 Good morning. Welcome to the fourth meeting of 2016 of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, can I remind everyone to switch off mobile phones and electronic devices as they may affect the broadcasting system? However, you may notice that some committee members are consulting tablets during the meeting. This is because we provide meeting papers in digital format. The first item of business on the committee's agenda this morning is to consider whether to take item 5 in private. Do we have the agreement of the members to do that? We do. Can I also take the opportunity to welcome Jenny Goldruth to the committee? Under agenda item 2, can I invite Jenny to declare any interests that she may have that are relevant to the work of the committee? I have nothing to declare other than that it has already declared my register of interests. The third item on our agenda this morning is to take evidence from the Committee on Climate Change on its 2016 progress report on reducing admissions in Scotland. I welcome Lord Devin, the chairman of the Committee on Climate Change, and Matthew Bell, its chief executive. I thank both of you for coming along today. You did of course give evidence to the predecessor committee, the Rural Affairs Committee, so it's great to have you back. We have a series of questions for you, gentlemen. Can I start with a general point? What is your overall view of Scotland's progress in cutting emissions since 1990? Thank you very much for welcoming us. We are very pleased to be here. The first thing is that Scotland is doing better than any other part of the United Kingdom. I am unashamedly using it as a means of tracing other people to do better. Please keep on with it. It's a very valuable thing from our point of view. That ought to be said and said strongly, and I'm slightly annoyed that some of the press reports emphasised the downside rather than started off as we had started off by saying 2014, yes of course it happened to be true that the weather was helpful and other things, but if you take that out it's still true that the policies and programmes of the Scottish government actually have made a significant difference and you are meeting the targets and the target is a tough one. It seems to me that unless one starts there it's much more difficult then to go on to say but there are other things that have to be done but a bit of congratulations and thanks comes first and I won't say that. It does get progressively more difficult of course and it becomes more difficult because you have been very successful in facing up to the questions of the power sector and that means that as that becomes less there's less opportunity there because of success then transport and agriculture become very clearly the next areas of the demand and both of them are difficult, more difficult than the things. This is not a question of low hanging fruit it just is that there are certain things that are more difficult and of course agriculture has a higher proportion of emissions in Scotland than it does in other parts of the United Kingdom and therefore you have a specific problem and that part of agriculture which is animal husbandry is again a bigger proportion of agriculture as a whole and a more difficult area to deal with. So we are very pleased with the amount which the government has done pleased with the amount of advice that it has taken the advice we gave last year much of that has been implemented and we have to go on and say there are some things that really do need urgent attention and we've listed those. We'll come on and explore those in detail and of course colleagues now have some questions to ask around this at Jenny Goldruth. The committee notes that domestic policies are only responsible for a share of the emission reductions achieved today. Are you able therefore to identify any specific UK policies that have contributed to reducing emissions? Well there are many policies that have contributed to it but the UK as a whole is not doing as well as Scotland in specifics and we were able to disassociate the accidental reasons for improvement, whether such like, from the real reasons for improvement. That's not always easier over a larger base where you're drawing from four different nations. It's not as easy but there's no doubt that some of the policies to improve insulation and dealing with the need to reduce the sort of energy loss that comes from poor housing has been effective in Wales, for example, has been effective too to some extent in England, but you have made specifics and that I think is worth saying. That would be true in every sector. In every sector you could go through the series of policies and on the power sector side clearly renewable obligations and how the living control framework works and how the auctions work which are all set at a UK level has an impact on Scotland but equally local policies and planning issues and local support from the government here has an impact on the success of renewables and equally European level policies. The EU emissions trading scheme has a big impact there as well and similarly if you looked at transport you could go through policies at a European level like fuel efficiency, car efficiency ambitions, policies at a UK level like fuel duty and taxation and policies at a Scottish level like approaches to parking and approaches to modal shift and things like that. So in every sector there's this triad if you will of policies some from Europe some at a UK level and some at a Scottish level and we try to break that down in detail in the report but also to be clear where progress can be made in areas that are under control of the Scottish government and where progress requires discussions either at a European level or at a UK level. Yes welcome and can I ask you a question in particular about back loading in relation to the 2014 figures? I mean it was obviously a significant aspect that a number of allowances were withheld. What do you see the impact of that going forward particularly in the light of Brexit and the potential for UK not to be participating in the EU ETS anymore? I think the Brexit bit is very difficult indeed. I mean I clearly think it's a dreadful thing to have done and I think it will have very serious implications but I think we have to face the fact that anybody who pretends to know what it will mean is lying because they don't know even those who wanted it and so we don't know what that effect would be because all that's open for negotiations and I notice that the Brexit minister has now said that these may be the most complicated negotiations ever. I don't seem to remember that having been said in the referendum but there we are. So we're now faced with the situation and I don't think it helps to postulate what might happen as far as that's concerned. Our belief is that the central issue is the public must know the truth. In other words we must not allow the system to cover up whether we've done better or worse and therefore in every issue whether it's back loading or whether it's banking or any of the other things which can be done the committee is very determined to make it clear as to what has happened and the area which will be most difficult will be that which is involved in moving from net to gross emission measurement which the Scottish Government has committed to do that in a way which doesn't make comparators impossible because the public must never feel that they're being misled and so I see it in that category amongst that group of things. That's why we try to be clear in the report that the Scottish Scotland would have met its targets even had the back loading not taken place and so all the different relatively complex accounting rules that govern how the target is actually defined and how we calculate whether it has been met or not but in amongst that then we try to be clear for parliament and for the public about what level of real progress is sort of setting aside the accounting and had the back loading not taken place Scotland still would have met its targets the fact that some of these ETS allowances have been sort of taken out temporarily and the thought is that they would be put back in at a later date means that you cannot count on that progress so the extent of the overachievement is probably overstated if you look simply at the simple figures but equally we know there's a lot of discussion at European level about reform of the EU ETS and even not withstanding any issues about Brexit you would expect the EU ETS itself to reform over time and part of that discussion is how you treat the the permits that have been temporarily taken out for for back loading because if these allowances get brought back in the next couple of years if we don't make progress on agriculture and transport we may know as we may end up failing annual targets again well i think that's in objective terms that's a possibility what we have to do is to make it very clear what the reality is and the difficulty is that the EU ETS arrangements have huge advantages the disadvantage is that you do not know in advance the proportion of of the weight which will be on the united kingdom as a whole and you have to make your budgets up without knowing that and that's difficult and it's very difficult for the public leave alone experts at it to understand how it works my sincere apologies we're going to have to suspend the meeting for five minutes there are some problems with the recording system there's no record of being taken over the first few minutes so please um we'll suspend now for five minutes grab a coffee something really outrageous we'll go back to that so i suspend the meeting for five minutes do you to say we can now resume the meeting with apologies um there was a low level recording of the initial stages of the meeting which should be sufficient for the purposes of the official report so we'll just pick up where we were so can i invite alexander burnett to ask some questions good morning um it was good to see that scotland played its part in the UK's reduction of eight with around eight percent in line with both gva and population but as you mentioned you know there are a number of anomalies negative in the farming and a positive in woodlands which obviously that average of eight percent height excuse that uh what do you see going forward in terms of scotland's ability to play it's it's it's share according to gva in population and uh do you see any other sectors which are gaining going to skew you be masked by the average clearly it will depend very much on scotland's ability to get in agriculture significant reductions that's absolute and transport is going to be the other area where that's going to be really necessary and i think in both cases the big issue is to clear out of the way the excuses before we start to know if you if you take transport for example there's always the excuse that this is a big area and a small population therefore it must be that we have a lot more long distance now it is true that particularly for the carriage of goods there is a special problem but it's only a very small proportion of the total problem and the big issue is how you reduce the impact of of transport in the central belt where the problems are very similar to any other urban area of the united kingdom or beyond and i just think one of the important things that committees like your own and others must do is to say well we're not going to be led astray by the easy answer which tends to come out in that sort of half a half a minute you've got on television this is why we can't do it well it isn't true on agriculture the the really big thing is getting the basic measurements as to where we are agreed and accurate for example bringing the peat areas into the calculations seeing where we actually are with forestry and what that really means and making sure that the industry as a whole accepts that basic because unless we have a more effective baseline then measurements in the future will be significantly difficult and we'll go on having as your chairman and i've talked about before that what i what i call anecdotal compliance which is nonsense because you tell the anecdote that suits and not all the other anecdotes which don't suit so it's that bit that i think is going to be the biggest problem for scotland and that has to be done at once that that bit has to be got right as quickly as possible and we mustn't have the excuse that because the big issue is maybe livestock that the smaller things that you can do by different methods of plowing or no plow and all those sort of things because that doesn't add up to a huge amount there is a tendency to feel it's not worth doing it is worth doing not only because what it does add up to is worth it but also because it gets the whole farming community into a spirit of saying we have to play our part and if you don't get them to play their part in the areas which are relatively easy then jumping immediately to the difficult part seemed to me to be almost impossible thank you and just to add to that we know that the objective in general is to delink economic growth from emissions growth so delink gva from emissions growth and an important part of that is what we do in terms of investment in infrastructure investment in a range of things which contribute to economic growth but can help to reduce emissions and one of the sectors we haven't mentioned yet clearly buildings and households putting in place energy efficiency measures putting in place low carbon heating measures part of infrastructure renewal programme that is one component of allowing gva growth to continue whilst continuing to reduce emissions right thank you that's a very useful scene set I will now start to drill down to certain sections we'll start with the energy and this mcdonald thank you convener good morning or debon good morning mr bell it's clear that we're making good progress on renewable electricity generation and with a reduction in a overall generation in scotland coupled with an increase in generation from renewables it's certainly progress indeed however your report highlights a significant increase in the rate of renewable energy installation will be required to meet the target to generate 100 percent of scotland's electricity from renewables by 2020 now there's clearly some progress with regard to tidal and wave which is moving at a