Chamber and committees

No, I do not—[Interruption.] Mr Lumsden is laughing away. His party cheer most of Mr Ewing’s announcements to the rafters, which is one of the reasons why I take them with a pinch of salt.

The Prime Minister’s announcement last week signalled a clear intention to choose the latter scenario, in which short-termism is the order of the day. It took some gall for the Prime Minister to stand behind a podium with the slogan

“Long-term Decisions for a Brighter Future”

while reading a speech that amounted to a betrayal of current and future generations.

I am grateful to Colin Smyth for giving way, and I take very seriously the challenge that he has made. I am in this job so that I can contribute to a climate plan that is capable of getting us back. However, I hope that Colin Smith will recognise that, on the last target, the gap was the smallest it has been since 2011. We have been closing the gap and catching up to where we should be. We need to continue to do that, but the announcement last week will make our job 10 times harder.

It certainly does that—Mr Swinney makes that point well. The Prime Minister’s announcement, if it has created any unity at all, has created unity between the car industry and Greenpeace on the lack of certainty and clarity that is created.

Douglas Lumsden says repeatedly that Governments should be working together. The message that the UK Climate Change Committee gave us all—UK, Scottish and Welsh Governments—was that we needed to work together more effectively. We have tried that in the past and had the door closed in our faces. Just days after that meeting, the UK Government made its unilateral announcements, without any prior indication to us or the Welsh Government and without publishing any detail on them. Is that what working together looks like?

Will the member give way?

Christine Grahame has made some very important points. We are seeing some willingness in the financial services sector to innovate—to develop green mortgages and a range of other products under that umbrella term.

Does the member agree, however, that the measures that the UK Government has announced will again undermine investment by and the willingness of industry to innovate and put on the market financial products that will enable people to make those investments?

The member knows very well that we will complete work on the climate plan and we will consult on a heat in buildings strategy. When the results of that come out, he will see that it is a hell of a lot more ambitious than the backtracking that we are seeing from the UK Government.

It seems very clear that the Conservative members at Holyrood are firmly behind their Prime Minister watering down and delaying action. Those are the same people who, exactly a year ago, were urging Scotland to copy Liz Truss’s economic policies, which crashed the economy, and they are now urging Scotland to follow Rishi Sunak’s policies, which will do the same to our global life-support system. With a very few exceptions, there are simply no lessons learned, no reflection and no backbone from the Conservatives.

Completely. The language and the anti-environment rhetoric that the UK Government uses is undermining people’s belief that we can move forward on this together.

We also do not control large-scale insulation programmes such as ECO4 and the warm homes discount, which has now been re-badged as the great British insulation scheme. We repeated requests for well over a year for the UK Government to link them more effectively with our schemes. Those requests were not even turned down but were simply ignored.

All of Parliament should support the ambition that we are bringing to this agenda, not just on heat in buildings but on developing our renewables, on record investment in active travel, and on leading the fightback for nature with the nature restoration fund, a five-year delivery plan and a natural environment bill. As Christine Grahame told us, it is time to hit the accelerator and not the brakes.

Mr Sunak spoke about being

“brave in the decisions we make”

and said that people

“wonder why in the face of the facts as they have them, choices are made as they are”.

I am afraid that I do not wonder why he has done this. He has done it to create a new partisan dividing line when our politics needs united determination. He has done it because he sees political opportunity from making climate a new front in his culture war.

Climate week might be an annual event, but, this year, more than ever before, we need to recapture the shared sense of urgency that shaped the first climate change act—the Climate Change Act 2008—and led all political parties to work to strengthen it. Across the political spectrum, there are those who know that we need to act with urgency, and there are others who would prefer to downgrade, delay and dilute climate action. We need to have the courage of our convictions and ensure that the next climate plan not only delivers but recreates that sense of unity.

We have discussed this before, so I know that Sarah Boyack is aware that demand-led grant and loan schemes were vulnerable to low take-up during the past few extraordinary years that we have all been living through. That is one of the reasons why we have committed to consulting on a supplier-led model, which we think might be less vulnerable to that kind of external shock.

It will not come as a surprise to anyone in the chamber that I disagree with the Conservatives and their Prime Minister. It is clear that most of the public do not trust them on the issue either. It is also clear that this is not just about policy differences but about the role of this Parliament. What the UK chooses to do has a significant impact on what we are able to do in Scotland. It could not be otherwise within the limits of the devolution settlement, which is being undermined year on year by the UK Government. When the climate targets were set, of course we did not agree with the UK Government on details of policy delivery—there were reasonable disagreements of that nature—but there was at least some reason to think that the UK would have a hope of a Government that was vaguely rational and that was willing to communicate and co-operate despite our differences.

That need for co-operation was set out clearly by the UKCCC recently in telling all the UK Governments in the UK that we had to try harder to work together, and we agree. However, within days came that wrecking ball through climate policy without a word of communication either with us or with the Welsh Government. Of course, the UK Government has form. This is the same Government that, a few months ago, deliberately sabotaged the deposit return scheme, for which this Parliament voted, by insisting that our scheme had to align with its scheme—a scheme that did not exist and, as is increasingly clear, will never exist under this UK Government—[Interruption.]

In seeking to extend part 1 of the act, I will continue to ensure that the provisions do not remain in force for longer than is necessary in connection with the cost crisis, and I will keep under review the on-going necessity and proportionality of the measures.