Seòmar agus comataidhean

The HSE’s view is that hazard classes should be adopted at UN level before they are implemented domestically. It has told us that it has identified some problems with how the hazard classes are defined. The HSE is working at UN level to look at how those problems can be solved. I am afraid that I do not have any detail on the particular example that you give, Mark; however, that is the rationale that the HSE has set out to us.

If the HSE has not shared it with the committee and the committee has asked for it, the committee may want to take that up with the HSE.

It was a collaboration from the get-go. There has been collaboration for years; it has not happened just in the past year.

We have a Cabinet sub-committee on climate change that is attended by key cabinet secretaries who have climate action embedded in their portfolios. As you would expect, that includes the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands, Mairi Gougeon; Fiona Hyslop, who is the Cabinet Secretary for Transport; and Màiri McAllan, the Cabinet Secretary for Housing, but we also have the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government and the Deputy First Minister as part of that group.

We started with a blueprint. I am able to identify the actions that we can take within the climate action and energy portfolio, but the bulk of emissions reductions will come from changes in land use and transport. We looked at policies and commitments within those portfolios and took those into account as part of the blueprint, and we reached out to those cabinet secretaries and their officials, particularly when we got advice from the Climate Change Committee in May last year. When we were working on the carbon budgets, we went back to those cabinet secretaries and portfolios to see what more they could offer by way of emissions reductions, particularly in order to be able to meet the first carbon budget and to look at how they could contribute further to the climate change plan. We do not dictate what those portfolios should do: there is conversation and collaboration across the whole of Government.

We take a whole-Government approach. As I said, the portfolios that are able to do a lot of work on emissions reduction have to reach out to their stakeholders while looking at all the other things that they have to achieve and must ensure that the decisions they are going to make are also part of the just transition. It is not as simple as thinking only about emissions reductions; they have to take into account the impacts of the decisions that they are making. They come back to the subcommittee to have discussions with me and my officials about the climate change plan, and we work through that to decide what is possible and what it might be less desirable to do.

It is absolutely not a question of sticking a finger in the air. It is a whole-economy cost that has been estimated. The climate change plan is an overarching document on emissions reduction. It is very wide in scope and spans the whole economy and society. It is broken down across seven sectors. A breadth of detailed sector and analytical information is provided in annexes 2 and 3 of the plan, and five separate impact assessments accompany it. We have heard through the consultation that a lot more detail can be set out on the how, and we absolutely take that on board. With the final climate change plan, we want to be able to set out a lot about the delivery mechanisms that could be used to deliver on the aims of the plan.

That will be supported by sector-specific strategies and delivery plans. We have 150 new policies. We also have detailed continuing actions that build on the achievements of the previous climate change plan. We will be analysing all the consultation responses. Detail and delivery are themes that have been coming through. I have the whole climate change plan here. Embedded within it we have the front part of the plan, annexes, and links to many of the policies that are already in existence. It is very detailed, but we take on board that people are asking for more detail on the delivery mechanisms associated with the plan.

As I have mentioned, it is an overarching plan—it has to be an overarching plan, because it will span three different parliamentary sessions, and the Governments will set out their policies with the climate change plan in the background.

It is tremendously difficult, particularly in a just transition context. We would like to have as much decarbonisation across industry and domestic life as possible. As you rightly say, the reform of the electricity market that the previous and current UK Governments said that they would undertake has not yielded anything by way of plans to bring down the costs of electricity. I was hopeful that that piece of work would result in a plan or solution associated with that problem.

For example, we might want to put in place policies that enable households to decide to have a heating system that is not based on burning fossil fuels, whether through an oil tank in their back garden, which many people in our part of the world still have, or through a natural gas boiler. At the moment, if someone wants to go with an electric solution and they phone up to ask for advice on changing to an electric boiler, they will often be asked whether they are aware that they would be paying four times the running costs.

At the moment, Scotland is producing around 70 per cent of the renewable electricity in the UK. We have plans to do an awful lot more, but communities are rightly asking where the benefit to them is and why they are still paying the highest electricity costs in the whole of the UK. Why are the standing charges in the north of Scotland a great deal more than the standing charges in more populous parts of the UK, particularly the south-east of England? They cannot connect the need to decarbonise with the cost of living. As we all know from speaking to our constituents, the cost of living is the main issue for people right now.

I found it disappointing that the false coupling of the price of gas with electricity that the previous UK Government took off the table was not brought back when the Labour Government came into power and was looking at the reform of the electricity markets. That is an arrangement that was made, and it is not based on real-world costs. It means that gas is cheaper than electricity. The electricity market should be separated from the gas market, and the more electricity that we produce in Scotland, the lower the cost should be for the consumer.

I suppose that I would split it into two eras, given that engagement with the current UK Government has absolutely been a lot better than it was with the previous Governments. However, is that engagement at a surface level? I would say yes. There are interministerial groups involving the four Governments—I am trying to remember whether they meet quarterly or every six months; certainly, I have one soon—and the Governments in Wales and Northern Ireland and the Scottish Government have been pressing particularly for actions to decarbonise the gas grid and on electricity costs. Again, that is not just the Scottish Government, but the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, too.

We have also been calling for a decision to be made on hydrogen blending in the gas grid. We have the potential to inject hydrogen; in fact, those injections would happen in our area, Mr Stewart, at the facilities up in Westhill, and they would go into the pipeline and then the gas network. They would do two things: significantly reduce the emissions associated with the natural gas that most people across the UK use to heat their homes, which would mean a significant emissions reduction for us all and would create what would be a massive offtaker for hydrogen projects. I do not feel that we are going fast enough on those areas or that we are getting the answers that we need from the UK Government on a lot of the potential that is sitting waiting for us.

Is engagement better than it was? Yes, it is. Is it at a deep enough level, or at the sort of collaborative level that it needs to be at? No, I would say that there is a long way to go before we have that.

Yes. Please forgive me—I need to get this information in front of me. Perhaps Phil Raines can say something first of all about the process by which the Government arrived at the figures, and then I will give you some more detail.

We will take on board a lot of the discussion that has been had on that. Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, actually—

Because it is very difficult to put figures on what the Government might have to spend on the basis of not knowing what the UK Government will do in some areas. For example, not knowing what the electricity cost is going to be in five or 10 years makes that very difficult, so you can only ever give an estimate.

On policy decisions, we might decide that there are Government interventions that we want to make now in areas where there has not been a market or private investment. EV charging is a good example of that. Looking at the EV charging money that the Scottish Government put in in the past and what has happened since in terms of private investment, things have moved on significantly.

My worry about our modelling and setting out the figures associated with that at the moment is that the figures might be out of date very quickly, based on market movement, public sector investment and market creation, as well as UK Government interventions in key areas that have costs associated with them.