pace in fact we saw some progress on that yesterday with the tidal turbines being placed on the the pentland first thanks to a £23 million investment from the scotland's government but there's still you know bits where we're not exactly moving forward as fast as we would like for example in district heating we're clearly not meeting our targets with regard to district heating although I'm pleased to say that there is an exciting initiative in my constituency for a large district heating project in Grangemouth which is a major industrial complex providing cheaper heat to the massive petrochemical plant and further afield including council buildings etc etc but still at an early stage but hopefully we'll see it progress pretty soon and it's an initiative I have to say that was first mooted in the 1950s so and then got mentioned every decade since so it's a case of better late than never and we're definitely getting there but I'd be interested to hear what your view is on on the progress made in cutting emissions from the energy sector as a whole and and where we can improve well I think it's a very useful example because one of the problems we have in Scotland and elsewhere in Europe as a whole is the difficulty of getting people to think differently and and district heating is a very good example of that there's a sort of instinctive dislike of the you have to get over those things another example which is true in Britain but not true in in Germany or in Scandinavia is our refusal to accept ground source pumps or air source pumps we just find it hugely difficult to get these to be in stock and if I were your committee I think I'd be pressing Scottish Government to look much more closely at the behavioural sides of these things we we've just put on to our committee a behavioural scientist it's the thing that I wanted to do when I became chairman because I do think we've got to find ways of saying there are certain things and ground source heat pumps is a very good example of it district heating is another very good example there are certain things where the technology is there where you can make a real change which really works and the problem is that people just say I don't like it I don't think it works I'm not happy with it doesn't it mean I've got to have my heating on when they tell me and not when I want it all those things come into that and I think if I were putting a priority it is really working hard on how you help people to realise the opportunities which really are there this is a government and this is a cross party agreement which ought to make those things available it's the general populace that we've got to engage okay thank you certainly behavioural changes is the key and we just have to look across the North Sea to Norway where there's a high uptake of of air source and ground source heat pumps it's it's taken his red over there that that's what you put in there's no no questions asked so clearly behavioural changes I must there's no doubt about it Finlay Carson wants to go in of that behavioural changes what emphasis or what recognition is given to the importance of future energy storage particularly with renewables where we see the pattern of energy production is very variable when it doesn't always fit in or with people's behaviour what emphasis have you put on future energy storage as a method of of reducing energy consumption well we're very keen on energy storage of the two different sorts at least generally different sorts which is carbon capture and storage which we think is an essential part of enabling us to use gas for longer periods and air liquid storage which obviously increasingly would contribute to making intermittent production part of the base load because if you could do that it becomes unimportant that it's intermittently produced I always a little leary about it because what I don't want to have there's always people in politics he says after being politics himself a very long time there's always people in politics who will grasp any excuse what I don't want is a situation which people say as some people do say oh well lord even it's very easy you know I mean we only have to wait for this to come and it'll come and it'll all be all right and I don't want to get into that area because we don't know I mean we haven't got even a full scale exemplar apart from what's happening in Canada of the CCS and as far as electricity storage the reason we all think that it will be delivered is because so much money is going into it from so many successful businesses who've been very good at the electronics and such like so we think that it must be okay but we haven't got it so it must not be an excuse for not doing other things but it is central and if we can get that it would change the whole face of it and it may be that given the uncertainty of renewed nuclear contribution which is part of the present panoply of things this will have to be the mixture which delivers and more generally we tend to emphasise the importance of flexibility in the power system in the electricity system and that includes storage but it also includes the demand side that we were talking about and demand side response and includes a range of technologies that allow the electricity system to more flexibly respond to respond to demand patterns and changes in demand patterns and that's a range of technologies of which different storage technologies would be one component and some of those are less easy to sell to the public I mean when you talk to them about smart grid you then have to go into some explanation talk about energy storage they understand that and we've got to I mean the truth is we are moving from a grid system which will look us out of date as the rutted roads of the age before metal roads when we get smart grid when it will be wholly different but there is that journey to to travel and there are many newspapers in particular who really if they can find a reason why smart metering and smart grids can be tagged we'll do so cross call it's clear that we have made excellent progress in Scotland in you know developing renewable energy generation but there's still a lot more to go and I think your report points out that we're effectively needing to more than double our installation rate within the next couple of years to meet the 2020 target I'm interested to know where you think that generation is going to come from is it going to have to come from offshore renewables in which case you know there are some controversies at the moment or surrounding offshore wind do you think we need to reinvest in onshore perhaps repowering sites and what kind of subsidy regime would be required to support that on the figures are you right what we say is that compared to what's been installed over the last few years rate of installation to the next few years to 2020 would have to increase quite substantially in order to meet your 100% target having said that what we also observe is that the the projects that are in the pipeline and that are at various stages of development would be sufficient to meet that target so it's not that there is that there is no idea about the sets of projects that would be sufficient to meet the target the things that are in the pipeline were they to be brought forward and were they to be installed and operational by 2020 would be sufficient to meet that that 2020 target and that's a combination as you know it's a combination of a range of different technologies of onshore and offshore I was just going to say that does assume though that there's a subsidy regime which means that that pipeline of projects are actually economically viable and I think perhaps that's the difficulty of the industry spacing at the moment well I think it's very important to recognise that the choice between the possibilities and the nature of the regime to achieve that end is bound to be a political decision it's not a decision for the climate change committee what we have to do is to say here is a range of things which you from which you can choose and put together and this is the figure you've got to meet and can we point out that this is an advantage or that is an advantage but in the end it is for politicians in the mixed economy that we have between Scotland and the United Kingdom and the European Union it's for politicians to to decide what is the politically acceptable mix of those things and my only determination is that it should be a mix the danger I think is if politicians decide that there's only one way forward and there's not going to be anything else because once you get into picking winners we have such a terrible history in every country and every sort of politicians right from I'm so old that I can remember the groundnut scheme I mean right from very early days when we thought we knew how to do that it we don't so you need to have a range of things and of course it's it's more expensive than if you pick the right one but it's a darn sight cheaper than when you pick the wrong one so you have to do that and so I I do think that we do have a duty to remind the government that going down one route and having one answer is a very dangerous one indeed. Morris Golden hello thanks for coming today I was just interested in how we manage electricity demand in particular you've mentioned earlier and I'd be interested to hear your views on a micro level so smart meterings household level but also at a at a national level the impact of managing that demand via industrial units so obviously in Scotland we have we have an issue in terms of transmission capacity so would for example the introduction of an electric arc furnace which are used in other places across northern Europe as a means of managing that that demand rather than use of constraint payments and also the the kind of more general issue of tenuous payments both obviously electricity generators in Scotland are paying those and English consumers are paying on the other side of things so looking at that demand management overall at a micro level and at the national level well the first thing is we've got to get a lot better at doing it and we've got to learn a lot from other people I'm very conscious in this particular area the amount of reinventing the wheel that goes on I'm amazed if you look at some places where you never think of it but the demand management that the southern Texas electricity company does by arranging a special deal with all its those who've got the technology of its customers so that it shaves a very small amount automatically off their use in times of peaking and the cost reduction so great that they have a check in the post every month for doing that they enter into a voluntary operation and I take that as an extreme example but because it comes from Texas where you would have expected it not to have come from at all and it seems to me that we have to recognise once again that first of all there's a lot to learn from other people secondly you can do a huge amount by using modern technology in the home not just the sort that we've been talking about in terms of smart metering but being able to turn on the electricity from your from your smartphone so that you don't have to use old-fashioned things when it comes on at your usual time when you decide that you're not going to go home as early as you normally do I mean those sort of things really can make a huge difference if you use it and of course you know that you are saving money for you which is a very important part of the encouragement that you have so I suppose my main comment is that some of these things are very complex and the government has to be involved in how the big utilities really do step up to the mark I mean one of the things that is I am very critical about is that if you look at the energy saving in the mechanism of delivering electricity and just the mechanism so to speak it's pretty difficult to see that there have been huge steps forward and I think there's a big pressure on the utilities to become much more fleet of foot and much quicker at introducing new technology and much better at explaining to the public why it's in their interest to use this and I do think this attempt to suggest that if you've got a smart metering it's a kind of spy in the cab you know the sort of thing that they they use to to attack the tachograph when actually it's a means of you saving money for yourself so I think they've got to be much better at selling this and in the end commercial operations make their money by selling their products why they can't understand that they auto be selling this as well is a problem for me the national level in terms of you know encouraging you know industry to take on that electricity demand as a way of avoiding uh heavy constraint payments I think that's a very important part and one of the things that we have been concentrating on is the degree to which we haven't seen the savings in in the industrial field that you might have expected given the pressures on it and I think we've got to look at that much more more closely there's been increasing success because the national grid has had increasing success in its auctions and its contracts with industry to try to enter into voluntary arrangements and it becomes important that those are seen as genuine voluntary arrangements again sometimes you get the the the overblown reaction to industry turning down its production at times of peak electricity demand or energy demand as a something that's a negative outcome and then reducing UK manufacturing but actually what it is is shaping your manufacturing to when it's cheapest to do to do the production and being able to make those adjustments becomes very important and and more generally on the details of some of the things you were mentioning a transmission charging and the arrangements that are in place for pricing flows of electricity which clearly sit with sit with off-gem I think at this at this level the important thing is that the climate change targets the need to meet 2020 2030 2050 targets need to be an explicit part of those conversations and of that of that discussion and and then you know it's for it's for off-gem rightly to then decide precisely what mechanisms are in place and what the pricing arrangements are to meet the objectives that collectively we have set of which the climate change ones are an important part. Thank you, Claudia Beamish, finally