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Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee 03 March 2026 [Draft]

03 Mar 2026 · S6 · Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee

Item of business

Draft Climate Change Plan

Dr Emily Nurse (Climate Change Committee) Watch on SPTV

Thank you very much for having me here today.There are a few more things to say at the higher level. First, the climate change plan is more of an overarching plan, within which other plans are needed. In the absence of the upcoming plans that we are expecting, we do not have the detail that we need in order to understand everything. Emma Pinchbeck has highlighted the issue in relation to heat in buildings. We need to see the heat in buildings strategy and delivery plan, which we are expecting this year, as soon as possible. We also need to see the fourth land use strategy, the industrial decarbonisation programme and the route map for negative emissions technologies that has been alluded to.As I said, the CCP is an overarching plan. For the first time, it gives quantified emissions reductions by policy and proposal, which is a significant step forward, but the detail on what that really means and what the policies and the delivery will be in certain areas is missing. We have highlighted that that is the case in relation to buildings in particular.Emma Pinchbeck has talked about the shape of the buildings pathway, whereby very little will happen over the next 10 years. Progress is supposed to accelerate extremely rapidly over the third carbon budget period. We would expect a less risky approach to be taken, which would involve building on the positive progress that has been made so far in heat pump roll-out and building up the supply chains, rather than delaying and then catching up at the last minute, in order to meet the 2045 target for buildings and for net zero overall.I do not know whether we will talk about this in more detail later, but the other thing that I want to talk about is the monitoring and evaluation framework. It is welcome to look at emissions at a subsector and a sector level and to look at the deployment of low-carbon tech and other indicators of progress. However, what is missing from the plan is what change we expect to see in all those areas, which means that we will not be able to judge whether we are on track or whether more action is needed.For the final climate change plan to be credible, we would like it to lay out clearly what is expected, and we would like to see what underlies the modelling so that that can be monitored. For example, we do not have annual sectoral emissions pathways; they are given as carbon budget averages. We know that there is an 18-month lag in emissions reporting. The carbon budget averages are similar to the midpoint of the carbon budget, but it is not exactly the same. The midpoint of carbon budget 1 is 2028, but we will not get emissions data for that until very close to the end of the carbon budget, which ends in 2030. That is too late for any action to be taken. We need more annual data on emissions so that we can track it. I am not talking about targets; we need indicative data that we can track.We also need the indicators that Emma Pinchbeck mentioned. We managed to cobble some together in chapter 4 of our progress report, in which we look at indicators, but we are missing some key ones. For many areas, we do not have annual indicators. They are not all summarised in a convenient place, either. There are no indicators for low-carbon heat and none for heat pumps. We have already identified that area as being a significant risk. We need to know what is needed when it comes to rolling out low-carbon heat. We have called for indicators to be provided in the final plan so that we can properly evaluate and monitor progress. That will mean that, if anything goes off track, there will be time to implement contingency and back-up plans.

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Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee 03 March 2026 [Draft]

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