There are ways in which we can work without considering structural change in local government and the public sector.

I will not disagree with anything that George Tarvit has just said; and, naturally, there will be concerns about the time and resources that would be needed for any restructuring of local government.

I draw to members’ attention the point that our number of municipalities, and the ratio of that number to the population, are extraordinarily different from those in the rest of the European Union, where the scale of local authorities may help to maintain a strategic and sustainable relationship with communities. If our municipalities became much larger, we would be completely off the scale when compared with others in the European Union. I would be worried about that.

I would like to drag people away from the issue of restructuring, which has begun to dominate. The question concerned whether local authorities had the skills at the moment to deliver.

The solutions that George Tarvit was suggesting are entirely the kind of things that we would be considering. We would be trying to share expertise, for which SSN is very useful. SSN provides a very helpful community-of-practice approach, which helps to share good practice. We would be keen for that to continue.

In the public sector, we would like there to be better alignment of the different advice-giving arrangements, so that, for example, there could be a single delivery plan for low-carbon advice in Scotland. I do not mean a collapsing of different bodies, but we could have a single delivery plan similar to the set-up for zero waste Scotland, which has now been under way for the best part of a year.

When we consider overall structures, we have to bear it in mind that, for example, putting green cycle tracks along the sides of roads is not the main issue for local government. We need well maintained roads, and there is a hell of a backlog in the maintenance work required on existing structures before we can start changing them drastically.

I invite Charlie Gordon to ask a supplementary question on this issue before moving on to his own questions.

Convener, I know that you would like us to move away from questions on governance, but in light of Professor Docherty’s remarks, I feel duty bound to ask him for an assurance that he will not be back here soon recommending that the best way in which to implement our climate change objectives would be to elect a mayor in a monkey suit, or a robocop.

No, it is fair to say that that would not be the best way to do that.

My challenge to people who doubt the importance of structures would be to invite them to go to the boundaries of any one of our four largest cities, look around at the fringe developments in the adjoining local authorities and ask themselves, “Is this a carbon-efficient way of doing development in Scotland?” The answer is a resounding no. Every time I hear the producer-interest response that the last thing that we need is reorganisation, I want to point out that when the system is broke enough, and when enough people are telling you that it is broke, it is time to fix it.

We had a city region once in Glasgow.

An overriding issue is involving people in the revolutionary changes in their behaviour that will have to take place. Notwithstanding the regional approaches that some of the witnesses have mentioned, does living in a society in which people elect their local government at a very local level make it easier for those people to take more responsibility for their actions and not to say that everything is somebody else’s responsibility? The European model has that local level, and probably has regional levels as well—the Länder in Germany, for example. That would be a better model for delivering the RPP than the model that we have.

The simple answer is yes. That also addresses Anil Gupta’s point about the size of the top tier of local governance. If we move to a higher tier, there will be even more of a vacuum beneath that. We should consider very carefully how to re-energise the community level through more formalised, responsible structures.

I agree with that. The case studies that we bring across to Scotland to put before people in Scottish local government tend to involve continental European municipalities, with a mayor and a deputy mayor. The municipality will have the power, vision and leadership to put stuff into practice locally. Some of that is just absent here. I do not know whether that is to do with structures, powers or the vision thing, but there are a number of factors that mean that things are not working as well in Scotland as they do overseas.

To quote the RPP,

“the policies that will have the most significant impact on emissions reduction lie with the EU and the UK Government”.

Furthermore, the RPP sets only two milestones for transport by 2020. Is the Scottish Government taking sufficient and appropriate responsibility in the transport sector?

Many of the transport policies and proposals that are listed in the RPP are closely based on a piece of work that you might well be aware of, which was produced last year by the University of Aberdeen and Atkins, called “Mitigating Transport’s Climate Change Impact in Scotland”. Were all the policies that are contained in that document to be included in the RPP, Scotland could make a very significant contribution to emissions reduction in transport. The answer to your question is that, in the draft RPP, the Government is standing back somewhat from what it could do, hoping that the EU and UK policies—over which there are some question marks—will deliver. It is not committing to enough devolved measures in Scotland.

