Hansard

To begin, I apologise for being slightly late for the start of the debate.

I will seek to draw the debate together in a consensual fashion, given the importance of the issue. I put on record my thanks to all those members who have contributed to the debate and, in particular, to the committees that have taken time to scrutinise the draft climate change plan. On reflection, it feels as though the wider committee engagement on this particular plan has been greater than we have experienced on previous occasions. That is to be welcomed.

Ownership of the draft climate change plan and of the final plan is critical to its success: not only ownership in the Government—I will come to that point—but ownership in the Parliament as well. In order to tackle the issues that we need to tackle in our healthcare system—whether that is through green theatres, pharmacology or other measures that can be taken for energy efficiency in our health service—it is important that, in the next session of the Parliament, the health committee is alive to those issues and pursues them with vigour. The same must be true of the local government committee, the rural affairs committee and the committee on constitution and culture. It will be essential that there is collective responsibility in the Parliament to pursue and consider the draft climate change plan.

Broadly, there were three buckets to the evidence that the committee received when we were considering the plan. One bucket was that of those who thought that the plan may go too far in some areas and that it is too ambitious in what it is trying to achieve. I see by the looks on their faces that some may feel as though there were not many of those—I am afraid, Mr Harvie, that there were. Secondly, there were those who thought that the plan has not gone far enough and, thirdly, there were those who thought that it reaches the right point at this juncture. Wherever you are on this journey—whether you think that the plan goes too far or not far enough, or is about right—it is clear from the debate this afternoon that the main issue is about delivery.

A lot of the committee’s recommendations focus on the importance of delivery. Any plan and its ownership are only as good as how the plan will be implemented and delivered. The committee highlighted a number of concerns around delivery and the shortage of detail in the draft plan on how key aspects will be delivered. Whether it is aspects of agriculture—Finlay Carson raised the importance of both policy and finance measures to support that sector’s transition—heat in buildings, local government support or our healthcare system, the delivery of policy will be critical in all those areas.

I suspect that part of the challenge is that several key parts of delivering in those areas do not rest with the Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy or the Cabinet Secretary for Transport: they rest with the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, the Cabinet Secretary for Housing and others. That is why it will be important that there is a proper structure across portfolios within the Government to identify how that delivery can be achieved, and that there is a clear line of responsibility and of action in each individual portfolio.

That brings me on to another important recommendation that the committee made, which relates to an issue that many members have mentioned—the need for early warning indicators and the means by which those can be made visible to the public and to Parliament.

We should not have early warning indicators just for the sake of it. As we move from a system of annual targets to a system of five-yearly carbon budgets over the course of the next decade and a half, if we start to lose momentum in key areas, we need to be able to identify that at an early stage. The danger is that the burden falls on other policy areas, which then have to make up the difference. We know from previous experience that that is very difficult to achieve and that such an approach is not effective.

A system of early warning indicators is helpful not only in supporting the Government to develop policy, to ensure that that policy is on track and to identify where there might be early challenges, but in aiding parliamentarians and committees to scrutinise how the Government deals with some of those issues. I hope that the final iteration of the climate change plan recognises the importance of the transparency and accountability that are provided through a system of early warning indicators that can identify gaps as and when they arise.

That brings me on to a further point about specific policy areas. If we look at how the CCP seeks to address energy issues, we can see that it relies to a significant extent on decarbonisation through electrification of our society, whether at domestic or industrial level. Alongside that, it places a greater dependence on negative emission technologies, some of which we know are still in their infancy and still carry significant risk. Therefore, we need to ensure that we build sufficient contingency into how we plan for those things, should they not be able to achieve the level of uplift that the plan expects.

In reflecting on this afternoon’s debate, it has at times felt as though we have been debating a committee report on an energy strategy rather than a committee report on a draft climate change plan. The debate has highlighted the fact that, in dealing with new technology, there is a risk that it might not be able to meet the level of ambition that we are looking for and that, therefore, we must ensure that there is sufficient contingency in the system to deal with that.