Official Report 902KB pdf
Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 (Scottish Carbon Budgets) Amendment Regulations 2025 [Draft]
Welcome back. Agenda item 2 is a debate on motion S6M-18060. I invite the cabinet secretary to move the motion.
Motion moved,
That the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee recommends that the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 (Scottish Carbon Budgets) Amendment Regulations 2025 be approved.—[Gillian Martin.]
Does any member want to contribute?
I want us to get to net zero, but it needs to be done in an affordable way. As things stand, I do not know what the impact will be on our households of the regulations that are coming through. It seems as though we are writing a blank cheque with no idea of the costs to Government, families or businesses. I welcome the fact that there will be costs in the climate change plan, and I hope that, when I see those costs, I will be able to support the budgets. However, at this time, there are too many unknowns, and I do not feel that we should be asked to approve the regulations without knowing those costs.
There is a risk of huge inequalities in relation to things such as electric vehicles, which we have spoken about. If you are fortunate enough to have a driveway where you can charge your car, you can pay 7p per kilowatt hour, but if you do not have a driveway, you have to use a public charger and will probably pay seven times that—perhaps 55p per kilowatt hour, or up to 90p per kilowatt hour if you are at a service station. That is a real risk.
The Climate Change Committee says no to electricity generation from gas, but the cabinet secretary cannot tell us whether she agrees with that at present, so we do not know whether that will be part of the future.
On the cost of electricity, I agree that it is too expensive, and that is often blamed on the gas price. As I mentioned last week, if I look at my utilities bill, I see that electricity is four times more expensive than gas. I hear that it is pegged to gas prices, but when we have to pay more or when the wholesale price goes up, where does that money go? Does it go to the wind farms and increased costs? I am not clear on that.
We have heard things from the Westminster Government about the £300 that we are meant to be getting off our electricity bills, but there is no sign of that happening any time soon. The situation with bills is complex. It is not only the wholesale costs that make up our electricity bills; we are also paying for balancing costs, CFD subsidies, renewable obligation certificate subsidies, grid upgrades and the social tariffs.
I also have a concern about the impact on communities. Without a plan or an energy strategy, the impact on our communities is unknown. I would welcome the plan. I know that it is coming at the end of October or early November but, as it stands, it is difficult to approve the regulations without seeing more detail.
I am reading the submission from the Institute for Public Policy Research in Scotland. It says that MSPs will have to decide to approve the carbon budgets
“effectively in ignorance of the policies they would then have to support in order to see the budgets delivered.”
The lack of information is concerning, and it perhaps plays to those, such as Mr Lumsden, who want to weaken ambition for the carbon budget, rather than people such as me, who want to strengthen that ambition.
No climate change plan—not even a draft one—has been submitted. We have only an incredibly thin indicative statement. The Government has rejected the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee on livestock and on peatlands, and policies on heat and on traffic reduction have been dropped. There is no energy strategy as yet. When it comes to Peterhead power station, there is uncertainty about the existing power station, let alone the prospect of a second one.
There are a lot of unknowns here and, quite frankly, I do not know whether this carbon budget is ambitious enough, because it lacks the transparency that successive committees of this Parliament have called for in advance of setting targets, objectives and aspirations around climate change. Although I will not vote against the budget, I find it very difficult to vote for it, because, without that detail, I do not know what it is that we are voting on at this point. I will therefore abstain.
12:30
Having listened to the evidence from experts this morning, we know that we need to act fast and decisively because carbon emissions are a massive issue around the globe. We will have major shifts in world climate; we are already seeing extreme weather, such as forest fires, which we have not talked about today but which could impact on peatland emissions; and we have 280,000 homes that are already at risk of flooding. We need more joined-up thinking and action; resilience and adaptation need to go together.
Another thing that we have not really talked about is how we will get the economic benefits of this in our communities across Scotland. We are still waiting for the energy strategy. We need a more detailed climate change plan and the investment that will transform our constituents’ lives and create the jobs, including local jobs, as well as the manufacturing and heat networks that could deliver lower bills, but we are not seeing the detail of that. We have talked about tree planting, for example. Where could we get more community benefits from tree planting?