The levers that are likely to make the biggest difference are the price of fuel, as we know—there is a lot of empirical evidence for it—and the general tax treatment of transport charges, for example tax relief on various modes of commuting or, returning to our earlier discussion, paying people to make more sustainable choices or subsidising them in making those choices. That requires control over some basic building blocks of the taxation system.

Unless our expectations have been completely confounded, I guess that what has been announced recently elsewhere will not devolve that level of fiscal responsibility to Scotland. Therefore, the Scottish Government has a difficult choice. One option is to argue for particular uses of fiscal powers that it does not have. However, it will perhaps have learned the lesson of arguing for a local income tax, which was a particular solution to a financial problem that immediately ran aground politically. Any Scottish Government is hardly likely to say, “If you give us control over tax X, we will raise it to level Y, because that will solve the problem,” as that is politically untenable. That is why the budget says as little as it does. Another option is fiscal autonomy, and we have heard plenty of interesting evidence this afternoon about the need for that in lots of areas of taxation policy. My own view, for what it is worth, is that without that we will find it very difficult to do many of the things that the RPP document seeks to do. At the moment, most of the spending and most of the carrots are devolved, but significant parts of the sticks are not.

I will move on now. There was a nice balance to those two answers.

We have heard that during the production of the RPP there were discussions about revenue-generating mechanisms such as workplace parking charges and road user charging. The latter was discussed during the earlier panel session on the draft budget. So, avoiding repetition but bearing it in mind that others have joined the panel, what is your view on those two measures?

17:00

I believe that there was a version of the RPP that included reference to a workplace parking levy, parking management and so on. Those are important because the work that was done to develop the transport proposals in the RPP looked at those measures as a package of mutually reinforcing measures; therefore, if you take out one of them, you lose more than simply that single measure’s contribution. I will give you a good example. If you want travel planning to work, it is important that it is coupled with parking management, otherwise its effectiveness will be only a third to a quarter of what it would be with parking management in place as well. Taking out the revenue-generating and demand-management measures on parking has a much reduced effect on emissions, I am afraid.

I want to press Professor Rye briefly on the parking management issue. Is it not the case that there is a market for parking, which to a degree regulates the choices that people make? I might very well want to drive into Glasgow city centre and park there all day, but somebody will charge me an arm and a leg to do so.

Off street, someone might charge you an arm and leg, but we must remember that our local authorities control a lot of on-street parking, a lot of which is not currently charged for or even really controlled.

I do not know whether the professor has parked on street in Glasgow recently, but Glasgow City Council charges an arm and a leg now, too.

I absolutely accept that Glasgow City Council, along with five other councils in Scotland, has decriminalised parking enforcement and now charges on street in certain areas, but you know yourself that if you go to areas a little way outside the city centre and the west end, there are areas that still have high parking demand where there is no charge and you just have to fight to get a space. That kind of parking management is what was being considered in developing the RPP, and we know that it is not there. That is why I think, as I said before, that some of the voluntary measures in there will be less effective.

Are there any more views on those two points, especially workplace parking?

In the earlier question-and-answer session, I remarked on the uncertainty about the environmental impact of road user charging and whether it would reduce traffic overall because of varying outputs from the models. I come back to my point about our governance structure being designed to be competitive. The big problem with workplace parking charges is that the parking market is subject to substantial failure because we do not charge people the full price of their actions, which relates back to what I said about negative externalities. For example, if any of our central local authorities had a workplace parking levy, because they thought it an appropriate solution to the problem, immediately the classic problem would arise of surrounding authorities, which are in competition with them and have a plentiful supply of cheap land and cheap development sites, making the offer, “Come to us and have free parking,” and the additional vehicle miles that would be generated would not be absorbed at all in the market pricing.

And that is the current scenario under the Transport (Scotland) Act 2001, is it not?

Yes, as far as I remember.

