 Mily對不起, but I welcome everyone to the 24th meeting in 2015 of the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee. Everyone present is reminded to switch off mobile phones as they affect the broadcasting system. As meeting papers are provided in digital format, you may see tablets being used during the meeting. Apologies have been received for absence from David Stewart and Siobhan McMahon. Our only agenda item today is to take oral evidence in advance of publication of the Government's draft budget 2016-17. The committee has agreed to use this year's budget scrutiny as an opportunity to focus further on identifying what further action is necessary within its remit to help to meet the climate change targets. Although the draft budget is not expected to be published until the 16th of December, this session will provide an opportunity for witnesses to comment on the outcomes of the current year's spending and to suggest what more might need to be done both in this financial year and beyond to meet the targets. The session will also help to inform questions for the committee's second and final evidence session on 6 January with the Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Cities. I welcome Professor Jan Bebington, a Professor of Accounting and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, Theresa Bray, chief executive of changeworks, representing the existing Homes Alliance Scotland, Dr Sam Gardner, head of policy at WWF Scotland, John Lodder, a regular attendor at our committee sessions, who is the national director at Sustrans, and last but not least, Sarah Tiam, director of the Institute of Civil Engineers Scotland, representing the low-carbon infrastructure task force. First, I invite witnesses to make any short introductory remarks. I am focusing on a carbon accounting methodology, which highlights the need to take a whole system approach when deciding if something is low-carbon. I am not commenting on the infrastructure itself. Many other witnesses on this panel are much better qualified than I am to do that. I would also like to highlight that, in making the observation, I am drawing on a Scottish funding council study of the University of St Andrews, where we are putting together a bio-heat plant and, partly, trying to prove that investment in understanding what we are doing. We have invested in some research alongside that. I am drawing extensively on expertise from the University of Edinburgh and its carbon accounting unit. The key observation that I will be happy to be asked more about is that, if we are going to go for low-carbon infrastructure, it is a whole-system approach. It is not a bit-by-bit approach, but it is how the whole system morphs and changes together. The second key observation is that there is a great deal of uncertainty in that planning process, but there are methodologies that are starting to emerge that help to inform that uncertainty. I welcome the opportunity to speak to you today on behalf of the Existing Homes Alliance. We are pleased that the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee recognises the importance of energy efficiency of its existing homes. Energy efficiency is a key activity in tackling climate change but also has much wider social and economic benefit. The Scottish Government has made the commitment to energy efficiency by making it a national infrastructure priority. It is important that this is followed through with financial commitments too and has the level of ambition to make a real difference in terms of both reducing carbon emissions but also in tackling fuel poverty, targets for both of which have been missed in recent years. The national infrastructure priority should have the objective of all homes reaching EPCC or higher by 2025, which the Government needs to commit to. This is ambitious. With 61%, 1.4 million of our homes need to be improved. The Alliance estimates that £140 million per year for the next 10 years will be required. It is important that the Scottish Government makes its own evaluation of the funding required. We recognise that this is, with the funding constraints, £140 million in the coming year will not be available, but there should be a transitional year leading to greater years of funding. Not all of the funding will be coming from Scottish Government grants. Homeowners should be required to make a contribution where they can afford to do so. There would be challenges in spending such large amounts of money in the short term and delivery plans need to be developed and the supply chain as well. There is established programmes of delivery in the area-based schemes already funded by the Scottish Government and the warmer home Scotland. We want to ensure that the momentum continues to tackle the issue of our poor-quality homes. For the coming year, we wish to see that the current budget is maintained, but we also recognise that the funding coming from the energy company obligation will be falling, so to maintain the level of activity, there will need to be extra resources committed. The Scottish Government is making difficult decisions with regard to the comprehensive spending review. Spending on energy efficiency has so many benefits with regard to climate change and fuel poverty, householder finance, jobs and health, and there has to be the financial support. