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Welcome back to the third part of today’s Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee meeting. This evidence session is a chance to consider the Scottish Government’s nomination for the chair of Environmental Standards Scotland, and I am pleased to welcome its nominee, Dr Richard Dixon, to the meeting. Appointments to the ESS board require parliamentary approval under the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2021.
This evidence session is an opportunity to put questions to Dr Dixon about his vision for the role, and what qualities and experience he thinks he would bring to it, prior to Parliament considering a motion on his appointment. “Dr Dixon” is very formal. Richard, do you want to make an opening statement?
Yes. Thank you very much, and I thank the committee for inviting me to speak. Obviously, this is part of a job application process, but I hope that we might talk about ESS more generally and the environment, perhaps, as we go through the meeting.
Your papers have a truncated CV, so I will very quickly go over my history. I have been the acting chair of Environmental Standards Scotland for nearly a year and have been on the board since we set the organisation up five years ago. Before that, my public-body experience included eight years on the board of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. I have been active in the environmental charity sector for 30 years. I was the director of WWF Scotland and, after that, the director of Friends of the Earth Scotland.
That gives me an excellent network in the sector, which is an important group of stakeholders for ESS. In that package of different things, I have experience of environmental science, policy formulation, communications, regulation and—most recently—scrutiny of public bodies.
With regard to my priorities, I am, should I be appointed, not looking to bring revolution to ESS. I have been on the board since its start, and I think that our first chair did an excellent job of setting up the organisation from scratch during Covid restrictions, then running it for three years. I think that the organisation is doing really well.
I have priorities but, as I said, they are not revolutionary. First of all, there is the key task of creating a new five-year strategy. We are due to bring it to the committee in October this year, after consulting stakeholders over the summer.
In the next four years, I want to see ESS making the maximum difference that it can make on the biggest issues, which are climate change and biodiversity. On climate change, I share the committee’s concern about the long timescale for creating the next climate change plan. That also raises the problem that, while we wait for that plan, it is not very clear whether activity is going on to deliver existing commitments. The foot has potentially come off the pedal on that.
On biodiversity, I am very much looking forward to seeing the proposed natural environment bill when it arrives soon in Parliament. There is a proposal that ESS will become an independent review body that will review the Government’s strategies and, more widely, what is happening on biodiversity and achieving new biodiversity targets. My determination is that the body really will be independent and that, like our other work, we will be answerable to Parliament but not answerable to ministers in performing that role. It is important to me that we preserve that independence.
Finally, we had the rather lacklustre review of the Scottish Government’s environmental governance. There is unfinished business on environmental courts and on access to environmental justice in general, so I would like us to make progress in that area.
I look forward to working with you over the next four years, if you recommend me and I am accepted by Parliament. Thank you.
Good afternoon, Richard. You have been a member of the board since the setting up of ESS, as you mentioned in your opening contribution. What would you bring specifically to the role of chair of the board, if you were appointed?
I have suggested that I have a few priorities. In reviewing what we call our strategic plan—the first three-year strategic plan—we concluded that it was not very clear what our priorities were. That was because we had just set up a new organisation: we did not know how many representations and inquiries would come to us and, from looking at strategy and analysis reports, we did not know exactly what our programme of work should be. It was quite excusable that the priorities were not as clear as we might want.
In the new strategy, I want the priorities of the organisation to be very clear and I want very clear flexibility in those priorities for urgent and emerging issues. I want clarity around the things that we mostly work on, but we should have space to cope with new things, as well. That clarity is important.
We have a great board, so I want to develop that board and harness those people, who all already make a good contribution beyond the hours that they put into board meetings. Everyone has another role within the organisation—helping with something, advising on something or chairing something. I would like to build on and support that work
One of our challenges is that the public sector is moving into an even tougher period in terms of resources, so our relationships with the public sector need to be as strong as possible for when we say to organisations that they are not doing something that we think they should be doing and they say, “Ah, but there is no money.” We need to be firm on our side, but we need to be understanding about the situation that local authorities and other public bodies find themselves in. Part of the job of the chair is to help to build those relationships, to maintain them and to smooth those discussions.