I think that discretionary powers exist.

But we come back, again, to one of the undercurrents in this afternoon’s discussion, which is the limits of voluntarism.

So you are suggesting that only a coherent national approach would have a chance of achieving the desired effect.

I would imagine so, because the boundary effects would be so stark. We have already seen them in certain sectors. Retailing is the classic one, where there are so many developments just outside the zone of an authority that wants to implement charging of that description. We would see very negative outcomes if the charging was not controlled.

On the 2001 act, the powers for a workplace parking levy were struck out of the bill.

Yes. I think that I was conflating that power with a discretionary power to introduce local road user charging. I apologise for that.

That is still there. Another point is about the planning system, which we have heard a lot about. Given what Iain Docherty just said about competition between local authorities, it is a great pity that we have just seen the abandonment of national maximum parking standards for new development in the planning system in the new Scottish planning policy.

I want to move on to land use strategy with regard to the RPP. There is a target for growing forests and increasing cover to 25 per cent by the middle of the next decade. We have the farming for a better climate scheme with its focus farms. There is potential for 80 per cent of electricity to come from renewables by 2020. There is also the challenge of food security, which farmers can meet in the system. A land use strategy is to be tied in with the RPP to provide a decision-making framework to allow conflict resolution between the competing priorities that are set out in the RPP. What action is needed to ensure that all landowners contribute to delivering emissions reductions in the land use sector?

Those are big questions. One issue with the land use strategy is the lack of interaction with the strategic planning framework and the need to tie the two in more effectively. Whether that happens this year or in a subsequent iteration is a moot point, but there is clearly an issue about having a planning framework that has already set its course and then inserting a land use framework part way through.

I was worried when I looked at a couple of the RPP proposals, particularly that of increasing woodland creation to 15,000 hectares per year. Woodland planting in the past five or six years has been on a fairly standard downward trajectory. In other words, we have been talking for several years about the need to up our planting rates, but that has not achieved anything yet. We need to look very hard at the current support arrangements in the Scottish rural development programme for delivering that increase on the ground, because clearly they are not delivering it.

On the broader issues, such as the farming for a better climate programme, a lot of positive work has been going on, particularly on cross-compliance and getting people to work together more effectively. There is a lot of good stuff in there, but we still appear to have a disconnect between what we intend to do and what is actually happening on the ground.

The conflict between farming and forestry is undoubtedly unresolved, although there was a slight upturn in the planting figures during the summer. Given that two thirds of planting is done by private owners, is it not the case that investment has been reduced because of the crunch and the recession?

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that it is less to do with the recession and more to do with what we might call behavioural attitudes of farmers, who do not think of themselves as foresters. They have a different view of land use from the forestry approach. There is a broader issue about how to use land most effectively throughout Scotland. It is not yet clear to me that the land use strategy will deliver what we seek to deliver. In a series of workshops that we held in the summer, a big criticism was that we do not have a geographically located land use strategy across Scotland. The issue is not just about rural land use but, to plug into earlier comments, goes right across into urban areas. We need to consider how best to use our land.

There need not be a major conflict between forestry and farming for food, if we assume that food comes from the top two or three grades of agricultural land. The issue is the rough grazing, but that is less of an issue, so there does not need to be a major conflict. However, we need a much more coherent approach and it is not yet clear to me that the land use strategy or what is written into the RPP will deliver that.

I am conscious of the time, but thank you for the hints. It bothers me that there is still a big conflict between supporting less favoured areas—rightly, for various reasons, and some of them are quite productive—and putting the onus on farmers, which to me seems the wrong emphasis, as they are not the biggest owners of land.

That is a fair point.

On waste, which we touched on earlier, does the panel agree that the existing policies will be adequate to deliver the required emissions reductions in the sector? Should wider resource consumption be considered in the RPP? If so, what proposals would reflect such thinking? We have had debates about collection and about changing behaviour, but is consumption at the root of the problem? If so, does it have to be changed first?

