Chamber and committees

Well, it is, because that looks to see how we are meeting the five-year carbon budget and where we are on it.

It is important to mention that one of the reasons for having a five-year carbon budget is that there are fluctuations in year. All bets were off during the Covid pandemic. Straight after Covid there was a massive reduction in car use all of a sudden because, during the pandemic, people had not wanted to go on trains and so on. Having the assessment over five years allows for such fluctuations to be ironed out.

When it comes to scrutiny, two reports will come out every year: on greenhouse gas reduction and on how we are meeting the provisions in the climate change plan.

The greenhouse gas emissions figures will show you how they are matching up with the carbon budget.

Obviously—because I would not be sat here putting this bill forward if we had said that we could not go for a 75 per cent reduction by 2030. However, as Ms Lennon will remember, it was during the process for what is now the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019 that Roseanna Cunningham put forward a draft for a 65 per cent reduction by 2030, and Parliament voted in favour of a 75 per cent reduction. Roseanna Cunningham was very clear at the time. She said that the Parliament voted for a 75 per cent reduction by 2030 and that we had to recognise that action to get us there would have to follow. The target setting is not enough. That was a very challenging target, and the Committee on Climate Change at the time said to us that it was not in line with its advice. It did not think that it was achievable, and it thought that it was extremely challenging.

In this country and in the wider UK, we see not meeting a target as failure. However, the way that I like to look at it is that, if we do not set challenging targets that change our culture, change our mindset and show that we have bold ambition, action may not accelerate as fast as it could.

If you are asking whether I regret the fact that Parliament moved away from the advice that we were given by the Climate Change Committee, which said that we should have stuck to the 65 per cent reduction that Roseanna Cunningham put forward at the time, the answer is both yes and no.

We would certainly be nearer to a 65 per cent reduction than a 75 per cent one, but we should ask whether the target accelerated our actions and whether net zero is now far more deeply embedded across Government, local government and society. It has embedded itself in the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill and in national planning framework 4. It is embedded across policy making, although the CCC gives advice on targets and not on policy.

In summary, we did not take that advice in 2019; we went further.

No, because the new climate change plan will result from the changes in carbon budgeting. That needs CCC advice, which we have always committed to having. I am not going to change that or turn it back to front.

Frankly, I am surprised that the idea of publishing a draft climate change plan without having CCC advice has even been mooted. I am not going to do that. The plan needs to be informed by CCC advice if it is to have credibility.

I have misunderstood you. The CCC says that it will give Governments advice in the spring. The advice that it would ordinarily have given us, per the 2019 act, would have taken a different shape. It would have been recommending targets for a 75 per cent reduction by 2030, a 90 per cent reduction by 2040 and achieving net zero by 2045—the advice would have been on that mechanism.

However, the advice that we are waiting for the CCC to give us, if the bill is passed and if we introduce carbon budgeting, will relate to the different mechanism of carbon budgeting. The CCC knows where we want to go. It has seen the bill and is in support of it. It has recommended that we go to five-year carbon budgeting, so there is certainly no pushback from it in that regard. It is pleased that we are taking this action and changing our processes. It just means that the advice that we get will dovetail into that five-year carbon budgeting process.

I am not saying that our changing anything here will delay that advice. However, the reason why I cannot give the convener and the committee a definitive date for the draft climate change plan is that I do not know—neither does the UK Government or the Welsh Government—exactly when in the spring we will get the advice, because the CCC has not yet said when it will be. The sooner the bill can be passed and royal assent given, the sooner we can say that the Scottish Government is now working on a five-year carbon budget mechanism, and the sooner the CCC can give us its updated advice, once we have gone to a different system.

I will briefly give a bit of context on the reasons why we have introduced the bill. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to that.

Our independent experts on the Climate Change Committee have—sadly—determined that the 2030 interim target is beyond what is achievable. The Parliament’s 2019 targets were extremely ambitious, which I do not regret, because they set out the scale of the challenge that has prompted action in so many areas. However, as the CCC has said to us all, the targets have proved to be unreachable, and we must temper our aspiration with credibility and, crucially, deliverability.