on this section. Thank you, convener. Good morning to you both and welcome. Could I ask you if the committee sees a place for inclusive models such as cooperative models and community models in relation to energy at all levels in Scotland and also whether the committee has any view on whether there is a place for to use a generic term fracking in relation to climate change as a transition fuel. Thank you. Well as to community-based generation I'm personally a great believer in this. I think part of the success of the Germans can be put down to the fact that half their renewable energies in the hands of cooperatives or local communities in one form or another and therefore there's a much wider commitment to the success of renewables than there is in other countries and certainly in the United Kingdom so very much in favour of that and finding ways of doing it and I think it's interesting that they I don't think we can just blame governments either in Scotland or in the United Kingdom for this not being very advanced because there's no doubt that the cooperative movement in Germany did take a very active proactive part in doing this in a way which has not been true in Britain for all sorts of different reasons but that so so so we have to energise it. As far as fracking is concerned we've taken a very clear view which is that it's only if the very tough requirements which we've laid down are met that fracking can be a part of a society which is committed to meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets. Our job is to set the budgets set the parameters and to be very clearer as to what you can and cannot do within those things but once one has been clear about that the choice of where you do it and which bits you do is really up for the government. It's the government to decide whether it wants to have fracking or not on whatever basis it does UK or Scotland but we have said if you have it you have to meet certain very clear three very major requirements and if you don't meet those three requirements then fracking is inimical to meeting our fourth and fifth carbon budget which the nation has accepted so it's a very real and clear statement. We don't have a philosophic opposition to fracking but we do have a very clear statement about what you have to do to make sure that it would be within the budgets which we've laid down. Thank you very much. We'll move on to transport now and David Stewart has some questions. Your reports and your earlier contributions I think have highlighted that transports in the area where frankly we need to try a lot harder as you know it's 28% of emissions in Scotland. How important is it to you to emphasise modal shift from car use to other forms of transport? It's clearly a crucial part and we come back to that behavioural concern because it is one of the surprises of life that people will sit daily in a motor car in a absolute jam for an hour when they could get to the same place even on a convenient tram in a quarter of the time but that's how some people operate. Now one of the things we have to do is to understand more clearly how you move people but there has been remarkable improvements and changes. I just think of where I live in the centre of London where one is much more likely to be knocked down by a bicycle today than almost any other form of transport. I mean it really has changed. I mean there are very serious examples of how modal shift has changed and in many cities the introduction of trams for example which people find more attractive than buses. They clearly do and they use them and there are many examples of that. I think we're more likely to get modal shift in that sort of area than some of the suggestions that people have of rather high-faluting ways of getting more people to walk longer and further. I think you just have to move people very, you have to move them on to the first of all the possibility of not using their motor car and then a slight shame in using your motor car for very short journeys is the thing that we I think we're going to have to start thinking of because the real problem is the number of small journeys in motor cars in our big cities and that is common to England, Scotland and Wales in the north island. So you were mentioning earlier that this is on one level not really about technology itself it's really down to psychology it's about change of attitudes and you know the management of change and I lived in London when congestion charging came in and hitting people in the pocket certainly paid off at one level and certainly the huge investment into buses and the two made a huge difference in London. You cannot expect people to make behavioural change if changing is inconvenient and really inconvenient if you don't know when the bus is coming. I mean I do think just knowing when the bus is coming is that one of the biggest advantages and producers of behavioural change. If you know it's coming in two minutes you'll stand and wait for it. If you're just hoping it's a very different choice. Real-time information is absolutely important. I mean on the same theme convener I mean how important is promoting ultra-low emission vehicles because clearly that's good practice in terms of having very low emissions in Scotland and across the UK? Well I think both are important aren't they? I mean if you merely made a straight choice between the present mode of propulsion and electric vehicles you wouldn't have done much for the general problem of congestion at the light. What you really are trying to do is two things. One is to make sure that the vehicles that you do use are in fact as low in carbon as possible and emissions as possible and also at the same time to create alternatives so that people do in fact use the roads more sensibly in terms of the capacity and that's all about using our resources properly. I mean what climate change says to us is it's not only the immediate thing about electric vehicles rather than internal combustion engines but it's the longer term thing is how do you run our society in the way we want it to be run and the way it's run now with less demand on resources and that one of the demands that you want a lesson is the building of roads and the need for that sort of infrastructure. I think another way I think to raise convener is that on freight and clearly it's important that we make the ability to transfer freight from road to rail and indeed to see easy for business and I've spoken to many businesses in my patch in the hounds and islands when they say it's actually quite difficult to get freight on to rail. Give you one example of best practice and previous committee I went to Rotterdam and as you may know they paid for a direct freight only rail line from Rotterdam harbour direct to Germany at billions of euros which incidentally they've got a european funding for which it takes them back to another point. Is it important then that we do encourage the movement of freight off the road but also ensure that there's infrastructure there to ensure that businesses are able to do that in an easy way? I agree and sometimes it isn't about big infrastructure it's about information and getting people to think about it. I mean I remember in my former constituency I had Britain's largest container port Felix Town and until there was a change in the control of the railways the only people who went on a new if a new shipping line came in the only people who went to try to get their business were the lorry companies. There was no sort of attempt by the rail companies to do now with the competitive situation the first people in their offices are very off of the rail and that's meant of course that we're actually under real pressure to provide enough rail connections and so sometimes it's not it's not the huge things it's the the smaller things of making people think there is an alternative there is a different way of doing it you don't need to do it like you've always done it. I'm just on free I'm not conscious of time computer. You mentioned in your report some very good best practice which you recommended which was around urban consolidation centres and again at my previous committee I visited one in Rotterdam which for those who haven't followed them are systems where HDVs put freight to a common centre out with the city and use smaller lower emission vehicles to take it into the city centre obviously excellent for reducing emissions would you see that as a best practice for not just Scotland but the rest of the UK? Well I'd certainly say it's best practice and I think it's got to be spread though beyond the HDV area it seems to me that this is one of the things that we ought to do much more in construction it's much easier if the gathering together of that which is needed for a construction site is done outside a city such your delivery is a in a smaller vehicle and b you have consolidated it already so the number of the number of trips is is is much less and also we really do have to get to a construction industry which is on the just in time basis because that's the only way that you first of all restrict the amount of traffic that you have to do and also you save significantly because you don't have stuff left on sites for long periods of time where they get broken and stolen and and therefore there's every advantage one of those areas where it really makes a difference and one of our problems both in Scotland and in the rest of the United Kingdom is the construction industry is not always the most modern and rapid and new industry it does tend to stick to what it knows works rather than trying to find new ways of proceeding. I'm getting a look from the convener. Is aviation is obviously a big cause of ambitions? What's your assessment of the Scottish Government's policy of having a 50% decrease in the APD? Well I'm always very careful not to take specifics and say I think that's a good or a bad thing because that is the role of the government to make those choices but if you make a choice of that kind you need to look and see what you have to do in other areas to balance that up and it may well be that you say for social reasons that you want to do something which is more difficult as far as emissions are concerned but the thing I'm always bushing for is very simple is that if you do that you have to say at the same time where you're going to make up for that what what the total effect is on your budgets for for carbon and what you're going to do to cover that off and and it's only by us all thinking like that because there are no absolutes in this except the absolute of of reducing our emissions and the way you do it is really a political decision but part of that political decision is never avoiding the fact that any decision costs something so what does it cost and what do you intend to do to offset that cost? One of the advantages that the Scottish Act has over the UK Act in that sense is that all aviation emissions are captured in the in the carbon targets and in the carbon budgets and so there's there's no question that there's a legal duty on the government if the result is to increase aviation emissions to offset them somewhere else to stay within the budgets. I mean do you see an alternative to air passenger duty which reflects the true environmental cost of frequent flights while it's still tight whilst at the same time meeting the Scottish Government's objectives? Well you could do if you decided to do all sorts of alternative systems which might some would say would be socially more equitable you can do a range of things of that sort but again I think that is a really fundamental political decision which a government has got to make and the the fact that it is under your system unlike the rest of the United Kingdom necessary if you do something which is damaging as far as air transport emissions to compensate for that elsewhere is only the second point to it. The first bit is when you do it you must be concerned to discuss what it might mean and because it's got to be part of the whole ethos of the way you make decisions so that decisions aren't made and then have to be caught up afterwards about emissions decisions are all made with the emissions effect as part of that decision that's what I think we have to move towards and you won't meet your tough targets unless almost when you'll bind the pencils you're thinking about what is the emission effect of making this decision. Lord Devon in the report when you talk about the benefits of cutting the speed limit from 70 miles per hour the upper speed limit to 60 miles per hour and indicate that would cut emissions by 28 per cent can we possibly get to the point where transport makes an appropriate contribution without doing that again I I think our job is to remind people of the cost of doing certain things and of not doing certain things and I don't think it's for us to say you ought to cut the speed limit to 60 miles an hour but what we have to do is to remind people of the realities of having it at 70 miles an hour and and the fact is you can yes transport can meet the requirements by doing other things but just remember in each case you're asking people to make choices what you can't do is to do and if I may make a very unsuitable remark but you know how it is in a family your wife says to you or you says to your say to your wife do you think we can afford such and such a thing and you say or she says well we could afford to do that but we can't afford to do the other thing but of course you don't want to do that you want to do both that's what the truth is you you want your partner to to agree to the possibility of doing both things and I think this is exactly the situation here we have to say if you don't do this then if you want to meet the requirements you've got to do other things and you've got to decide which are the politically acceptable things what you can't say is that we'll do neither and that's the issue and that's why it's worth highlighting something which we know is politically very controversial to say that would make a huge difference so if you don't do that where does that eight percent come from elsewhere okay thank you so let's move on to another area that we need to do to see a better return from which is land use agriculture forestry peatlands etc kateforbs and good morning i have a few questions on how we make more progress in agriculture and one