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. Every year, since the passage of the Climate Change Act, WWF has submitted evidence to the Parliament during its scrutiny of the finance budget. Each year, we have asked, is the budget aligned with the requirements of the Act, and each year our assessment has failed to reassure us that the budget fulfills the expectations set by this climate legislation. If this year is to be any different, as a minimum, the draft budget will need to do the following things. First, we will need to set out in a clear and transparent way the proposed expenditure alongside the policies in the RPP, the report on proposals and policies, so as to give confidence to all stakeholders that the budget fulfills the commitment of the Cabinet to embed climate change in the autumn budget process. This has never happened in the past and has always meant that committees such as yours are frustrated in their efforts to establish the extent to which the budget is aligned with the Climate Change Act. I think for energy efficiency, the second point, should reflect the commitment to designate it as a national infrastructure priority, and in particular provide a clear goal of ensuring all homes reach an EPC of C by 2025. As we approach the 2016 deadline, one million homes remain trapped in fuel poverty, that's 39 per cent of Scotland's households. Since 1990, emissions from the housing sector have fallen by less than 13 per cent, and emissions fluctuate widely from year to year. A sufficiently funded national retrofit programme for Scotland's homes could generate nearly 10,000 jobs, safe households up to £500 a year, could save the NHS between £48 million to £80 million per year, and reduce dependence and costs on fuel imports. The third final point clearly signals a significant shift in focus of the capital budget towards low-carbon infrastructure. The infrastructure decisions that we make in the next few years will determine how we live in 2050. The future will be decided in the next decade, and it must be consistent with supporting low-carbon technologies and behaviours. Thank you, convener, and thank you, committee, for inviting Sustrans to come along. I'll be covering active travel, which covers walking and cycling, key elements in reducing carbon emissions, particularly in the urban context, and in particular allowing Scots to choose to not use cars for every trip that they make. The vast majority of car trips remain very short and very repetitive. That hasn't changed in a number of years and it isn't helping transport to reduce its carbon emissions. From that point of view, I'm pleased to come along today because there are good, positive signs of growth in certain areas in Scotland, and where leadership is being shown by local authorities and by Transport Scotland, there are some positive signs that we're beginning to see more people opting to cycle and a good number of people continuing to walk for everyday short trips. That's very positive, and I'll be covering that in my evidence as well. However, I think that what I will also be concluding is that the funding that has been increased for active travelling is at a very vulnerable stage. It needs to be kept at the level and grown over the next few years if we're really to realise the ambition—very good ambition—of the Scottish Government to grow the numbers of people walking and grow the numbers of people significantly by cycling for short trips. I thank you for inviting us to share the work of the low-carbon infrastructure task force. The task force brings together key figures from the infrastructure life cycle across public, private and academic sectors with expertise in construction and finance. The outputs from the Scotland's way ahead project, which is led by the task force, include the case for low-carbon infrastructure, a long list of 10 low-carbon project examples, which could help to drive the required step change in coming years. The final output will be a short list of two to three projects. The research that has been undertaken on behalf of the task force highlights the benefits for Scotland in investing in low-carbon infrastructure. In addition to meeting climate change targets, low-carbon infrastructure has the potential to deliver considerable economic and social benefits. Failure to invest in that type of low-carbon infrastructure will lock us into high emissions and vulnerability to the multiple impacts of climate change, leaving a legacy of buildings, roads, transport infrastructure, energy generation and more, which will be expensive to adapt in the future. The short list of low-carbon projects will emerge from our work. We believe that we are worthy of consideration and inclusion in Scotland's future infrastructure investment plans. We also believe that the Scottish Government has a unique role to play both in directing infrastructure priorities and as an investor. The case for low-carbon infrastructure that has been commissioned by the task force showed that around half of the current infrastructure investment in Scotland could be described as low-carbon. However, international comparators suggest that a significant increase will be required to enable delivery of the ambitious targets that we have in Scotland. The Scottish Government's next spending review provides an opportunity to shift capital spending towards low-carbon projects, and the Scottish budget 2016-17 is a good starting point for that transition. The Scottish Government's commitment to making improvement of building energy and efficiency