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You mentioned in your opening contribution that you thought that ESS had been doing well since it was established. What do you think it has been doing well, and not doing well, during your time on the board?
The board sees reports about the inquiries and representations that come in. About six months ago, I was reading the board papers and saw a report from the team that does investigations. It included a whole page of things that we had done. I looked at it and thought, “That’s great—the world is different and the environment has improved because we did all those things.” I am very pleased with the progress that we have made on those things, and I am pleased with the approach that we have taken. The board—led by the first chair and now supported by me—is keen on the idea that we should resolve things by talking to people, if we can, and that we should resort to our formal powers only when we have to do so.
We have achieved a lot of things. For instance, it is now almost impossible to put a seal scarer on a fish farm. Someone had complained to us that an assessment was not correct, so we worked with Marine Scotland—as it was at the time—and the guidance was changed. Now, farms must do a much more rigorous assessment and it is very hard for them to justify having a seal scarer, which in most cases would be very damaging for protected dolphins and porpoises. That is one example of a thing that has changed in the real world because of what we have done.
There is frustration that things sometimes take a long time, but there are natural timescales built in to the process. If someone raises a concern with us and we write to a public body, it is only fair to give the public body 30 days to respond. If it writes back with not quite the right information and we have to ask again, or if it does not write back and we have to remind it to do so, that takes another 30 days. Suddenly two months have gone by in which we are just waiting for information. That is frustrating, but it is naturally built in to the system. We are working on it, but there is not much that we can do about it.
Recently, we have seen that, when we come to an arrangement with a public body, it agrees to do certain things. We publish a report saying that we have found an issue, that we have discussed it, and that the public bodies has agreed to do specific things. However, what is not obvious from the website or from any document that we publish is that there is a lot of follow-up activity. We continue to talk to that public body: “You said that by April you would do this. Have you done it?” We have learned that we need to be better at communicating the on-going discussion in which we make sure that what the public body has agreed to do is happening. That is building up to being a big bit of work, now that we have quite a few investigations under our belt, but it is not really visible to the outside world.
Finally, a thing that I think has gone well is our use of our enforcement power on publishing a report that compels the Scottish Government to address an issue. We have done two of those—we publish an improvement report and the Government has to come back with an improvement plan. We have published one on air quality management, and one on the public sector duty on climate change and what local authorities are or are not able to do with it. Both of those reports have come to the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee for discussion.
I am pleased that we did them and think that we did them well. We had a long discussion with the Scottish Government, when we had identified what we thought the issue was. The Scottish Government moved quite a long way on a number of issues, but would not move as far as we thought it should move on some final key issues, so we moved to the enforcement measure of producing an improvement report.
I am pleased that we have exercised our teeth, in a sense, and also that we have not had to do so in most cases because we can get the right result by talking to people and agreeing a way forward.
Okay. Thanks.
I was struck by your initial comments, Richard, about the big challenges in making sure that there is a climate change plan that delivers for Scotland’s potential role under the proposed natural environment bill and around unanswered questions about environmental governance. However, there is a whole range of other issues as well. You mentioned seal scarers in fish farms, and the whole raft of regulatory reform analysis that Environmental Standards Scotland performs.
How challenging is that landscape at the moment? Week in, week out, I come across demands for reform of regulation and questions about enforcement. Most recently, we heard about the treatment of battery waste at recycling centres, which is an issue that raises questions about whether the regulations are adequate.
In a landscape in which there is such a strong demand for ESS’s services, how do you equip the organisation to deal with the breadth of that demand, to analyse whether regulations are being enforced appropriately and to consider whether they are fit for purpose in the first place?
There are probably two parts to that question. On the investigations side, the number of inquiries and representations that come to us has been slowly but steadily increasing over the years of our existence, and we have several scenarios for what that might look like in the future. We are in the process of recruiting a new officer to work in investigations, so we are anticipating an increase in demand. However, in five years’ time, the demand could be really quite big, and we need to build that into our thinking.
On the analysis side, we have some subject experts. For example, we produced a report on soils, in which we identified gaps in the regime governing soils. That was written by our expert on soils. However, in some areas, we will not have an expert, so we commission external work. For example, the report that we produced on antimicrobial resistance was done by external consultants. There are a range of ways in which we can do work.
