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For just transition fund money and offshore wind money, we are able to track where there has been inward investment. There are also our Scottish Development International activities. Three Government ministers went to the Osaka expo, and we have been able to quantify that £23 million of inward investment came into Scotland as a result of those three interventions. We can track where Scottish Government investment leads to greater investment from the private sector.

That was very regrettable, and I wish that I did not have to make decisions like that. We are in discussions with Wave Energy Scotland about that.

Wave Energy Scotland was expected to be at commercialisation by this point. It still has an ask of Government, but I was unable to provide that in the budget. I had to go to Cabinet with a note of areas that were prioritised and areas that, sadly, could not be prioritised. The rationale lies in the constraints that I have been under when it comes to delivery, which the finance secretary has asked every cabinet secretary about.

I would like to be able to find a way to support Wave Energy Scotland. I feel very strongly that Great British Energy should be assisting technologies that are yet to achieve commercialisation. GB Energy seems to be going after technologies that are already commercialised, when it is the ones that have potential, such as wave and tidal, that need Government assistance. I have made that point to the energy minister at UK Government level, and I have said in public where the UK Government could assist the Scottish Government in getting some of those technologies to commerciality. I believe that the UK Government also needs to look at why those technologies are not getting to commercialisation—there need to be favourable conditions and they need assistance. It is regrettable that I was not able to put any funding towards Wave Energy Scotland but I was in a very difficult position.

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My officials have been working with Wave Energy Scotland to get more clarity around future planning to get them to commercialisation. That has been happening since September 2024. My officials advised that the Scottish Government put forward a budget proposal for limited funding, but we were clear that it would have to be contingent on budget affordability. Those conversations will continue. We need to see a business plan from Wave Energy Scotland that shows how it can get to commercialisation. We have not had the clarity on how it is going to do that.

I do not want to cut anything. I do not want to be in a position in which I have to make such decisions. I had to make some very hard decisions around that, about what we could prioritise. We are still talking to Wave Energy Scotland about future funding options.

It has to be able to set out a business plan that takes it to commercialisation. My officials are speaking to Wave Energy Scotland and if there is anything that can be done to stop what you have just outlined, I want to be able to figure out whether we can support them. I cannot say any more than that because those discussions are still happening.

I am not going to commit to anything without speaking to my officials on the latest situation and the discussions that they have had with Wave Energy Scotland.

The £48.2 million energy transition budget is capital resource supporting that shift. Some of the projects that I mentioned are coming to a natural end, which results in that decrease. I mentioned the recycling improvement fund; the Scottish industrial energy transformation fund is ending as well, as is the investment to support the launch of the national flood resilience strategy.

The budget has been reconfigured to reflect projects that we have taken forward and other, existing projects that are continuing. That is why there is a decrease. We were able to fund everything that we committed to in the programme for government. The reason for the reduction is those other projects coming to an end.

They are also being used to fund the community and renewable energy scheme, which enables communities to have more access to the expertise and the associated capital that they might need for community energy.

This is not so much in the budget space, but you will have noticed that we also have a pilot programme on repowering opportunities, which is happening in Forestry and Land Scotland, for communities to have an option to have those opportunities first.

We are continually monitoring that. In a period in which there was a moratorium on spend, the ECU capacity uplift of more than twice the amount of personnel was the only area in which we were able to spend money, and we did that because of the demands that you mention.

I can only speak to what is in my portfolio and the information that I have before me. We can get that information from the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government and write to you.

—because we put forward the argument to former cabinet secretaries for a climate change taxonomy to be associated with budget spend. The taxonomy is non-statutory, but it is a useful supporting budget document that provides a read-across of where funding is contributing to climate action across several portfolios, and it sets out how the budget will impact the priority of tackling climate change.

The taxonomy is divided into two parts. There is an overarching climate narrative that highlights key spending areas from multiple portfolios that contribute to the response to climate change. The second part provides a carbon taxonomy assessment and commentary on the capital and resource budget.

That work is always improving, because it is quite nascent. I am not sure whether other Governments do such taxonomies. I am not aware of the UK Government doing anything similar, although I would certainly love to see a taxonomy of the UK Government’s budget. Given our ambitions, the question of how we can assess every Government’s budget spend across different areas is something that can potentially be fleshed out more widely in the interministerial intergovernmental groups of the four nations.

The net zero assessment has been designed to be proportionate. It operates on a threshold of a minimum of 10,000 tonnes of COper year and includes forecast emissions that are based on the impact of policies. Annual reports about that come to me, and the outputs of any individual net zero assessments are used internally in the Government.

Therefore, I understand why Ms Hyslop said that. She operates within the net zero assessment for transport and reports back to me, but it is my directorates that collate all that information and, with finance colleagues, produce the final taxonomy.