The RPP is framed around a series of bottom-up policies, and what I think you are saying is, “Would it be better to look at the issue far more holistically and ask whether we can stop the behaviour that is causing the problem in the first place?” The answer is yes, but I am not sure how you would deliver on it.

Well, we are looking for the practical delivery of these things. There are too many ivory towers and we have to get something that people can do.

What is in the RPP, because it is derived from the zero waste Scotland plan, is adequate, but you are right to ask how we take people up the waste hierarchy from recycling. That challenge is still ahead of us.

SSN has done work on ecological and carbon footprinting, which takes people straight into discussion about their own consumption behaviours and puts the right emphasis on how consumption drives economic growth and the sustainability of that and the global dimension of the issue, in the sense that recycling is only one small, end-of-pipe solution. Zero waste Scotland has the right strategic approach, but the issue is how quickly we can go up that ladder of prioritisation.

We would like to see further discussion of engagement, through voluntary or other means, in producer responsibility, particularly given the proposal in the new Scotland Bill for responsibility for landfill tax to come to the Scottish Parliament. There must be a reasonable case for having discussions with some packaging producers and others in Scotland to try to reduce the amount of waste. Another idea—I cannot remember which company suggested it—is having, instead of buy one get one free, buy one and get one later. That is an interesting suggestion, but it disappeared completely. Offers such as buy one get one free, which pressure people into more consumption, are profoundly unhelpful, but they could be balanced out and still give people an interest in returning to the shop.

You will be glad to know that we are getting close to the end. Alasdair Allan has a couple of questions.

What is the panel’s view on the requirement for a new RPP by 31 October 2011? What does that do for stability or uncertainty for the system in future?

If it simply meant recycling a lot of the work that had been done and not adding to it, there would be a problem, but given where we are in the political cycle, having an RPP within a year is no bad thing. Going forward, there has to be a clear understanding of the trajectory and what the added value is. I appreciate the reporting requirements under the 2009 act, but it has to be clear what the RPP is adding in practical terms to the debate. I think that next year is crucial.

As long as the RPP is an iteration of what we have and it is not a case of tossing it out and starting again, I think that it is the right basic principle. We would probably want to see an RPP every year to have the system feedback and management information to answer whether it is delivering what it is meant to deliver or needs tweaked or amended. As long as it is a developing picture rather than a complete reworking of the RPP, that is a positive way forward.

17:15

If savings of 12 to 15 per cent are required as we move forward, greater prominence will be given to the transformational changes that were mentioned and the need to embed those in the milestones. That will be quite an interesting debate. I hope that, once the draft RPP is finalised, discussion of the longer-term objectives will come into play.

On that point, it is necessary to be much more specific about who is doing what. If we are getting investment, who has done what to deliver and by when? In other words, rather than just stating policies and proposals, it will be necessary to state what has been achieved.

Finally, does the panel have a view on the 2020 group key performance indicators, which the committee was told were

“offered in a spirit of dialogue but are meaningless unless directly linked to carbon targets”,

and whether the RPP should include indicators along those lines?

I have heard that the 2020 group is taking that idea forward, but I have yet to see the detail. I think that it makes some sense to add detail to what is in the RPP, but I would not hold back on the RPP just to develop the indicators. Cross-sector dialogue would be required on what the indicators look like and how you put them into operation.

An issue for some parts of the public sector will be the extent to which the data to feed into the KPIs are readily available and whether gathering a lot of data might create a further burden.

Thank you, convener. I am going to have to make my apologies.

Thank you. I thank all our witnesses, particularly those who were on both panels, for their time answering questions at what has been a long meeting. It is much appreciated. Would any of you like to make final comments on issues that have not arisen in the questions?

We provided you with a draft set of comments—I do not know whether you received those—but we might want to refine them quickly over the next week or two and come back to you, if that is of any use to you.

That would be possible, but any further written submissions should be sent to us sooner rather than later if they are going to inform our report.

Thank you all very much for your time. We now move into private session for the remainder of the agenda.

17:17 Meeting continued in private until 17:26.