For areas that are priorities for us and in which we know that a lot of work will come in, or on which we decide proactively to do a lot of work, we will have such subject experts, but, for other areas, we will look at ways of sharing resources, including with the Office for Environmental Protection down south, which has offered us help from its college of experts. In addition to having experts on the team, there are ways in which we can get free help or cheap help, as well as quite expensive consultant help.
As we look forward to the next strategy period, it is a question of thinking about which people we will need to have in-house and which people or services we might need to buy in from time to time.
Are you able to predict what the demand on your resources will be? You can strategise and say, “These look like the areas where we’re going to be asked to do more work,” but there might be new and emerging areas that have not yet been scoped out.
That is right. We can make our best estimate. That is what the scenarios in relation to what the future level of representations might be are about. Will that continue to grow in the way that it has been growing? Will it be a steady growth, such that, in five years’ time, it will be at a certain level? Will it accelerate as people hear more about us or as the environment degrades further and more people come to us? We have scenarios for that, and we are looking at financial projections for the next 10 years.
With regard to subject matter, if we have a set of four or five big priorities, we will have people who are able to address those priorities, but we will also make sure that we build in space to enable us look at an issue that emerges that we had not thought of, as you suggest.
We also want to ensure that we can do cross-cutting work. We are beginning to look at public registers. Someone made a representation to us about public registers in forestry that were not available for environmental impact assessments in the way that they should be. We fixed that, and, in August, those things will go online. That is not the first time that someone has told us that a public register is not working or does not exist, so we are doing a broader piece of work across the public sector on which public registers should exist on environmental matters and which of them actually exist and work well. We do such cross-cutting governance work, as well as looking at subject matter such as climate change.
Would you say that the resources that you currently have as an organisation are adequate?
The UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2021 asks us to report to Parliament every year on whether we think that we have the resources to do our job. We have recently written to the committee to say that we think that that is the case this year.
Obviously, staff costs go up, and 70 per cent of our costs are staff costs, which everyone expects are likely to rise 3 per cent a year over the next five to 10 years. Therefore, if our budget stands still, it will not be very many years before we cannot really trim anything else and start to not be able to do our job, at which point we would come back to you to say, “We can’t see how to do this.”
We are obviously thinking about savings at the moment. This year, we got a 3 per cent increase. The figures in the papers include a one-off technical capital allowance and the actual comparable figures are 3.02 per cent this year and 3.1 per cent next year—so, an increase of about 3 per cent. Apart from the changes to national insurance for employers, that is pretty much a standstill budget. We are, of course, grateful for that, but should we start to get a budget that is declining in real terms—although we would obviously work on that ourselves—we would come to you to talk about it.
This is probably the final question—if there is time, convener. It is about your relationship with other stakeholders, Dr Dixon. We now have the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland, which presumably drives quite a lot of referrals to ESS; there was also the work that ESS did—with, I think, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities—around reporting scope 3 emissions. There was perhaps a different interpretation about what was appropriate there. Do you have any comments or thoughts about how those more challenging stakeholder relationships are working and how you wish to progress and develop them? To summarise, I guess that there will be those that want you to go faster and those that want you to go a wee bit slower.
Obviously, I come from the environmental charity sector, so I have been a campaigner. The job of a campaigner is to have a nice, calm conversation with you, but then they go outside and say, “It’s not going fast enough. They’re not taking this seriously.” I understand that some groups will say to us that we do not move quickly enough or take on things that they think that we should take on. There is a bit of that going on. However, we have very cordial face-to-face relationships with most stakeholders.
In the very early days, public bodies perhaps did not know who we were, why we were writing to them to ask for something and whether they even needed to respond. We have completely got over that. Pretty much every public body that we write to knows that it has a statutory duty to respond to us. There is a good set of relationships with those stakeholders.
If I become chair, I would expect to, with the chief executive, meet some of the key public bodies regularly to talk to their chairpersons and chief executives. As I come from that sector, I already have good established relationships with bodies such as the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland. That body wrote quite a critical report on us, which I did not find very fair, but we still have very cordial relationships with it.