There are lots of opportunities here. However, it is not about warm words; there must be a plan for action. We have climate and nature crises, and the Scottish Government needs to do more to bring people with us to make the transformation that we need, because it is sustainable development that will tackle what will be real challenges—the Gulf stream, for example, although we did not talk about that today. We might not be here in 30 years’ time, but the next generation will be, and it will be more than a challenge—there will be massive problems. This is a time for action, detail, information and bringing people with us, and the Scottish Government needs to do way more than it is doing at the moment.
I have listened to what others have had to say today. I think that it is time for action as well, but the Government has been put in a position whereby the original targets that were made were unattainable, because Parliament pushed them on to the Government. As we move forward, we all require much more detail on how we will reach net zero in a just transition but, quite frankly, we do not have the answers to every single aspect thereof at this moment in time.
I recognise that the cabinet secretary and her officials will do all that they possibly can to get everything absolutely right. However, let us take, for example, the future use of hydrogen. At this moment in time, we do not have answers to what the benefits of that will be. Let us look at the fact that almost all of us want to see the UK Government remove the linkage between international gas prices and electricity. We do not know whether that will happen. If it does, it is likely to be a benefit, with greater electrification quickly; if it does not, that process will not happen.
What annoys me, I must say—I suppose that I can say this now, because I am going—is the fact that there is always bickering over some of those things, but without logicality. The logical thing is for us to agree the subordinate legislation and allow the Government to get on with it, and for us as a Parliament to continue to scrutinise all of that as we go forward. I think that to vote against the legislation today is very unwise, and I will support the cabinet secretary and her motion.
There has been a theme during the evidence sessions last week and this week. We have each had a giant disagreement about some of this, which is fine. There have been calls for precise details, such as costings for each household in granular detail. The plans will run for 15 or 20 years and will rely in part on business innovation and buy-in in order to make shifts. They will rely on a good, positive dialogue with Westminster about electricity pricing, as well as other things, and will rely on technological innovation. They will also rely on all of us, as householders and not just MSPs, to buy into it. I have not seen the climate change plan and the associated costings, but I think that it is reasonable to say that there will have to be a range. Costings cannot be precise for technologies that are still to be developed or for an electricity market that is still to be reformed. There has to be a fair wind and some realism in relation to it all.
That said, Mark Ruskell has made some reasonable points, in that scrutiny would have been enhanced if we had had the plan at the same time that we were locking in the targets. However, we are where we are. In some respects, we know from the last time that the Parliament and the Government failed to deliver on targets that targets in themselves are just numbers; the actions that we put in place to make them a reality are important. For the Parliament not to agree to the budgets and not to free up the Government and the Parliament to scrutinise the climate change plans that will surely follow would be a big misstep.
Finally, although I concur with the challenge around scrutiny that Mr Ruskell and the convener have pointed out, I think that we are already starting to scrutinise some of this stuff. We will be scrutinising the climate change plan when it is laid for public scrutiny in real time, convener. Scrutiny does not start and end once the process is finished; it will be on-going. We all have a responsibility as a committee—on a cross-party, apolitical basis—to put our shoulder to the wheel and scrutinise the matter in a robust fashion. Although there may be disagreements among committee members, I think that it would be correct to lock in targets and come together to significantly scrutinise the Scottish Government on how it will deliver on them.
I am looking at the deputy convener, because I will say something and I wonder whether he wants to make it a full house by expressing his opinion.
There is no doubt that aspects of the process are far from ideal. If you were to design it, you would not design it in the way that it has been done. Some of Mark Ruskell’s comments are perfectly valid and reasonable. Clearly, we always want to reflect on the process, how the issues are handled and how the process will be managed in order to see what we can learn for future parliamentary sessions. However, we cannot get away from the fact that we face a climate and nature emergency and we have a collective responsibility to take action. I could follow Douglas Lumsden and produce a list of what I would describe as flimsy excuses for not supporting the motion, but all that that would do is demonstrate a lack of leadership to deal with one of the biggest global crises that we face.
Will Michael Matheson take an intervention?
Let me finish my point first.
As parliamentarians, we have a collective responsibility to take responsibility for that and show the leadership that is necessary in order to address it, rather than looking for excuses to chase after voters who are drifting to Reform UK.
