Chamber and committees

Yes. The committee is part of the Parliament, and the committee has its own process. However, I believe that the process for scrutiny of the climate change plan provides a minimum of 120 days. I hope that you appreciate that I want to get the plan to you as soon as possible.

Yes, I will. You wanted a short answer—yes, I will consider that. We will look at that.

The convener wants me to be short and sharp, so my main takeaway is that we must be honest about what gets us the largest reduction in carbon emissions with the budget that we have and for which there is agreement and appetite as part of a just transition. I am having a conversation with my colleagues in the Cabinet—with regard to land use and transport, for example—about which areas we can accelerate and go further on, within our limited budget, that will make the biggest difference. Maybe we have tried to do too much and the process has been too piecemeal. We are looking at which areas we can we bring our limited resources into in order to have substantial change.

Land use, transport and construction. A lot of work has been done in the housing area, around energy performance certificates, for example. A lot of work has been done on construction. There is also peatland restoration and work on the skills for that. We have been doing reasonably well on peatland restoration, and that is the big-ticket item with regard to carbon sequestration. We are in the position that we are in not because there has not been enough money associated with that work—£250 million over 10 years is a lot of money—but because we have not had the capacity, in the form of a trained workforce, to do that work. We need to look seriously at that area, which comes back to the point about embedding work across portfolios.

Yes.

Let me take that away. Obviously, my officials and I will talk about the trajectory of the timescale. I do not think that we will have a climate change plan available at the same time as the secondary legislation; I just do not think that that is doable. However, we want to make it available as soon as possible after that point.

Yes—hence the need for the targets to be in secondary legislation, as that will give future Governments a chance to assess how far they have come in five years and what needs to change with regard to those targets.

I made the point earlier that, in certain sectors, things might go really far down the road of emissions reduction in a way that we did not expect—there might be some kind of change or something might happen that enables that to be the case. Other areas might not be able to go far enough—the picture might change and might need to be examined flexibly. That is another reason for setting the targets in secondary legislation. It is not just about what the Government does but about future Governments aligning with the 10-year climate change plan and the long-term setting of three budgets to cover the period up to 2040. That will be crucial.

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.