Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener.

Thanks for the opportunity to discuss the improvement plan that we laid on 3 September. We welcome Environmental Standards Scotland’s report on the support for local authorities in delivering their climate change duties. It is clear that local authorities play an absolutely critical role in tackling the climate emergency. The report’s recommendations were thoughtful, and we have worked constructively with ESS since it made them and, indeed, have resolved the majority of them.

One area that we have not been able to accept in full is, as the committee knows, the pathway proposed in response to the recommendation on making the reporting of scope 3 emissions mandatory for local authorities. As our plan sets out, there are technical and resource challenges with regard to reporting all categories of scope 3 emissions, which I recognise account for a significant proportion of local authorities’ emissions.

I hope that the committee agrees that the improvement plan sets out a phased and proportionate approach that will help improve the information available to support local decision making on reducing emissions. At the same time, the plan avoids placing an unreasonable additional reporting burden on local authorities, one that might not actually drive action.

I thank COSLA and local authority officers for their valuable input in developing the improvement plan. Our reporting duty has helped drive climate action and enables the tracking of progress across the public sector. The actions set out in the improvement plan seek to enhance reporting by local authorities and to help accelerate action without, as I have said, putting an undue burden on them.

Thank you, convener.

You say that that is an easy question, but the answer is actually quite complicated. There are obvious benefits to reporting any emissions, including scope 3 emissions, which account for about 70 per cent of the emissions arising from the work that services do. The benefit of putting in place a system that monitors and measures such emissions is that it could allow local authorities to make more informed decisions about, for example, what they procure. At the same time, it would have to be done in a way that ensured that they were not having to measure absolutely everything to the nth degree, as that would take away from the actions themselves and, indeed, the capacity required to deliver on them.

I was struck by what the previous panel were saying about the fact that just talking about reporting on scope 3 emissions has engendered conversations with their supply chain and people with whom they have been working with for many years about their carbon footprint and what they do. It could have a positive domino effect in that respect. After all, local authorities are among the biggest procurers in any country. If Governments and Parliaments are starting to talk about measuring scope 3 emissions, even our having that conversation at the moment is probably making suppliers think, “How do we measure our emissions? What can we report on? When we bid for a contract, what can we say about what we are doing to reduce our carbon footprint that might make us more attractive?” If local authorities are looking at their scope 3 emissions, that might make suppliers start to look at their own carbon footprints and put in that sort of information when they bid for contracts. It could have a big domino effect.

Not if it is worked through. A focus group is going to be put together that will have all the experts in the field and work with local authorities on what is required. We will then have to commission larger pieces of research to inform what happens as the methodology is put together.

At the moment, our colleagues in the—[Interruption.] I am sorry. Is it climate improvement Scotland?

The members of your previous panel were entirely accurate: we cannot tell. We come back to the fact that, until the methodology has been bottomed out, we will not know what kind of training will be required in relation to that methodology. It will be necessary to assess the systems that the local authorities already have and how much of a step change it would be to put in new systems, what those systems would cost, what training would be associated with that and what capacity the relevant departments would need to have.

We need to go through the process that we have put in train, which involves the focus group that is comprised of various academics and experts in the field, to bottom out what the methodology could look like and to do that wider piece of research. At that point, we would have to say to COSLA and local authorities, “This is what has come back from the focus group. This is what has come back from the research. How feasible is this, given your current capacity? How feasible is this, given the expertise that you have available within your organisation? Would your current systems support such reporting and the methodology for that?”

At the risk of quoting Silke Isbrand too much, she kept on saying, “How long is a piece of string?” That is the territory that we are in here. The methodology must come first, and then we will be able to work with COSLA and local authorities to answer your question.

I do not have the information in front of me. It is a perfectly acceptable question, but I do not have the information. To my knowledge, they have not.

That is quite easy to answer because, with the exception of the scope 3 emissions part, everything in the ESS report made absolute sense. It was great to see that the report was looking at particular sections of Scottish society such as local authorities where there is an awful lot of procurement and buying power in relation to a lot of services and goods, and was asking whether the legislation and the compulsions are fit for purpose, given that we have a net zero target for 2045, and what more we can do to accelerate action around mandating that organisations create climate change plans, and monitoring their work on that.

We were grateful for the recommendations—that is why the service was set up after Brexit, so that we had environmental standards that were being looked at by an independent arm’s-length body that could make recommendations to the Government and Parliament, and I think that it did its job well. The scope 3 emissions situation is tricky, but it is right that that was there, because all Governments need to think about that.

The biggest opportunity for joint work is with the other three nations in the UK. Our improvement plan and the ESS report’s recommendation has prompted things to move a little bit faster in Scotland than in those other countries, but it is coming down the line there, too. The UK has no mandatory requirement for local authorities to report on their greenhouse gas emissions, and the Welsh Government, which does not have one either, is running into the same difficulties that we are. I have quite substantive discussions with my Northern Irish and Welsh counterparts on our net zero ambitions and what we can do in the devolved space to accelerate action around them. We also meet regularly on the issue with the UK Government, so that joint work will be factored in.

We would like to share with other countries the work that the focus group is doing and our wider research. We should also keep a keen eye on what happens in the EU, because this is an issue for every country that wants to accelerate its emissions reduction, and the issue of scope 3 emissions is becoming more of a discussion point in that regard. The methodology around that needs to be bottomed out so that it is fair and will work.

We will continue pressing ahead with the work that we are doing but, at the same time, we will keep an eye on what is happening in the European space and, I hope, we will influence what happens in the wider UK space, too.

As you have heard, I cannot quantify what resource is required. It might be that, after we have done all the necessary work, I will go back and say that councils will require more resource to enable them to do the necessary work, but, for this budget, that piece of string has not been bottomed out yet, as it were.

A few local authorities are already reporting voluntarily. One council—I think that it was East Renfrewshire Council—did a piece of work that involved publishing the emissions data for its supply chains, but it found it difficult to report accurately on that and on how it would impact on decision making.

We must remember—I cannot believe that I am telling this to a former councillor—how varied and broad the services that a local authority procures are and the number of organisations of different sizes that bid for contracts to supply goods and services. Therefore, it could be difficult to ascertain what the scope 3 emissions are, for the reasons that we have all talked about. Some organisations are larger than others, and some have the data while others do not. There is also the issue of whether the data can be relied on.

I come back to what I said at the beginning: ESS has published its report, the conversation is under way, the improvement plan is in place and the Scottish Government is working with COSLA. We have held a few workshops with local authorities and have started to talk about the implications for their activities in identifying scope 3 emissions. Things will have come out of that process that will have prompted action in some areas.

Members of your previous panel mentioned the conversations that have been had with suppliers. For the larger suppliers, that data might be readily available or they might say, “We are moving in this direction in order to reduce our emissions. Can we give you some information on that?”

When it comes to voluntary reporting, will local authorities spend time on that? I think that they will make a judgment about whether that is the best use of their time. Before we put mandatory reporting in place, we need to bottom out a methodology that local authorities are comfortable with.

I do not have that information here. I do not think any have reported on that.