of the areas that you identified was the possibility of greater international collaboration what are the opportunities that you identified that could give us more progress in agriculture with that international collaboration well the irish the new zealanders the fins all countries with not dissimilar problems where agriculture has an important part in their planning for climate change all countries that want to do the best are doing a lot of work in this area and a lot to learn from them and to cooperate with them seems to me that the new zealanders in particular have been very concerned to see what they can do and it may well be that scotland would find that sort of cooperation with similar sized countries with the same problem of having a relatively small population in a very large area and a very important role for agriculture that that would be a very worthwhile thing Matthew has been concerned with the new zealanders and no doubt would like to add to that well and there are different i guess there are different types of cooperation and at some level for agriculture and land use it's understanding what works and doing the analysis and doing the trialling out different things doing the research to try to understand what works and that's clearly easier done more easily done if several different countries are doing different things and they can pool their learning their learning from that and then there are there are other areas where it's about where how do you balance the contribution that agriculture is going to make with wider land use change whether that's forestry or whether that's more broadly how you how you treat the land how you think about soil fertility and carbon stored in peatlands and in soils and again different countries will have different approaches and learning about what works or explicitly trying to coordinate research efforts and finally we know that in agriculture we don't have all the answers yet and so there's research and development and there's innovation around animal feed around a range of things that still has to take place in order for us to have a set of options that then we can try out and again whether the Scottish Government by itself has enough funding to do the r&d that's necessary or whether it would be better to pool some of that r&d funding and to undertake that at a more multilateral basis is something that could be considered thank you another question on changing cultural practices within agriculture particularly when there are voluntary initiatives and i'd be here to know how successful you think those have been for example the farming for a better climate initiative which is voluntary and in the first phase demonstrated savings and emissions from the focus farms of 10 to 12 percent despite challenging weather conditions is that replicated when it's voluntary and how do we encourage greater uptake of voluntary initiatives well one of the things we've been clearest about not just in this report but in previous report is the importance of proper evaluation of these schemes and so we struggle to know how effective farming for a better future is and indeed the pickup you know to what extent has it been picked up outside of the farms that were immediately involved in it so i think better evidence better evaluation better tracking and monitoring of programs when they are voluntary is important to then inform whether you can continue with a voluntary approach or whether you have to think about other mechanisms and other incentives and other opportunities to to roll these out and one of the things that we've been we've been clearest about is the importance of that ongoing monitoring and then reacting to what what is found out and we we find a lack of evidence there not just in scotland has to be said but more generally as well and and that's an important that would be an important first step and that brings one back to the point about baselines about knowing what you're calculating against if you're only calculating against the figures from that particular farm which you very often are you don't have any concept about whether the baseline is a relevant baseline or not farms that choose to do these things very often farms that have always been good at so is there are you actually making a bigger uh you can't tell that so it's me i i have to say that um i'm actually stopped part of a report not for scotland but of another report we did because i didn't think that the quality of the baselines in agriculture was sufficiently good for them to be compared with the other parts of the report that it was better to not to say we can't answer this question because we really don't have the the proper statistical base and so i come back to it i think that getting that statistical base is absolutely essential and then of course you can trace whether the success on individual voluntary arrangements is reduplicated in other farms is it moving is it actually happened to the to the farmers unions actually helped to do this is it really happening i don't think you can tell that now i don't think we know we don't think that we always is we come back to the anecdotes it becomes anecdotal so it is a very dull and boring thing but it has to be done we have to get those figures right if we're actually going to be able to prove to ourselves what does work and and also it may be that we'll discover that the voluntary system doesn't work but you need to know that you can't turn to farms and say we're going to make this compulsory because you haven't done it right if you can't prove they haven't done it right point on that very issue about mandatory set against voluntary thank you as politicians we're all keenly aware of the the the reasons for making something voluntary and the reasons for making it mandatory which you Lord Devlin have sort of touched on in our last committee the rural affairs committee we looked at the possibility of mandatory on farm carbon audits and i wonder whether your committee has looked at these and if you see a place for those taking bearing in mind what you've already said about one must have evidence in order to sort of expect people to do something well we've we haven't done all the work that i hope that we will do on on this issue like anybody else you start with the priorities and we're moving into agriculture now in a way which we haven't had to do before because we've had to get that first part right and in that sense the the change of the structure in in london from from the just the closeness between energy and climate change to a wider view is i think advantageous as long as it continues in the same direction every indication that it will but it's advantageous to say that climate change isn't just about energy it's about a whole range of things and it's going to be very strongly about agriculture so we will have to do some more work on that but again you've made the point unless we get the basic measurements right there is no point in having an audit because you can only have an audit if your figures are right thank you microscombe building on your point there lord devon obviously experience and government be will be useful to to share with us here i mean how do we achieve that policy coherency because we have two sort of separate areas within scotland we've got you know two committees one rural affairs dealing with agriculture one environment we've got two separate ministers we've got different groups lobbying on either side if i dare say that there's a side to this debate so do you see a way for us to deliver greater policy coherency here because you know i see that as a real a real challenge in scotland about how we can make significant progress in this area well i think that the convener's introduction of this little bit about land use is the key to this i'm just completing an article i'm doing for a periodical which i'm arguing the case for being much more serious about land use i just think that we have got to recognise that in these islands land use is crucial and if we want to have the sort of responses we've actually got to be thinking about how you deal with rural land how you deal with urban land how you deal with forest all those things together and it isn't for me to say how your committees should work but i do think one of the problems of the separation of committees is that that concept of thinking about land use bringing see it's planning into that why why is planning not involved in both the environment and and agriculture because that's all part of the same picture and if we're going to deal with uh not just with flooding but what happens with very heavy much more heavy rain coming down in much more concentrated bouts on west side of scotland if we're going to deal and think about what that means to the countryside and to the way in which we protect ourselves as well as make use of it then you can only do that if you're thinking about land use in the whole in the whole and i think we've been very slow to understand that so that's that's my key is to think about land use together thank you for that i want to move on to the issue of housing uh alexander bonnet thank you uh just before i ask my question i'd refer to my register of interest and interest in house building and and the rented sector um we obviously want to uh you know see improvements in in housing and the housing standards and energy efficiency and and the ebc uh question of how you monitor and monitor buildings um there's been considerable discrepancy in in the stand the quality of ebc's you can get varying results depending on which firms you use and there seems to be a lack of consistency in the standard um as these standards which i think are a good thing we kind of come more and more important and have more and more financial implications whether it's the level of feed in tariff or r h i you can qualify for or whether you're the ability to uh to letter property uh what what's your view on this and how do you see and how important and who do you think should be taking the lead in getting more consistent ebc standards well i first of all think it's very important indeed um i do think that it continues to be not good that we are still building houses which we're going to have to retrofit because we're just not building them to a standard which other countries would automatically build them and and i also happen to think and it's something i have some expertise in i think the arguments that this can't be done because it's so much more expensive are just nonsense the truth is that the only reason that it's more expensive is because we don't do enough of it and therefore you don't get the same long runs which you do uh at the using less efficient systems and we just have to realise that this is this is like offshore wind when you start it's very expensive indeed it's only when they actually start having having a proper order book and they can have bigger boats and they can do all sorts of things which they couldn't do before that you begin to see the the price fall very significantly and if government doesn't set high standards and insist on them and not change the date but actually insist upon this the industry won't make the changes that it needs to make and what's more the good companies will suffer because the people who think they can get away with it will get away with it and that you don't want to have i think it's very bad for moral and also morally unacceptable so i take it very seriously and i think and the argument i'm least like are the people who say oh well it's only a tiny bitch you know you have to understand Lord Dieben that most of the houses we've got are already built and that's what we've got to concentrate on well yeah that's true but it doesn't mean to say you make the sit the thing worse but not getting the ones you are building to the standard that you're going to have we hope change the others to so i think you're right absolutely central the times against us so i want to move on and look at waste more as golden hi um really just one focus question around your recommendation for encouraging recycle recycling and separate food waste collections in rural island and island communities obviously generally when you're introducing a new service you do some rerouting to financially mitigate the impact of a new service now in rural and island communities obviously the addition of that new service given the economies of scale are significantly less for local authorities there so i wondered what your thoughts were on how you would actually fulfill that recommendation of encouraging those systems in those particular areas it isn't easy and i wouldn't pretend it's easy and i'm not sure that you can't you can do it without accepting that it will be more expensive to do it in those areas than elsewhere i still have a feeling like the penny post i do actually think that you you must provide services in rural areas in so far as you can which are commensurate with else with elsewhere in many of those rural areas of course people are able to do a lot of their own composting and one of the things that i'm very keen on doing is perhaps spending the money that you do have to get those who are not doing it to understand how to do it and certainly to provide the preliminary equipment which will make that possible for many so there are a number of ways of doing it and i think i particularly think that that way down is the best it's certainly the one that we found in my very rural area well i know certainly but it's nothing like as difficult so you've got a way on it a short sharp question from Claudia Beamish around business industrial and the public sectors right thank you govino i think you've almost asked the question it's really to you both what opportunities exist in scotland in devolved areas for in relation to the public sector industry and business and as as you will know we move towards mandatory reporting in the public sector after a complex range of discussions in the in the previous session of the parliament so i wonder if you have comments on any of those sectors please well all i'd say is that i'm i'm very much in favour of reporting as long as somebody then reads the reports and makes sure that what they've reported has a result in changing attitudes and improvements i'm terribly concerned about the amount of reporting that goes on to no good purpose at all except reporting and i