and national infrastructure priority has significant potential to deliver on social justice and economic benefits. In summary, the evidence that I am giving today has been made in reducing carbon emissions and provides a good foundation on which to build. However, a step change in pace and scale is required. Thank you very much, Ms Tiam and thank you to all the other witnesses. Can I perhaps kick off just by asking about the ambitious climate change targets? The Scottish Government has acknowledged that meeting the targets set by the Parliament has been challenging. I just wonder if you have any insight into what difference changing the baseline has made to meeting that target. Dr Garner, do you want to kick off? Yes, I can certainly have a stab at it. It is certainly true that every year that the greenhouse gas inventory is revised as a result of improved understanding of where our emissions come from and, as a consequence, our understanding of our emissions in what they were in 1990 is different from what it was when the Climate Change Act was passed, and that makes the emissions reduction required in order to hit those annual targets harder than it was envisaged when we first set the Climate Change Act. That is not to say that we could not have actually hit the target last year had it not been if we had actually seen greater policy effort. We only missed it by a small fraction if we had seen effort in other sectors, particularly transport, where at the moment there is only one policy in the RPP that is targeted at reducing emissions from the transport sector. We could have hit those targets. To say that we have missed the target simply as a result of the greenhouse gas inventory revisions is incorrect. It has certainly had an impact, but so would greater policy effort if it had an impact to negate that. For the moment, the Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, Eileen McLeod, has stated that it will take time to produce a credible package of proposals and policies to make up the shortfall from previous annual targets, which totals 17.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Do you agree with that statement or do you see that as being in opposition to what you have just said? I agree that it will take time. How much time it needs to take is the area of discussion. We have missed four targets and, as I understand it, the section 36 report that is required by the Climate Change Act to say what steps the Scottish Government will take in order to compensate for those emissions has not been produced. In the first instance, that was captured by the first RPP. We are now in a situation where the next RPP, the third one, is not likely to be out until the very end of next year in May indeed, given how long it will run into 2017. We are waiting for that in order to compensate for emissions reductions that were excessive in 2013. There is a need for great urgency in how we address our overshooting emissions and the fact that 17.5 million tonnes of excess emissions have been generated means that it is going to be an increasingly hard challenge to get that under control unless we seek concerted policy efforts, which the minister has committed to, that they will bring forward new policies. Certainly, WWFs hope that we see those in the very immediate future and that this budget is an opportunity to reflect greater emphasis on certain areas such as energy efficiency and transport. The other witnesses could address the concerted policy effort that you believe is required to make further progress. Do you wish the Government to place that effort? I feel that there are opportunities for energy efficiency. We do not require huge technological changes to make this happen. We have already got existing programmes that could be ramped up relatively easily. It is difficult because you are covering so many homes, but it is proven to make reductions already in carbon reduction. I think that there will be the need to support behaviour change linked to the physical measures so that people take advantage of the improved efficiency. There is certainly an opportunity within the housing sector that will make a much greater difference to people's lives as well as meeting the climate change targets. In terms of the transport sector, there are already good policies available. In terms of putting them together into a package, I do not think that that is happening with enough emphasis and enough drive, particularly from the transport sector. We still have an ambitious programme of road construction, but, in addition to that, we do not give sufficient emphasis. I do not get the sense from transport that there is a real drive to reduce emissions, particularly through vehicle emissions, yet I think that the policies are there. I do not think that we are pushing them in quite as hard as we should be. Do you have anything to add, Professor Bevington? Can I point to the heat sector in particular as an area that is needing far greater attention? The committee will be familiar with the fact that heat makes up over 50 per cent of our energy demand and about 50 per cent of our emissions, yet currently we are just about less than 4 per cent of that being met by renewable sources and 1 per cent of our heat demand being met through community or district heating networks. If we are to decarbonise our heat as the Climate Change Act requires us to and make significant progress by 2030, it is an area that will