I would not say that not knowing the cost is a flimsy excuse. Surely we should have that information. Even Mark Ruskell, who is on the other side of the argument to me, has said that, if we had the information, we could go even further, but without it, we cannot.
When I talk about things such as “flimsy excuses”, I refer to, for example, your suggestion that electricity is in some way pinned to the international gas price in the UK, when that is a fact; it is what drives our electricity costs. Your party was in government at Westminster for more than a decade and it could have taken action on that if it had chosen to do so. The reality is that it chose not to. Equally, during that time, the Conservatives supported the need to ensure that we achieved net zero by 2050.
In the UK and Scotland, it is not optional; it is a legislative requirement. We are legally obliged to achieve net zero by 2045 and 2050. As parliamentarians, if we choose to ignore that based on flimsy excuses, we are not doing our job properly. That is why I will vote for the motion, even though I accept that parts of the process are not as effective as they could be. I accept the responsibility that we have to tackle the nature and climate emergencies that we face, not only for this generation but for future generations.
I will say a little bit and I will then bring in the cabinet secretary. The evidence that we have heard has been particularly interesting. At the moment, I do not know in my mind—and as a parliamentarian, as the deputy convener said—whether we need to weaken or strengthen the commitments that the cabinet secretary will be making, because we have not seen the climate change plan that will be produced.
There is an issue in my mind about developing our understanding of what is achievable, which is not only about the commitment of individuals or of Government but is about the cost of that and how we will achieve it. I take the point on the importance of electrification, but during the process of hearing about it, especially today, I have found it very difficult to stomach simply saying that the cost of doing nothing is too high. To my mind, that is lazy and slightly rude to the individuals who are trying to question it.
With the way that the vote will go today, carbon budgets will probably go through. I may be proved wrong—[Interruption.] I will finish on this point. They will probably go through, but I want to register my dissatisfaction with the whole process of how that has come about. The committee should have been discussing the matter much earlier. I have always made it clear—people who have spoken to me will support me on this—that I do not like and have never liked the fact that we are doing this in the last months of the parliamentary session. It is far too important a matter for us to get it wrong. When it comes to the vote, I will abstain, not because I want to frustrate the budgets, but because I want to register my dissatisfaction at how the process has gone.
Cabinet secretary, I give you the opportunity to sum up if you wish.
I am not going to go into all the substantive points. People have made their views clear. I do not think that it is lazy to suggest that there is a cost, a danger and a great deal of risk associated with doing nothing.
I align myself with the comments that the deputy convener made about the Parliament’s responsibility. I feel that we fell down in our responsibility in the previous session by not doing what we could to support even the most minor policy directions that were put to the Parliament. It is not enough to support a target. There has to be concerted action. If we do not do it in this generation, the next generation will ask, rightly, why it was put in such a precarious position.
I have moved the motion in my name, but I will leave my comments until such time as I have a full plan in front of me and I am able to answer all the detailed questions that have been asked today.
Thank you. The question is, that motion S6M-18060, in the name of Gillian Martin, be agreed to. Are we agreed?
Members: No.
There will be a division.
For
Doris, Bob (Glasgow Maryhill and Springburn) (SNP)
Matheson, Michael (Falkirk West) (SNP)
Stewart, Kevin (Aberdeen Central) (SNP)
Abstentions
Lennon, Monica (Central Scotland) (Lab)
Lumsden, Douglas (North East Scotland) (Con)
Mountain, Edward (Highlands and Islands) (Con)
Ruskell, Mark (Mid Scotland and Fife) (Green)
The result of the division is: For 3, Against 0, Abstentions 4.
Motion agreed to,
That the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee recommends that the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 (Scottish Carbon Budgets) Amendment Regulations 2025 [draft] be approved.
That concludes our business for today. Next week, there will be a discussion of the paper on carbon budgets—[Interruption.] We are not quite finished yet, Mr Stewart.
That discussion will follow from the report, which we will sign off early next week. There will also be consideration of the petition on air quality, and a supplementary legislative consent memorandum on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill will be added to the agenda.
On Friday next week, the committee will visit Port Glasgow and the Hunterston Port and Resource Centre.
Meeting closed at 12:45.Previous
Subordinate Legislation