think you've got a wonderful opportunity here of actually making people feel that when they report my goodness somebody looks at it and says what about this and well done very important part of it well done when they've done it well saying thank you is to me one of the cheapest and most important things for us all to know might indeed be an appropriate note for our own committee to get those back who are doing mandatory reporting and listen to where things are going and hopefully say thank you thank you we move on to rpp3 and i want to explore how you feel rpp3 can build on rpp2 what the implications of the paris agreement are on the development of rpp3 and just about the whole issue that you touch upon in your report about having proper monitoring of progress in place that's a good place to start off because one of the things that we recommended most strongly is that the next the next rpp climate change plan sets out clear measurable sets of objectives against which progress can be met it made any measured in each of these sectors and so whether it's areas we've been talking about transport or in buildings or in agriculture or indeed continued progress on the on the electricity and power fronts is that it's not simply a collection of policies or a collection of good ideas but it is also a program against which you can evaluate progress and against which you can make adjustments because we know that they'll be learning that takes place as you go along and where you set off might not be where you end up but it's important to have the information we were just talking about monitoring of public buildings but more generally in these schemes and so um as we've indicated sort of in response to some of the other questions it's often not our position to say this is the precise policy that should go into rpp3 um but it is important that they're in each of these sectors that we've discussed there's a range of policies that you're trialling different things that things are being put in a meaningful way district heating schemes are being put in a meaningful way meaningful effort is being made on modal shift and on electric vehicles meaningful effort is being made in agriculture and that the monitoring is taking place such that we can make adjustments over time because these are medium term plans okay and it's crucial for the public because if people don't believe that these things are really happening or they think someone else isn't doing it and they're doing it or this country isn't doing it and that country is isn't doing it then you have a very very bad effect i had a comment last night somebody saying oh well we're doing it all and france and germany aren't doing this absolutely i'm true as a matter of fact but the point is you do need those figures um if people are to continue to work hard okay and the impact of the paris agreement well for me it's the most important agreement that we possibly could have because what it has told the world is that that is the direction we're moving in now it may be that we are going to find some difficulty in keeping up with it and we've got to pressurize all the time and and of course some people have promised what they won't deliver and other people will deliver more than they promised the chinese in my view will deliver more than they promise because that's their mechanism of thinking they will but but others will not do that they've just signed up because they've got to sign up that so but the fact is nobody now can doubt the direction in which we're we're we're moving and what we're intending to do and and paris is crucial to that and after all it is we shouldn't underestimate what it is it's no never before in the history of mankind have all the nations in effect of the world come together voluntarily and agree in something as extensive as this it is a staggering fact and i think it's changed the world okay you've referenced on a number of occasions this morning that it's not your role to tell government what to do but you do make recommendations and you've given the government two options around the annual emissions targets to 2032 could you briefly outline the merits and demerits of each of those options that's what i've got to trade executive for it it's it's it's worth saying that the the difference between the two options is not huge and so you you end up in in broadly similar places and particularly all the uncertainty that we've just been talking about around agriculture and other areas given that uncertainty you probably end up in very similar places but the two options that we've presented the first option recognises the fact that since the annual targets were set out to 2027 they're set a number of years ago now we have new evidence and we have new facts and were we in a world where nothing is changing that new evidence and those new facts would suggest that you change your annual targets out to 2027 as well as setting the new targets that have to be set from 2020 age 2032 we recognise that the reality is we're not in a world where everything's standing still and in particular one of the proposals that the government has is to bring forward the new climate change act and if that new climate change act is going to result in a whole set of of new targets then it might be superfluous to try to go through the legislative process now of changing all the targets between now and 2027 when you know that in a year's time you're going to have a new climate change act that will do that and so effectively that's the difference between our two proposals it's clear that you have to set new annual targets from 2028 to 2032 by the 31st of October whether you decide to amend the targets before 2028 I think is a judgment about will the new climate change act come in quickly enough and be meaningful and provide the direction that everybody needs in order to in order to make that additional legislative process superfluous okay gentlemen I know you have another meeting to attend and Edinburgh can I thank you on behalf of the committee for a fascinating morning's evidence look out we'll continue to engage you in the years going forward so thank you very much I'm going to suspend for five minutes before the next session takes place thank you thank you the fourth item in our agenda this morning is to take evidence from the Scottish Parliament on its work in combating climate change as a public sector body the Parliament is required to both follow the duties as set out in the 2009 climate change act and report on its work to reduce its carbon footprint we're joined this morning by Sir Paul Greist the Scottish Parliament's chief executive and Victoria Barby the parliament's environmental manager welcome to you both members have a series of questions for you can I begin just with a scene set up how would you characterise the Scottish Parliament's performance in these areas to date I think we're very pleased with what we've achieved since we we set out on this road a number of years ago with strong support from the corporate body and the parliament more widely so with a few exceptions for example just undershooting on things like waste I think we fit all the targets we've set I think the key point is we're right on track for hitting the 42 per cent reduction in our carbon footprint by 2020 so always a bit anxious and nervous about sounding sort of complacent but I think we're pleased with where we've got to so far and but keen I think to kick on from here could I ask them what would have been the biggest challenges you face today in trying to hit those targets and also have you any examples of innovative working that's helped get the progress you have to date yeah the I mean electricity consumption is is really dominates in terms of carbon footprint and that's been there's not been one single thing but that that's a big area for us so that's required both investment in technology such as led lighting but also behavior change just persuading us all to remember to switch things off and and that kind of thing so that that has been an area for challenge I think waste has been a particular challenge though you know the numbers are impressive I think you know we've I think we've achieved a 72 per cent reduction we're aiming at 90 and again I think the thing about waste is a lot of behavior what we're trying to do is reduce what we use in the first place and we're all you know that that's about the way a lot of us behave and that's always a challenge though again I have to say I've had tremendous support over the years from members and staff alike but nonetheless that that I think is a challenge for us going forward so I think they've been the two big areas and inevitably when you set out on a programme like this you do the the stuff with the highest returns first and for example I remember when we put led lighting in the car park I mean you know the payback on that was maybe a couple of years I mean and but as you go forward you have to look for more and more challenging opportunities and I think that's really what have been the two biggest challenges and I think we'll continue to the two biggest challenges as we go forward. On the subject of energy consumption and lighting it's long been a bugbear of mine that parliamentary committees sit during the daytime in rooms with lighting of this nature blinds drawn we're told I think largely accommodate television coverage is that something parliaments started to look at because to be blunt television technology will have moved on is there not opportunity to use cameras that are better in terms of of coping with lighting sources because surely you would appreciate this doesn't look good I've got a light in my eye as we speak well I mean we have put led lighting in so that and that obviously has reduced it I it's a tension that we've had throughout the you're right at one level both the committee rooms and the chamber are essentially like broadcast studios and by far the largest number of people who view your work as parliamentarians which is vitally important will view through webcasting and on the tv and we need you know we need to get the best quality for that and there is a tension more so in some other rooms even than this with a lot of you know yourself in the in the chamber is a challenge and I just try and strike a balance between between the two and as we put new cameras in you're right they're able to work with lower light levels but the reality is if you're a pure broadcaster you prefer they just like blacked out rooms whereas obviously we try and sort of strike a balance I think as we go forward and it eventually will know to have to replace the lighting more than just putting led in and again we'll look at all of that at the time so I can't offer you I'm afraid an immediate solution but it is something we try and balance and certainly I think putting led lighting in at least as reduce the energy consumption of the lights we do use okay okay thank you for that moving on to reporting procedures Claudia Beamish thank you convener and good morning to you Victoria and good morning again to you you have a carbon management plan which as as you know of course covers buildings travel decision making and indirect greenhouse gas emissions could you comment on when it was last reviewed and any other comments that you have about that carbon plan that's in place yes been in place I think for about five years five years now we review it annually so and we the other thing we do is we take external advice for example the carbon trust were enormously helpful in when we set when we set it up but there are organizations like zero waste Scotland and others so what we and sparing victoria's blushes you know we've both victoria and her predecessor David Fairhurst you know we've always felt it was right to have a technical expert on the staff to to guide us so we keep reviewing it annually it's the as you I think neatly described it's the carbon plan which actually brings it all together for us and I think that will just be continue whether there's a need for a complete revision of it going forward I don't know I think at the moment so long as we're still on track to achieve the targets I think we'll just continue with the annual update clearly once we get closer to 2020 to my mind I think there's probably a case for standing right back and maybe starting starting again just to make sure that we've not we're not missing new issues that we might want to address yes of course can I just add we've also applied for the carbon trust triple standard so and that will give us a good verified data that we are meeting our plan and checks that we've we've talking about the right data and that they've verified it all correctly so right thank you and just just building on that question how has the Parliament found the experience of fulfilling the reporting requirements of the climate change duties for public bodies reporting requirements and just touching back on the previous question have you been able to share what is obviously quite a lot of good practice with other organisations in the public sector and on your first point as the committee may know we volunteered to go a year early on that with the Government we found it a very very satisfactory actually rather good progress so I think we we find it's a good discipline on us so I certainly I can speak from this organisation we're very happy with that and now of course we're into the formal process and it's good that we've had that that year I think in terms of yes we do I mean Victoria networks a lot with other organisations I've certainly spoken publicly on it when I've been invited about what we've done both what we've achieved but it's also I think also important to share challenges and that's I think been very well received I think is a high profile public body people are always interested in in what we do and I was interested I was listening into some of your previous evidence and I would absolutely underline the points I think the convener and others have made you've got to have the data you know you persuade people by having good information you persuade people I think by being candid about not just your achievements but where the challenges lie and I think that's the approach we've we've tried to do and we're always very happy to to share experience with other not just public sector but public and private sector third sector organisations