need ever greater concerted action. District heating is an opportunity for the Scottish Government to align its capital budget with investment that will help to create jobs, tackle fuel poverty and also drive down emissions. We would hope that in future budgets, including this one, there is a signal of greater support for district heating in particular. The district heating loan fund has been very competitive and well used. There is a need for that to be continued. There is also a need for the Scottish Government to explore how it can underwrite or mitigate the risks associated with the oversizing of district heating pipe work so as to allow for networks to be expanded. It is the type of infrastructure where there is a long return but a high upfront cost. Where you have seen that development take place across Scandinavia and Northern Europe, it has always been, in the first instance, facilitated by the state in some way by getting that return over time. Three of the 10 projects of the long list of low-carbon infrastructure projects are about district heating and a fourth is about energy efficiency retrofit. We have been through a peer review process just earlier this week and it is becoming increasingly apparent what some of the regulatory, contractual and ownership issues are coming into play that could be addressed and some of the barriers that could be removed. Mike McKenzie would like to come in. My question is principally for Dr Gardner, because I recall a few months ago, and I am sure that you will too, that you did an analysis suggesting that it would be entirely possible to have all power generation in Scotland from renewable sources by 2030. You were looking for MSPs to sign and endorse that analysis and I found myself very keen to do it. I had my quill pen sharpened, I had my bottle of ink, I had my bloting paper and my pen was hovering over the paper and then I thought, no, I can't sign this. I wanted to sign it but I couldn't sign it and the reason I couldn't sign it is that the Scottish Government has almost no powers over energy and I realised that if only the UK Government would do the right thing, we could easily do that. It occurs to me from what you said this morning that there is a real problem in as much as a significant amount of the power required to make a lot to ensure that we go down this war-carbon route does not reside in this place, it resides in Westminster. You mentioned district heating loan fund but you will know in the projects out there that on the ground that they require complementary funding, so those projects are put together requiring eco funding, requiring green deal funding and the district heating loan fund and that it is incredibly difficult sometimes to get them to stack it out up without all this complementary funding from each Government playing its part. So my question really is, to what extent are we impeded by the actions of the UK Government in trying to take forward the aims that you have all outlined this morning? To what extent? I think it's clearly there is an impact of changes made at UK Government level on energy policy. We've seen those over the summer which have had a real impact on the deployment of onshore wind and solar, so it would be completely wrong to dismiss those who are having no consequence on Scotland's ability to pursue the low-carbon agenda. Equally, it's not to say that those should prevent us from continuing to strive to fulfil that ambition, and I see concerted efforts in various parts of the Scottish Government's agenda to do that. To point to the changes being made at Westminster and then say, as a consequence, we can't do all that we can in order to hit those targets would be wrong, so there are certain areas that the Scottish Government shouldn't continue to make strides to secure the low carbon agenda. Regulation is one, so the Scottish Government has convened a subgroup to work on regulation for district heating in order to facilitate the growth of an industry that is struggling to make any headway because it currently doesn't have the confidence that there is going to be a market for it to deploy to and the consumer doesn't have the protection that it would need. There are steps that it could take in that regard to support the investment in district heating. On the power sector, for instance, where the Scottish Government has used the powers that it's got very well in order to support low carbon technologies, it should continue to do so. There is a certain inevitability to the 2030 scenario that WWF's commission from Garada Sam suggested that we would have an entirely renewable power sector by then. What we're looking for is political parties to align themselves with that scenario so that we reap the benefits of aligning our policies strategically with the direction of travel that's happening in Scotland. There are benefits to being enjoyed from doing that. On the energy efficiency side, we have the opportunity through the capital budget to better align that in order to deliver on energy efficiency. We've heard from Theresa and you'll be familiar already of the very broad support that greater efforts on energy efficiency have across civic Scotland. Over 50 organisations from Bonados to Shelter to Age Concern all signed that commitment to ask the Scottish Government to support an emissions performance certificate rating of C by 2025 and the funding that's required in order to get there. Yes, there are