Seòmar agus comataidhean

Ms Slater is the portfolio lead, and I understand that she works to Ms Gougeon on that. NatureScot does not fall within my remit.

I would add, however—again, reaching back to when I had the environment portfolio—that, if it is a question of private sector-funded tree planting and what the sector gets from that, of course we need the woodland carbon code, just as we need the peatland carbon code, to have integrity and to ensure that any support is additional and does not amount to greenwashing. Recent changes in the woodland carbon code brought me great comfort in that regard, because they said—I am explaining it crudely—that if a scheme were to be commercially viable on its own, carbon credits would not be available to it. Therefore, yes, the woodland carbon code is catching up with the speed of the land market and the natural capital market in Scotland, and it is using those mechanisms to ensure that any private investment and carbon credits that come from it do not amount to greenwashing in Scotland.

I am not expecting a further full consultation. A great deal of work is being done to respond to a number of comments, most of which pertain to the energy aspects of the report rather than the just transition. Although Neil Gray and I are working jointly on that, the energy teams are principally engaged in responding to the comments on energy.

We have two sets of costs, one of which goes out to 2030 and the other to 2045. The recent figures that I have seen are still in the same area as you set out.

I clarify that my colleague Angus Robertson leads on the Scottish Government’s approach to oversight of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill and the relations between us and the UK Government on that.

First, we had to undertake an enormous piece of work to find everything that had not been listed. Now that I know what is potentially under threat in my area, it is about senior civil servants and then me, in the case of a refusal, making the case for why things should not be in the schedule. However, I do not lead on the Scottish Government’s response to the REUL bill at large. It would be for Angus Robertson to answer your question on that.

There is a balance. My officials and I have discussed the question, too. I say from the outset that, when I presented the 1.2 percentage point miss, I was clear that we thought that that had happened because of a rebound in transport emissions following a year of lockdown in 2020, as you said, and because we had had one of the coldest winters in a decade, which meant that emissions from heating our homes were higher.

I have been thinking about whether transport had largely settled in 2022—about whether people were not using transport because of a fear of Covid or whether a behavioural change has started to set in because people’s need to travel to work and their lifestyles have changed. The answer is that I do not know the extent to which that return to transport emissions will be seen into 2022. I think that there will be some. We might see some aviation emissions rebound in that.

However, I would also like to think that a positive that came out of the plethora of incredible negatives of the pandemic was that change in people’s lifestyles; for example, in how they travel to work. I hope that we will hold on to some of those changes in the 2022 results. All the time, we seek to introduce policies that will make changes now and will be borne out in future targets.

Yes. I aim to lay a draft in Parliament in November.

The UK Government’s position is that it has declined to remove it from the schedule. When we raised the matter at director general level, the UK Government declined the request and, as far as we understand it, it has no plan to replace the plan. It is now for me to escalate the matter to my ministerial counterparts in the UK Government and to make the case very clearly as to why we believe that it should be removed from the schedule.

I am reluctant to stray into this because, as I said, Angus Robertson is leading on it. As you mentioned, it is a joint piece of work. However, as far as I aware, we do not have any tool to change what the UK proposes in the schedule. I do not think that there is a mechanism that Scottish ministers could use to do that.

I do not know what agreement you are talking about. If you can give me more information, I will be glad to talk about it.

I will hand over to Phil Raines in a moment.

For my part, I see the TIMES model as a well-regarded and exceptionally rigorous tool, which is critical to our ability to plan sector envelopes for emissions reduction. Equally, it is a model and we have to apply human judgment to much of what it throws up as being the pathway to net zero of least cost. That is the job that the civil servants and I will do: we will apply judgment to what TIMES tells us. We will be as explanatory and transparent as we can be.

One of the great benefits of this strand of work is that we have a tangible measurement for emissions reduction so that we can set out in great detail the emissions reduction policy. That is quite different to something like biodiversity gain. Where we have such tangible measurement, I am keen that it is as clear as possible what each policy accrues to. I will hand over to Phil Raines, whose days are probably very much filled with this just now.