thank you just to follow that up briefly could ask whether the reporting mechanisms whether you found them I know it's early days in terms of the mandatory reporting but have they been comparable with other organisations I'm going to let Victoria answer that yeah I think it's really helpful that it's now an online system so we can enter the data in directly that's been really helpful and the data is pulled through from the previous year's submission so again that saves my time adding in all the different data it's really good we can use the the carbon trust standards as part of the verification of that data as well so we're not duplicating by having other additional verification from other organisations so that's really helpful I do find that because the the tool the template is designed to cover all different public sector organisations sometimes our data doesn't quite fit and we can't quite answer as many of the questions as we'd like to if we were a bigger public sector organisation but it is designed to cover everybody so we can kind of accept that thank you and lastly have you done any or are you considering any peer review assessment in relation to the mandatory targets no not this year it might be something that we do in following years and but we because we've used the the carbon trust standard that's probably greater than it would be if it was a peer review thank you you touch there upon sharing best practice with other organisations has there been any work done on collaborative working physical collaborative working with neighbours perhaps around district heating that sort of thing really interesting idea I think that that is something that's on you know a future a future plan I think our approach there would be to work with the city of Edinburgh council and their have or are just about to set up I think one of these you know companies within the council to promote that we would certainly be interested in that it's obviously a long term plan but district heating is obviously something that's been on our radar for quite some time it wouldn't be something we would we're not a big enough institution to lead on but if there's a interest in a scheme being developed by the council we would certainly be want to be part of the discussions on that then it would just come down to you know what the business case was but in principle that's something I'm very interested in and other areas of collaboration again I think you'd say principally with the city of Edinburgh council around transport and other issues we were very closely with them in terms of getting people to and from the building so yeah I think collaboration with our neighbours is is key okay well come on to transport and mark droskell yeah you're happy yeah okay you're happy with that okay let's move on to procurement morris golden hi both firstly I should declare an interest in that I've worked with the Scottish Parliament previously in my role at zero waste Scotland to with respect to the parliament becoming a flagship zero waste zone and most recently supporting the sustainable procurement work so I think it would be helpful first of all to give an overview of your sustainable procurement vision for the parliament but specifically I'd like to ask you about how the procurement strategy can open up to include disruptive or circular economy businesses which tend to be small which tend to be micro businesses which tend to get left out of procurement because they are inevitably be deemed a higher risk to those doing the procurement so for example you know this this micro businesses out there that offer a lighting service which we've mentioned in terms of LEDs which would ensure that the product of the LEDs wasn't owned by the Scottish Parliament anymore but by a micro business so in terms of integrating those sort of procurements into your sustainable procurement strategy would be something that I'd like to hear more about maybe invite victoria in so the first point is we we see procurement obviously as a central part of our approach so it's integrated into it the underpinning approach is our responsible procurement strategy which dates back to about 2009 more recently we have a sort of sustainable procurement matrix which we work on which really guides us through any and starts on any procurement by asking do you need to buy it I mean it's a bit like the reduce reuse recycles the first thing to ask yourself is do you need it at all so that's embedded right from the beginning of the procurement process but assuming you get through to the the the actual point of procurement there's all sorts of guidance along the way alongside that one of things that we've found very helpful I think to address your point about smaller organisations is we've run these really successful meet the buyer events we find one of the big challenges of smaller businesses is just being aware of procurement opportunities they don't necessarily have whole departments that bigger companies would have looking out for those so I think we've also so that's they've been very and will continue with those and again if members here have got particular businesses or others who are not finding they're engaging with that it's really good feedback to have with us because we you know what we do there is we bring them in and informally because the as you know the procurement process gets rather formal rather quickly and that's not something we can really change so what we try to do is have these informal front end so they can come in informally discuss with either for say facilities management colleagues or procurement colleagues and often give them guidance on how best to pitch for the business we do and we can listen to them it may and there's a critical issue which is not easy to resolve is how you package them up I mean that there's a drive obviously always to get better value for money and accountable officer I have to do that and sometimes you do just get economies on the other hand we absolutely committed to try to give us many especially small and medium enterprises an opportunity and that there's just a balance to strike in there so there's decisions for us to make structurally a lot we can do to encourage businesses to get involved in that process and I think we're finding the the procurement matrix which is I think a sort of government tool a really helpful discipline on us to help us sort of step through and it also tackles things like living wage and others that are off the back of the procurement act 2014 so that's our our basic approach but Victoria might want to add a bit more to that just just to add we are looking at adopting more a secular economy approach on certain contracts so the audio-visual contract is a hiring in system rather than purchasing it and something that we're going to look at for our furniture contract as well whether we can hire furniture rather than purchase it and then just discard it I was also going to add that for the first time in our annual report we've started to measure some of the environment impacts that our supply chain aren't bringing into the parliament and trying to measure how we're how they're helping us to reduce our environment impact and hopefully we can do a bit more of that and perhaps even start considering scope 3 emissions from procurement and and start measuring that as well. Right moving on to adaptation and resilience Alexander Burnett really a couple of questions about the planning process when you're making decisions firstly with climate change what sort of evidence are you seeing for changing patterns over the last sort of five years or so with the strategy and how you can take into account future patterns whether it's more recent demands maybe on air conditioning or winter demands and people getting into travel and a second more general question on on sort of cost benefit analysis what how do you have your budget allocations you have for this and how where do you have a limited value for money is it about achieving these targets at all costs or maybe offsetting elsewhere I'm going to take the last one first and invite Victoria in we always do cost benefit analysis on any investment and yes there is a fixed amount of money so it can never be at any cost and I referred earlier I mean the phrase people often find about was a so-called low hanging fruit but more particularly obviously you want to do the things which deliver the greatest benefits but inevitably and because we began this early and we've been I think I hope very energetic and vigorous in our approach we've got through a lot of a lot of that so you start to get into for example if you're looking at self generation of electricity you'll know this committee will know better than I do you know the returns on for example you know photoelectric cells tends to be longer than say putting LED lighting in the garage and I think what the way I look at it is that I think you need a mix and I think oh so you know the hour so our investment programme in environmental measures will have a mix to be some things which will have a very rapid return but I'm very keen subject to persuading the corporate body that you know some things we just have to accept will have a longer payback and that's partly because if we go and take long term targets we need to make that investment and partly I'm conscious as the parliament I think we have a leadership role and you know it's still public money we have to be thoughtful but I think sometimes you know we need to be bold to demonstrate that it can be done so you'll find a mix and at the end of day of course it is driven by just what money we have available and there's certainly more we would do but we're just like every other organisation we have to live within our means but I'm very keen we also for example have a 25 year maintenance plan that helps us look past the normal planning horizon and the idea is just to try to constantly be looking ahead to what's necessary what's affordable and one thing that's helped us I guess is technology itself has changed often things come down in cost or deliver great effectiveness and again lighting is an area that you'll know has changed out of all recognition over a very short period of time so you know that it's the constant process of revisiting that and we have just a portfolio of investment and I have a structure within the organisation of my colleagues led by David McGill who's sitting in the seats of there so David has the responsibility across the organisation for managing that that process so we always have a pipeline of projects coming forward but do you want to pick up the first question? Yeah so about climate change adaptation we have had the training by adaptation Scotland our sustainable and environment strategy board received the initial training about adaptation and then we're going to move through on to the next stages of the steps to managing climate risks which is set out in the guide for public bodies in Scotland and we'll work through that and produce a climate change adaptation plan for the Parliament and we also include in our procurement process there is sections in there about adaptation and about encouraging and contractors and suppliers to make sure that they're building in adaptation plans into their procurement process. Can I ask in terms of resilience planning for significant events have you had any engagement with the national resilience centre at all? Yes I mean we have a well developed resilience planning process anyway and we feel this just fits naturally with that we work closely with the government for example and certainly with the emergency services and others to learn lessons and we're conscious that a lot of the expertise that's sitting out there and we do you know for example we run exercises from time to time as well so I think that fits well into you know planning for other potential eventualities that could disrupt the business here and you know again some technological changes for example one of the greatest vulnerabilities is potentially you know water ingress if you've got servers most organisations put the servers in the basement because it makes sense but it's obviously a vulnerable area in terms of resilience. Again I heard some of the earlier evidence you've had about you know greater more concentrated rainfall but there so there again you know we're looking for example at having more data stored in the cloud which gives us there's a lot of benefits to that but one of the key ones is it gives you more resilience so that so that that's our and that I think will just be continued to our approach going forward. Okay thank you for that I think we want to move on to transport there a number of members have questions around this start with the Dave Stewart. Thank you to Paul and Victoria you probably have gathered from the previous evidence session that transport is a major source of emissions in Scotland around 28% of emissions I mean do you have a system within the Parliament for assessing the costs of climate emissions associated with staff commuting patterns and if so what is it you're doing to try and reduce emissions? Yes there are two aspects to this there is the commuting you like to and from the place of work and there's business travel which I guess is mostly when committees and others go out I think on the committee trial and others we have a well established system now I think and you'll probably have known this yourselves when you've gone out to take evidence sessions that you know the clerks will support you in considering the most effective way including environmental considerations I think that's become a well established methodology in terms of commuting people commuting to and from what this is a more recent addition if you like into our strategy when we first began I think we we felt we should start with the things we can control within the building but I victorial correct me if I'm wrong but this is where you're getting more into scope three and sort of indirect issues and you're into a number of issues there a lot of it's about behaviour it's not for me as the chief executive to dictate how people get to and from the workplace I mean that's actually done in their own time so what you've got to do is to persuade them and I thought hopefully lead by example in how we do that so we've done a number of things first and foremost I think provided excellent