Chamber and committees

Cabinet secretary, I want to talk about numbers, volume and so on for a wee minute, in order to illustrate the scale of the challenge that lies ahead of us.

The UK Climate Change Committee tells us that we need 35,000 heat pump installations by 2030, which is a challenge in itself; I think that Scotland is installing about 6,000 or 7,000 per year on average. However, there are about 2.7 million homes in Scotland, and 300,000-odd council houses, so it does not take a magician or a mathematician to work out that that is a huge challenge in the years beyond 2030, up to 2045. It requires roughly—or more than—100,000 installations per year from where we currently are, at about 6,000 per year.

How on earth are we to meet that challenge, given the constraints that you have told us about? Principal among those constraints is the price of electricity, as you said. However, in my view—and in the view of members of the public who talk to me—another barrier is the installation cost for heat pumps, which can be as high as £14,000. I know that we have grants to assist with that, but we do not provide grants of £14,000.

The scale of the challenge is enormous, as we have been saying in this committee in recent years. Is the Government aware of the scale? How can we possibly scale up to deliver on that kind of target within the timescale?

I cannot claim credit for the idea. Believe it or not, it came from the House of Lords; it suggested that local authorities throughout the UK could play a decisive role, given that the scale of the transition is an absolutely fundamental issue and would, at the moment, appear to be beyond us. After all, the supplier network is nowhere near able to deliver 100,000 installations a year. Therefore, not only the price of the electricity but something else needs to shift: the cost of the equipment and the trust factor that a lot of constituents have mentioned.

Finally, cabinet secretary, you said in your remarks that it is difficult to make projections and to put timescales and targets into the draft plan when there is so much that we do not know and are depending on others to help us with. Will the Government try to put some kind of assessment in the plan to show us how we will reach the target, even if that is dependent on decisions being made elsewhere? Can we look ahead and see what the targets beyond 2030 will be, or is the Government not going to do that until it is more certain of support from other areas?

Thank you very much for that.

My question is about the scale of the challenge that faces us, and you were leading us in that direction a wee bit, cabinet secretary, when you spoke about electricity prices.

In our evidence sessions, our council colleagues have told us that they do not yet have the resources to scale up delivery of their local heat and energy efficiency strategies. That is tied in with issues around how we develop and grow our housing-related green workforce, whether we do that through apprenticeships, colleges or otherwise. Could you say a little bit about that difficult area, which, I am sure you will agree, is key for us if we are to make any progress down this road?

Your constituents must tell you what my constituents tell me, which is that they do not know who they can trust, where they can go to buy a heat pump, or whether the company that they might buy one from will still be there next year or the year after. Is there a role for local authorities to somehow step into the territory and become the trusted partner? Perhaps they could be the volume supplier in order to bring prices down. We expect local authorities to sustain until 2040 or 2045; they could be a trusted partner that local people can go to for help, support, maintenance and so on. There is not much evidence of that; perhaps there is some kind of legislative barrier to it.

Where I live, my neighbours ask me all the time whether councils can play a role for residents in the private sector, in which the retrofit problem that we face is nine times higher in volume terms than in the public sector. My neighbours and constituents ask me whether the council can help to supply heat pumps, maintain them or provide them at a better price. It could be attractive and worthwhile for local authorities to be able to step into that space, possibly. In looking at the scale of the challenge and at how we can go from 8,000 installations a year to 100,000 installations a year, could Scotland look at engaging councils much more directly in the work?

Professor Turner, our draft climate change plan assumes that the UK ETS will work. Is that how you see it? What happens if it does not? Can Scotland’s climate change plan succeed if that does not happen?

I am conscious, convener, that, when our successor committee has a conversation on this issue in two or three years’ time, its members will possibly ask questions about how the situation has progressed and who is responsible for enabling progress to be made quicker, better and so on. It will be important to have that data at that time, so that we can react and respond positively in a way that ensures that we can develop the climate change plan and take it forward.

I thank our witnesses for responding to my questions.

Richard Woolley, to what extent does the UK ETS work in harmony with Scotland’s draft climate change plan proposals?

My last query is on how well the on-going monitoring to advise both Governments about progress towards reaching the targets is working. Who will do that monitoring? Who is best placed to do the monitoring and to revise the plans, targets and schemes and so on as we go forward? Can anyone offer a view on that? Richard Woolley, how will we know that we are achieving what we set out to achieve?

Could Scotland do that almost independently as we move forward?