Thank you.
That was not the last question, Mark—the last one is from Monica Lennon. Sorry, Monica.
I thought that I had been forgotten there. Thank you, convener.
You are not forgotten, Monica.
Good morning, Richard, or rather good afternoon—you have been here all morning. Thank you for putting yourself forward for scrutiny. I was looking at your CV and background information, and my favourite fact is that your PhD is in astrophysics, which, in your own words, makes you “nearly a rocket scientist”—it is good to know that.
I want to ask about European Union alignment. You have said to the committee previously that one of the challenges is keeping pace with environmental law changes at the EU level. Could you say a brief word about the current approach taken by ESS and how you see it developing or improving in the future?
That is an extremely important area to us. It is not just the EU. Obviously, there is a policy commitment from the Scottish Government to keep pace with developments in EU environmental law but, as a board and an organisation, we are very interested in best practice around the world. If Brazil does something very forward thinking about forestry, why should we not learn from that?
The problem is, of course, understanding all that. Helpfully, the EU has just published a comprehensive report on how its package of green deal measures—which is a huge package of environmental targets—is going. That is a very useful monitoring stick to see whether there is something there that we should be taking on.
12:30We will commission work on keeping pace that will consider what Scotland has missed so far and what is coming up. For instance, there is a revision to the urban waste water treatment directive, which is about how we treat water before it goes into our rivers and burns or out to sea. That issue is quite high in the public’s consciousness. There is already discussion about how we can afford to make the improvements that are needed to meet the current standards, and there are new standards coming from Europe. There are also new standards coming on air quality. We could ignore those standards and just carry on as we are, but we will not be doing our best to protect people’s health if we do not meet them.
We will be part of that work, but we will only be a part, because it is a very big job. We will certainly be working with many others to try to understand what is coming, what its significance to Scotland will be, and over what timescale Scotland should be requested to meet new standards and change legislation.
That is helpful to know.
A few years ago—perhaps five or six years ago—you were on SEPA’s board, but there has been a lot of change since then. You have touched on some of the resource pressures. We hear in the committee and in our individual regions and constituencies that people feel that it is hard to get information if they report something to SEPA or have a concern about pollution, and the public do not always hear about the lighter touch that is taken by having a dialogue with people who might be causing pollution. It feels as though there is a growing gap between the concerns that are reported and what the public hear in relation to outcomes and resolutions.
You have talked about your role in the networks and your insight. I have given the example of SEPA, but it is not the only organisation with such issues. How do you see ESS being able to be fair but firm and being able to improve public understanding and confidence? Right now, people feel that there is not a lot of accountability.
What we do involves a number of stages. We begin an investigation when someone makes a representation to us or when we decide that we should look at an issue. After talking to the public body or bodies concerned, we make a conclusion about what we think is wrong. What is not being delivered, or what is the failure in the law that means that something cannot be delivered properly? It might be that the environment cannot be protected or that human health cannot be protected properly. That is the bit that we do. We say what is wrong.
We usually set out the things that we think should change, but that is the beginning of a discussion. We might say to a public body that there is a problem and that we think that it should do A, B and C, and it might come back to us and say that it agrees that there is a problem that it should fix but that doing X, Y and Z would be more efficient and would have additional benefits. That is the sort of discussion that we have. We make a judgment about whether what has been done has fixed the problem that we identified and, if it has, there is agreement.
At that point, a final report is published, so anyone can go to our website to see the agreement that we have come to. We set out why we think the problem has been fixed and the timescale over which pieces will be put in place to achieve the final solution to that problem. The person who made the representation is contacted during that process. They are told how things are going and receive the final report.
Sometimes, we have a timetable with a public body that sets out six things that will happen over the next 18 months, but it is pretty impossible for someone outside the organisation to understand that there is on-going dialogue about those things. Unless something goes seriously wrong—if one of those things was definitely not going to be delivered, we might start to take enforcement action or reopen the investigation—that part is a bit invisible, so I would like to make it more visible. I want someone on the outside who is tracking the issue to be able to see that the problem has been resolved as long as certain things are delivered and to see what is happening in delivering those things, so that, at some point, we can say that a case is completely closed because the problem has been fixed to our satisfaction and the public body’s satisfaction.