facilities and recently upgraded facilities for people who want to cycle or walk or run or get here in a way that requires changing facilities we've also done and a lot of things I benefited myself recently sort of guided cycles into work you know and I having thought I knew Edinburgh well I discovered cycle paths I didn't know existed and Victoria was telling me the other day we're going to try that with walking to work and we're wrapping that in a general plan that also includes you know encouraging and helping people to better understand the public transport working with the city of Edinburgh council so I think you know in terms that it's about to my mind it's about providing good choices for people not dictating to them but encouraging them helping them be aware but actually making it an attractive and easy option and it also ties in with some of the healthy living initiatives that we're looking at and that would and there's plenty of organisations out there we were we took part in a competition last year I think it was about cycling to work and pleased to say we came top I think we got 15% of colleagues cycling so you know it's a range of persuasion and encouragement and providing good facilities and I think we're doing pretty well but you know I think it's like any behavioural change I think it will just be a continuous process of working of working with that but so far I'm encouraged with the results we've had and I know from my own experience that you've had a strong home working policy presumably that's held quite dramatically in reducing emissions yeah I think flexible working use of technology again you know videoconferencing you know these like iPads I mean flexible working I think has huge benefits more broadly to the organisation in terms of effectiveness and morale but you're right it also ties back into the convener's point about resilience one of the key bits resilience planning is actually people not being able to get to work and because of the transport disruption and if you have a flexible a policy around where people can work from actually that gives you gives you resilience so you get benefits I think on all sides of that I couldn't bring you on to aviation again this is obviously a major source of emissions within the UK and do you have a policy for staff travel in terms of flying where there is solid available real alternatives open I think we encourage it again it's hard to be you can't dictate so for example if I'm down in London I'm a great fan of the sleeper so you know it doesn't suit everybody training it both ways in a day up and down that's a lot of travel in a day so I think we encourage people to use it where there's an alternative which would principally be trained but I don't think we're at the point of telling people there's only one way they can do it but certainly it would be our preferred option that people look first and foremost at you know travel by public transport certainly within the UK I just think I don't I'm not myself persuaded that we go the step saying you must you must do it I'm the first question is do you need to go at all so as with all these things do you need to make that journey but if you do need to make that journey what's the best transport option we'd expect them to go by you know by bus or train ideally but if they need to fly because the time frame is such that there is no other way to do it then fine one thing I would say is just in customs sadly still it's often the cheapest financial position I mean we've got better you know by long advanced booking but sadly still you know as I say even on the sleeper which I think is a great way to get to London it's still pretty pricey you know and against a sort of easy jet flight down in the morning it's so you have to what I've tried to do encouraged have to think I'll support that you know I mean I'm not you know they you know we will we will meet that cost so I think there's a fading such services well on the point of is the journey necessary I mean how important is video conferencing within the parliament clearly the committees are geared up to that and that's an issue about reducing the opportunity for witnesses coming in because we can use video conferencing how important is that for your own stuff it is and it's great to be sitting in this room which is the sort of premier video conference suite for committees and I don't know if you've had chance to use it but we've recently relocated our video the other video conference suite from the ministerial tower into Queensbury house yeah it's I mean I personally use it quite quite a lot find it a very good way to you know have discussions and business maybe there's more we could do with that I mean it is the nature of a parliament it's actually a lot of people tend to come to us a lot of people want to come here and so he's striking a balance I mean that personal engagement is still important but again the first question is always yeah do I need to make that journey and video conference technology now is well established we'll all remember the days a few years ago where you know you were losing signal and breakdown I think now it's pretty robust and we've certainly invested very heavily in having good video conference facilities so I would apply exactly the same policy as you would expect as a committee member to ask is it necessary to do that journey if it is and there's lots of good reasons often for having that face-to-face contact fine if not I think we've got good facilities throughout the parliament to use that and all the digital meeting rooms of course now have that integrated in them as well with respect that that's fine for that type of video conferencing but parliamentary committees generate a lot of travel miles with the witnesses um do we do any kind of assessment on the travel patterns of the many many witnesses that come to parliamentary committees and bearing that in mind can we not do more around providing video conference and facilities within committee rooms for the parliamentary committees to make use of those during sessions I'll take that way and I'll happily have a look at that convener to see whether and I'd need to talk to the clerks who sort of organised that to see whether there's more we could do I mean so we have in terms of facilities committees when this room is the permanently adapted room and we also have some mobile facilities and if there's any evidence that committees have been frustrated in wanting to use it for lack of equipment then I'll very happily take that away you know so say at the moment my my sense is it meets demand but if that's not the case then I wouldn't want a committee ever to feel if people were having to travel to it who'd prefer to use video conferencing because we didn't have enough facilities here so I'd be happy to take that point away because is it not really about changing mindsets that there will always be people who want to come to parliament to give their evidence that's perfectly understandable but if we were to be more proactive in pushing the option of doing video conferencing we're appropriate because you couldn't clearly have eight witnesses feeding into a committee at the same time but I just think especially we are the environment committee welcome you to have some thought around that issue for going forward I think it's a really good point and I'm happy to take that away if I may and I'll write back to you when I've had a look at that that would be appreciated further questions around transport Kate Forbes and then Emma Harper morning can I add to that previous comment about video conferencing and ask what you do around constituency offices if anything to encourage the same good practice that you're promoting in the parliament building question one and second question in terms of video conferencing as well I you know Skype for business has been great and when there are bigger groups meetings in constituency offices and and trying to meet with other MSPs elsewhere for example in the highlands yeah what kind of facilities might there be to facilitate video conferencing in constituency offices again I think if I may rather than sort of give you half an answer on that I think it's a really interesting point I think the answer is some of the basic equipment we give members would support a degree of video conferencing but why don't I I'd rather take that I think it's a really interesting line of thought and I'd rather take it away and I'll come back to you with what we currently have but also take up your very fair questions what more we might do to encourage members especially members living in dispersed areas to allow them to communicate so if I may can I take that one away and I'll come back to you not just with what we're doing but what we might do over the next over this session it's video conferencing again actually the other committee I'm on are really not keen on it at all so I'm just wondering if it would be worth exploring like a a way to educate members that how far advanced video conferencing has come it works great for the NHS you know reduces miles but it might help some of our members if they had a wee demonstration of how well it works look I'll take that I mean without being cheeky you're in a great position to to reassure them member to member but I think that's a good point I think a lot of focus still stuck in what video conferencing was like 10 years ago you know with you know poor bandwidth and and you know and I think and I think you're right a lot of people probably got frustrated with it and have not gone back to it and again what I'll do specifically on that as I'll talk to all the lead committee clerks who I think are obviously I think the way into this and and I do take your point I mean maybe just get people to try it and realise that actually you're right I mean convenience point I've tried I've sometimes been on a video session with six or seven people the reach is a point where I think it just becomes impossible but particularly just when you're talking to one or two people it's a very good way of doing it and you're right I think maybe a lot of people have preconceptions about it that and I think your idea of a demonstration is an excellent one but you know and just you know speaking to your colleagues and encouraging them that it that it works but I'll pick that up with the committee clerks and suggest that they specifically make that offer to all committees and if they're skeptical maybe to invite them just to have a go perhaps not in a formal session with a witness where they might be a bit nervous about it not working but it can be done even the point Kate Forbes made about you know when you get used to video conferencing each other as members when it's a bit more of a relaxed environment you maybe build up the confidence I think a lot of it is the just worry that it'll break and you know and I think we've got to just try and reassure people but you know it's not perfect and there's always a bit of a risk with technology but it's moved on a long way so if I I'll take that forward specifically I think with the committee clerks and get them to encourage committee and we can't make them but encourage committees to have a go up on that it's not just committees it's also that there's an issue with cross party groups and I'm aware that the support for cross party groups isn't provided directly by the Scottish Parliament however there was an issue with the cpg and crofting in the last session and the request for video conferencing facilities now clearly the cpg on crofting and the cpg on garlic by their nature rely on people to travel from the western highlands and the north western highlands and the western aisles so while it's not at the moment a direct responsibility for the parliament to provide these facilities is it something that can be looked at in the future to help people who might well want to travel to Edinburgh from Stornoway for example they may appreciate video conferencing facilities I understand the problem I mean there's a very important principle around cross party groups which is to keep them exactly as they are informal groups and not that if we make them part of the parliament we make them a different thing and so and there are very clear rules set by the standards committee around that and I have to operate very carefully within those and I but and even without those I would be personally very reluctant to lose the essence of them which are they are not formal committees of the parliament and I think we need to be very careful but what we will do it's not that we will give them no support so for example we will set up a video conference facility what we won't do and it's also resource issue is have broadcast staff on hand into the evening so we will happily especially and I think there's sometimes we can perhaps improve the communication between parliament staff and the cross party group so if we know there's going to be a cross party group say it was meeting in here at sort of six o'clock seven o'clock tonight we will come in and get that set up and we're happy to provide that support I think what we can't do is then have you know as you would have if you were meeting all the sort of technical support on hand so I hope that's a sort of a bit of a compromise that we worked towards because I was well aware I think you and I maybe even spoke about it in the last session and I I'd absolutely understand and I'm sympathetic it's just trying to strike a balance and I hope that offer to set it up is a sort of fair compromise to allow that to happen what we can't do is say is to be having staff paid into the evening to support those groups I think that's both a practical and a sort of principle point but and again I'm very happy that if those particular groups and if you're involved in them want to speak to us separately I'll certainly facilitate discussion with the broadcast team to sort of help make sure that we do as much as we possibly can within the rules okay thank you I want to broaden it out and invite members to put forward any other questions that they have and I'll let me start this off paper we seem to have an enormous enormous quantity of paper running through this place it strikes me that very often it isn't generated from within here I think we're doing some good work on reducing the amount of paper that's self-generated but we do seem to get an