Chamber and committees

They are not compelled to do it at the moment.

Yes. Also, we have the Scottish Climate Intelligence Service working with them on their emissions reductions and the data for the things that we ask them to do.

In the intervening period, they are working with local authorities and providing them with the methodology for all the other things that they will have to do to reduce emissions in the short and medium term.

With the scope 3 emissions, the situation, as you heard from the previous panel, is so much more complex. How far down the supply chain do you go, and what will the consequences be? I was watching the previous panel of witnesses in my office, and I disagreed with nothing that they were saying. That is why the methodology has to be bottomed out, and it is going to be a substantial piece of work.

I think that the climate change plans that the local authorities put in place and the work that they do with the Improvement Service to drive action will be far more important than reporting on the difficult stuff.

We could say, “We want you to report on the really difficult stuff,” without any methodology having been worked through, but I do not see what the gain would be. If authorities are doing well in reporting on quite a lot of the categories, we can assist them and look at the methodology to improve that reporting, and they can look at the actions that they are taking and can include those in a climate change plan.

As I said in my opening statement, local authorities play a massively important role in reducing emissions. That work also offers them an opportunity. I am most interested in the action that they will take, and I think that that is what wider society is most interested in. I do not think that people in wider society will think, “Hang on a second. They are only giving us figures for some of the easier-to-measure scope 3 reporting. We must compel them to report on all the different categories.” That might be quite difficult, and we do not know what it would yield. We must be proportionate in our approach, which is why we did not automatically agree with the recommendation in question. We need to do further work in this area.

I outlined, when I had my list in front of me, the various categories on which there had been some reporting, including employee commuting and business travel.

If we introduce legislation as a result of how the improvement plan has landed and the discussions that your committee is having with the stakeholders and so on, the reporting to mandate group 1 categories would start in 2025. However, obviously, a lot more work is going on in relation to the other groups as well. As I say, a lot of that will be as a result of the work that the focus groups are doing and the wider research that has been done, as well as discussions with the local authorities about what they can do, what they might feasibly be able to do and, importantly, what action that could drive.

I would have to ask the SCIS. Philip Raines might have more information. It is possible that you missed your opportunity, because you had a representative of the SCIS in front of you, but I could certainly find that out for you.

I have two big concerns about this. The first is the one set out in the plan, and the second is the capacity that local authorities might have to measure scope 3 emissions, given the expertise required and the complexity of what is involved.

The issue of unintended consequences that you also mentioned arises out of the current situation that we are in, and which was well rehearsed by your previous panel, of the absence of a standardised, tested, accurate solution for measuring and reporting. If, as the Scottish Climate Intelligence Service in particular was saying, you do not have a way of accurately measuring things, you might make decisions based on data—from, say, a supplier—that you cannot verify. Who is checking that the information that you are getting back from this chain of people who are reporting back to you, so that you can do these calculations, is verifiable and correct?

The current approach to reporting on procurement emissions relies on the spend-based method and the conversion factor that some of the previous panel mentioned. However, that is just an estimate of the emissions associated with the total spend. You could reduce your emissions by reducing what you procure, and spending less on something would correlate with those reductions, too, but what would be the unintended consequences of that? You still need to procure those items for a service to keep going. You could then have an apparent reduction in emissions by procuring lower-quality items. However, although they might have fewer emissions associated with them, what would be the impact of that on your services? After all, lower-quality products might need to be renewed more. Under the current system, that could mean putting off investment in more expensive items that might be more energy efficient and last longer, and which therefore have a longer-term impact, too. A solely spend-based approach is not suitable for on-going use.

If we are to prevent these unintended negative consequences arising and driving the wrong type of behaviour, the methodology has to be worked on and researched. As a result of the improvement plan, the Scottish Government has been involved in putting together a focus group to bottom out the methodology, so that some of the unintended consequences arising from the current system and the capacity issues get bottomed out, too.

Moreover, if there were a model out there that was being used by other countries and which we could replicate and bring over here, we would do that. At the moment, though, this same conversation is happening in a whole lot of countries. Indeed, the other countries of the UK do not have a methodology or have not asked their local authorities to report on scope 3 emissions.

The fact that we are having this conversation will drive the action that will get us to the place where we need to be. It is still worth while doing this, because certain scope 3 emissions will be easier to report on than others, and that, too, will drive action.

Or they might not know how they are doing. I was struck by what the last panel said: if you go far enough down the supply chain, you might well come to quite small businesses. A small business with fewer than 50 people that provides goods that have been procured by a local authority—or, indeed, provides goods to a person who is procuring directly for a local authority—will not have the capacity to debate or perhaps talk accurately about its emissions. Also, will such a company have a person with that expertise?

There has to be some proportionality, because we are a country of small and medium-sized enterprises. We do not want a situation in which, as the convener mentioned in his earlier question to me, a company has to put in a 60-page report on this one issue in order to bid for a local authority contract. That might be too much of a burden to put on those people.

The question that I always come back to is this: what are we doing to drive action? That is why, in our response to Environmental Standards Scotland, we were able to agree straight away on four recommendations that would drive action. However, this recommendation is trickier, because just reporting on scope 3 emissions would not necessarily prompt action and, indeed, could tie up local authorities in having to do an awful lot of reporting and monitoring work, which might take away from their other efforts or lead them, as you have identified, to make decisions based on potentially inaccurate data.

In fact, I do have a list—I have just realised that I had it in front of me. In category 1, which is purchased goods and services, 9 per cent of local authorities reported their emissions. In category 5, which is waste, 94 per cent reported their emissions. In category 6, which is business travel, 91 per cent reported their emissions. In category 7, which is employee commuting, the figure was 13 per cent, and, for home working, it was 72 per cent. In the categories in which it is easier to have that data, local authorities are reporting back on that.