It is fair to say that concerns about access to environmental justice in Scotland are well documented—it is very much a topical issue. You mentioned environmental courts and governance. We do not have an environmental court at present, and we do not know what the Scottish Government will do in relation to compliance with the Aarhus convention. Does that matter to ESS? If Scotland goes down the road of compliance and ends up with an environmental court, will that affect the operation and capacity of ESS and its relationships with other bodies? If that does not happen, what is your take on what would happen next in Scotland? What would be the effect on ESS?
First of all, compliance with the Aarhus convention and the European directive that implements it is about compliance with environmental law, so it is something that we are very interested in. If we were to fully comply with those—and one of the ways that we might comply is by having an environmental court—that would change the environmental governance landscape. ESS would have to learn how to work with such a court, because some things would go there, some things would come to us, and sometimes there might be grey areas. We would make an input into the formulation of that court or tribunal so that it would be, in our view, the best possible version, and we would try to build a good working relationship with that court so that we could build on each other rather than confuse people by appearing to compete.
ESS is keen on the idea that the right sort of environmental court would make a big difference in relation to access to justice, and so it thinks that we should have one. The Scottish Government appears to be determined not to have one. I brought quotes from the Government, which are from the review of environmental governance. The Government recommended
“that ESS, when they revise their strategy, should give further consideration to the conditions where it would be appropriate to investigate the individual circumstances of a local area, group or community, given the restrictions on exercise of its powers and functions. We further recommend that the Parliament considers this matter in their oversight of ESS’s activities and in particular when reviewing a draft revised strategy in due course.”
The key phrase is
“given the restrictions on the exercise of its functions.”
ESS is forbidden from looking at individual cases. My personal interpretation of those paragraphs from the environmental governance report is—if I may paraphrase—that ESS should look at what it can do on the things that it is legally forbidden from doing, and then the Parliament should ask us why we are not doing the things that we cannot do—which is a bit of a waste of time for all of us.
I do not know what will happen after today, but I think that we need to hear more about that. Thank you for your answers.
That is an interesting conundrum to leave us with. Before we leave, there are two things that I would like to say. One is a question and one is a comment. When people come in and take on new roles, I am always nervous that there will suddenly be a splurge of spending—although for you, Richard, the role will be a continuation of what you are doing. When the new chief executive officer of SEPA came in, I noticed that the first thing that happened was that a massive amount of money was spent on teaching the executive team how to deal with matters, which cost the taxpayer £175,000. Will you confirm that you are not proposing to do anything like that in your term?
Yes—and that would be trying to micromanage the organisation. That is a matter for the chief executive, so I might have a discussion with them, and the board might discuss such things, but the personal development of the senior team is finally a decision for the chief executive. I would certainly not be at all pleased if we were spending that kind of money on anything of that nature. Personal development is great and we should spend money on that, but not huge amounts of money.
I think that everyone questions the vast amount of money that is being spent on training people when they perhaps already have the skills that they need.
My other point is just an observation. I remember when Jim Martin initially came to the committee and we discussed ESS and the role that the committee would have in relation to it. I think that his comment was—I probably paraphrase it very badly—that “We look forward to working closely with the committee; we are not going to do everything you tell us to do, but we are very happy to have regular meetings and updates.” At that stage, the committee was happy with that, and it seemed an eminently sensible way of going about it. Will that be the way that you are going to continue?
Yes. I welcome close contact with the committee—you are absolutely essential. You are our masters, in a sense, so we need to be closely in touch. When we produce, for instance, an improvement report that generates an improvement plan, that will come here for discussion. This is the most important committee to us—it is very important indeed. We offer to come every year to give you an annual report, and, when issues come up, we get someone to input as well. I very much welcome that, and I look forward to plenty of close contact over the coming years.
Thank you. We will consider the recommendation that we will make to the Parliament as a result of this discussion, later in the meeting. The clerks will be in touch with you. Thank you for your time this morning and for waiting patiently when I let the earlier part of the meeting run over time.
We will move on because we are quite pushed for time.
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