awful lot from external sources can I ask your take on that subject and what thoughts you might have given us to how we could tackle the issue yeah I mean we do generate a lot of internal paper it has to has to be said and I think the the move to digital meeting packs for committees and many and the business bulletin I think have really helped and we've got a I think a target for a further 25 percent reduction in this session so we're and it's allowed us also to deliver very substantial financial savings as well so that's what we can control and a lot of that's about technology and then just the way we all behave it's a really interesting point actually about what happens externally and I think I was aware from a conversation we had at which I hadn't really thought about to be honest so you mentioned it to me about the amount of paper which just comes in unsolicited to members I think and I'm going to take that away I think the balance we need to strike is I don't think members would thank us for choking that off because who's used to say that's not something they want to read who's to say they don't want to read it in paper format but I was just thinking about this after our conversation and it might be that we could do some kind of survey of members and finding out what their position was because it could be there are a relatively small number of organisations that generate a lot of this and my approach to that would be to go to those organisations and say why don't you actually ask members how they want to have it so I'm very nervous about you know in any way preventing members getting what people think they need to see that's the essence of your job but actually why don't you survey a member and say you know do you like it in hard copy or electronically or dare I say it not at all and that allows at least the member to determine if they still want I mean there's some things I still prefer to get in paper copy so it's a really important point and in honesty not a point I'd thought too much about until that you raised it so I think we're gonna so I was discussing with Victoria early and I think we might start by just engaging with members more widely get their take on it and if they if they would support that we could help them you know go back to these organisations and it sounds to me as if because that does then contribute to our problem of waste I mean once it's in even if we recycle it and we're all aware that recycling is fine but it's better it's not as good as not having it in the first place so so I think it's a so that's I think I'd want to go into it carefully and to try and take members with us just to make sure that we don't cross the line into preventing people communicating with them but I think it sounds to me as if it's an area that would be helpful to society but also help our own waste targets and within that perhaps looking at how other parliaments have responded to that challenge because presumably you know our colleagues across Europe will have the same issues about volume of paper that's coming in we'll happily engage with them and see whether we can learn lessons yeah if anyone wants to crack this problem it would be it would be great to know how they've done it so yeah and again I'm more than happy to keep the committee in touch with how we're getting on with that that would be useful at Mark Ruskell as the Parliament starts to look more at indirect emissions I'm wondering to what extent you've done work on looking at pensions and pensions divestment particularly from you know high carbon fossil fuels um it's a contentious issue um what I would say is that the um sorry why is it contentious well because you get on the one hand um and I've let me let I will come back to that I'm not let me just the starting point is actually the pension fund I mean is actually managed not by the parliament by by independent trustees as as it rightly should we are essentially in the position of the employer um so that the decisions on actually divestment or anything else would be a matter for the pension fund trustees that the contentiousness comes in as a um not everyone agrees with I mean you can usually agree on some things um some particular areas of of investment that most people would agree um raise ethical questions but in my experience you get into others even fossil fuels where there is a degree of contention I think that seems to me a matter of a matter of fact we live in a parliament with a with a very diverse range of views on on these issues so that that that's one point to make in mind the other one is that any trustees have a challenge between their fiduciary duty to you know maximise their return to the fund and of course you know their their view as to what is a proper place to invest so um so that that's the position but the formal position is quite clear that in terms of your own pension fund the members which is the principal one because the staff are part of the civil service pension scheme so there isn't a fund as such and obviously members staff is more a matter for for members so we're really talking specifically about the pension fund for MSPs um that is handled by fund trustees the majority of whom are serving all former members of parliament and you know I know it is something they're very aware of um and they I know take very seriously their duty to try and strike this balance between ethical investment if I could use that phrase and the need to ensure that the fund is sufficient to meet the obligations of it are you aware that there's a lot of good practice emerging within the public sector on this issue there's been divestment for example of some of the pension funds operating in Yorkshire there's been active consideration within the full cut pension fund that serves another number of local authorities in the central belt about how they can invest more in social housing less in high carbon and I think you know the less contentious bit here probably is the high carbon fossil fuels rather than the oil and gas but um there is some good practice there which you could draw on and perhaps look at because you're a significant employer and you must have some link into the governance structure of these pension funds um well yeah actually no one has to be very careful I mean as the chief executive of the parliament in a sense my position you're not employed as members you're unique but we act as the the employer because we pay the employer contribution and there's actually a very strict and in my view very proper separation between the role of the employer if you like because we have a vested interest let's be honest in the level of contribution we have to make which is to do with the size of the scheme and the trustees of the scheme which have that now what I'm very happy to do and indeed if you want to speak to me offline I'm very happy to write to the trustees with any information they may care to look at but I need to be extremely careful not to cross that line and try to tell them how to invest because they actually have a very strong legal duty as that you'll be familiar with and I just need to be a little bit careful that I don't cross that line I think it's perfectly reasonable to and I'm conscious that having Dave Stewart here knows a lot more about this than I do actually having been in that position but I'm very happy to draw their attention to good practice I think that's perfectly reasonable but then I think I have to allow them as trustees to take a judgment in all the circumstances but if you want to either speak to me or flag that up I'd be more than happy to convey that to the fund trustees given that you've name checked him and he's indicated they're interested in coming in I'm going to allow Dave Stewart to call on parts to say a couple points conveners a next trustee and also is when I was on the corporate body last time round I was effectively on the employer side so I was really saw two sides of this this is certainly something that I raised on my time as a trustee and Matt Ruskell makes some very useful points I think the key technical issue though is that because of the size of the fund that we're still a managed fund which means that Bailey Gifford make the investment decisions but as the fund grows and develops in the future there's an argument for becoming segregated which means that the trustees would have a more direct role in investment decisions but as Sir Paul said there's also a clear legal duty to maximise the returns for each and every one of us here and our family members as well so there is attention I looked very very closely at this and it's fair to say that Bailey Gifford who are you know an excellent company are very very conscious of the so-called ethical investment side of this and I know the trustees have looked very carefully and there's been some questions at corporate body question time in the last session of parliament I'm sure Mark my look to to do that in that route because it's coming up very soon so it's a fair point but there is some technical constraints which members should be aware of alternative approach Finlay Carson I hope you don't mind jumping back in a general question you touched on the benefits of spending saved with the lights of the led lights down in the garage but you also mentioned the budget constraints is there any projects going forward which would see a significant impact in our carbon footprint that are being restrained because of the budget you've got to work with hmm try to sort of give it well it's we could always spend more money I mean that in that sense you know we're sort of limited by that I'm just in a sort of hesitate because I don't want to sort of give you a misleading answer on this I think we've got reasonable budget at the moment going forward I mean there's a good discipline about having a cap budget it does make you really look out I mean yes I was talking earlier to Victoria I mean there are some technical issues I'd like us to address around for example heating you know I think with greater investment perhaps in that we can get more efficiencies I think there's and but they're quite chunky bits of investment by which I mean you know maybe more than £100,000 so that's sort of money you have to think very very carefully about but at the moment I would say there is there is nothing in the pipeline that we want to do that we don't think we can fund if not this year we tend to do it in a rolling programme going forward I think we've got a reasonable balance at the moment and I feel and I hope Dave Stewart won't mind saying you know if I felt that we were really falling down on this or for example in danger of missing the target then I think I would get a sympathetic hearing out the corporate body and of course ultimately before your colleagues on the finance committee so it's hard to get a public sector chief executive ever say he's got enough money and I'm not saying that but I think we've got a reasonable budget and it has a lot I think we've had a good programme investment and I think going forward we should be able to achieve that if we hit any really big items you talked about district heating you know I think it's a really really interesting area I imagine at a decision making point there might be some pretty substantial investment that would be the sort of issue that we wouldn't budget for and I think if you hit that sort of issue I think it'd be a question of working up a business case trying to persuade the corporate body in the first instance and then probably trying to persuade the finance committee to do it so short of those issues I think we've got enough of a resource to keep a steady programme and I think the discipline of having to think hard about it is quite a healthy one to wrap things up we've talked today about the 2020 target and your confidence that you're on the right track to hit that but the Scottish Government Scotland has targets way beyond that I think the government has a target it was at 68 per cent cut by 2027 for the business industry and public sector what works being done from your perspective to look beyond 2020 can you give us an idea what you're looking at target wise beyond that I think the first thing to say is that you know we would be absolutely determined to hit that those targets as well I mean we've always regarded 2020 as a as an interim point it's not it's not the end and we're well on track and certainly we'll we'll exceed that if we possibly can but yeah we see it as a stepping stone to the really significant targets that lie beyond that and the way we achieve that I think we need to really continue to work hard on behaviour and we talked about transport the way we use things in the organisation I think all of us and I absolutely include myself in that can do can do more I think to get the really big step change however going forward probably is back to this point about investment for example I think if we're going to be generating more of our own electricity I think looking at the way we generate heat and cool things down and you know and some of these there is no escaping pretty significant capital investment so I think it's by that I think probably it's those probably quite significant investments going forward plus continued behaviour change but but I'm confident I mean we're on a really good trajectory and what I what encourages me it's not based just on one thing I mean it's across virtually all the measures and I think that encourages me to think that it's a broad based approach and I was absolutely well as confident as I can be that we would hit those more demanding targets out past 2020 okay well thank you very much for your time I think that's been quite interesting there are obviously a number of items you've gone on you've taken a way to to look at and we'll anticipate hearing from you in due course around those I'd also like to think in future years we might have a rerun of such an opportunity to sit and discuss the Parliament's performance particularly as we look to the longer term so thank you for attending I just to wrap things up at its next meeting on the 20th of September the committee will take evidence from a range of stakeholders and academics on the Scottish Government's climate change targets as agreed earlier we'll now move into private session I asked that the public gallery be cleared and the public part of the meeting is closed thank you