Ramping up action alone will not be enough. The scale of societal changes that would be needed for a 75 per cent reduction in our emissions by 2030 would not be fair or just on people in our society; they would cause serious impacts across communities and hit our people exceptionally hard. Therefore, we cannot achieve them.

The bill will enable us to set a credible route to 2045. It is narrow in scope and it will do three things—establish a carbon budget approach to our targets, enable carbon budgets to be set by secondary legislation and change the timing of the climate change plan to reflect carbon budgets. It will maintain annual reporting and will not allow a carryover of emissions.

My engagement with stakeholders and party spokespeople, and evidence to the committee, acknowledges that the bill is a necessary stepping stone. Scotland must have deliverable targets so that we can introduce a climate change plan as soon as possible and move the focus from target setting to delivery. I want to work with the committee and the wider Parliament to fix our targets approach in order to set fair and credible targets and produce a climate change plan that we can all be involved in and get behind.

With your approval, convener, I will draw attention to a letter that I sent the committee yesterday regarding some errors in our annual targets and the use of a statistic in the just-published section 36 report, which I was made aware of very recently. The letter sets out the circumstances and implications of the errors and the swift actions that we are taking to rectify them.

I intend to speak to that far more fully later this week in my statement to the Parliament on the section 36 report. I will issue the necessary corrections to the section 36 report as soon as possible. I am, of course, happy to answer any questions on that.

I understand why you would want to see that. I hope that, as I said to Monica Lennon, I will be able to give you a much better indication of the actual work that has been done on the climate change plan. However, Mr Ruskell, I am going to put together a climate change plan that will work with the five-year carbon budgeting approach outlined in the bill.

The bill is about the mechanisms. I will not be putting an unfinished climate change plan in front of anyone until we have the CCC’s advice on what such a plan and its associated targets have to look like, and I will not be putting in front of a committee a climate change plan that has not yet gone through the Cabinet. That would not be the process, and it is not how these things are done. There are probably enough people in here who have already been through the process involved in previous climate change plans and who know how these things are done.

I understand that you want to see the detail of a climate change plan. That is why I am bringing forward the bill and why I would prefer that the bill was passed—so that we can get on with waiting for the CCC’s advice while working on the climate change plan that we know we will have to produce. That will ensure that, when you as a committee and as a Parliament get it, you will have as much time to scrutinise it as it deserves.

I can certainly do that, because that is a different question.

My thoughts on that are exactly the same as those that you have just articulated. All Governments are criticised for not taking action quickly enough and there is a danger of spending too much time on the mechanisms and the process for the mechanisms at the expense of deliberation on the action plan. If the process is extended any longer, I worry that we could be looking at not putting a climate change plan to the committee before summer. I want to be able to give it to the committee before summer. A lot of that will depend on the CCC’s advice. If it comes in late spring, that might be more difficult, but that is my intention.

If we start to extend the processes to look at the mechanisms that are required for the measurement of where we are getting to with the carbon budgets at the expense of the scrutiny that is required for the climate change plan, I suggest that that is not what the environmental non-governmental organisations would like. I did not see the whole of your earlier session, but I certainly heard representatives from the ENGOs saying that the climate change plan was where they want to concentrate their scrutiny and that they wanted to see it coming forward as soon as possible.

It is deeply regrettable to me that we cannot put a climate change plan in place in November, because the targets are far too stretching. My job—and I hope that the Parliament sees it as part of its job—is to do what I can to make sure that the climate change plan is given enough air and oxygen through parliamentary scrutiny. After all, Mr Doris, we are reaching the end of a parliamentary session and the worst thing that could possibly happen is that it gets put back to next year and does not have enough time ahead of a Scottish Parliament election to be put in place.

There is a reason why we have a Minister for Climate Action—let us put it that way—because it is all about action. The climate change plan is where the action is going to sit. That is where I will be able to reach out to my colleagues, and they will get behind the action that is required in their portfolios. It is also not just about Government action. It is about sector action, local government action and whole-society action. People are waiting for the climate change plan, and I do not want to do anything to delay it any further.

Yes.