consequences to UK Government policy changes and they can be significant, but they don't come at the expense of the Scottish Government being able to do all it can to fulfil its potential. Certainly there are number of measures where it is made more difficult with out the areas being involved, but one of the things that the Scottish Government has been good at doing is ensuring that we are able to access a greater proportion of things like the energy company obligation. If we look at solid walls, which is an insulation that's been very much supported by the Scottish Government under the area-based schemes, under the figures for the most recent obligation, which started in April this year, 27 per cent of the solid wall insulation measures have been installed in Scotland overall compared to the rest of the UK. Similar figures for renewable heat incentive, a greater proportion of the measures that are installed are based in Scotland, partly because we've got more rural properties but also because of the sport that the Scottish Government provides in providing information and advice, whether it's through resource-efficient Scotland or through Home Energy Scotland. It does make a difference how much money we can access in something like that that is not directly under control. Can I ask you about the submission from the Existing Homes Alliance Scotland? You say in that 2016-17 is a transitional year and the budget should be sufficient to allow for current programmes to continue to compensate for cuts in UK programmes and piloting new programmes on behaviour change and loans. When you say that there is sufficient budget to compensate for cuts in UK programmes, do you have a figure? One of the difficulties is with the energy company obligation. There's never any figures associated to that. You only get from the energy companies what the number of measures are. We already know that, for solid wall insulation, they've committed 80% of their two-year allocation that's already been committed, so there is going to be far less energy company obligation coming through. Initially, we were seeing rates of £90 per ton for energy company obligation. That's come down much closer to 30 in some areas and even down as low as 15. The rate is going to come down and availability is becoming much more difficult. With a number of the smaller installers, installers operating out with the central belt can just not access energy company obligation at all, which is having an impact on the programmes there. What is the level of the shortfall that you're asking the Scottish Government to make up then? We were looking at, when initially the programme was announced, it was going to be £200 million with the funding produced by the Scottish Government. This current year is £103 million. It is coming down. If you were looking at the £200 million, that is an additional £97 million. If you look to see what level of eco has been levered in to Scotland, it's probably looking about, I would have thought, down from that maximum of 90 is probably about half that rate, about £50 million, and I would expect that to fall even further in this coming year. So the total figure would be what? Total figure to maintain the level of overall spending that was set is approximately £200 million. The shortfall result of eco is about £70 million. That's helpful. From what we've heard so far, if I've understood our witnesses correctly, they believe that there needs to be a realignment of spending from current priorities towards those investments that will have the biggest impact on reducing our climate change emissions. If I could ask Mr Lauder about active travel, Sustrans in their submission have said that they believe that the Government should commit 10 per cent of the transport budget to active travel. That's a significant increase on what the Government currently allocates, notwithstanding the fact that we're at a record level of investment in active travel. Is there not a responsibility on the part of your organisation and other cycling organisations to say where that investment should come from? Are there specific transport projects to which the Government is committed that can be postponed or where the level of investment can be reduced in order to release the funding that you would like to see? I think that the call for 10 per cent is a long-standing one when it comes to an association of directors of public health. What we're looking at here is that the model in Scotland is the model that has been set by Edinburgh City Council, which has increased the budget year on year in a gradual way. I'm growing it now to 8 per cent of the transport budget being spent on cycling. As a result of that, 12 per cent of trips to work are now by bicycle, which is four times the national average. It's a gradual process from within Transport Scotland. I don't necessarily see that projects need to be postponed. I do think that there will be projects. The figure does need leadership, and it does need leadership from Transport Scotland. I think that the obvious budget there is from within the spend on the trunk road budget being moved, as you've said, being switched to active travel, which is a new element that Transport Scotland needs to do more about. Currently, of the Transport Scotland budget, 2 per cent, as you've said, goes on active travel, and of the staff within Transport Scotland, there are about three looking after walking and cycling. In a sense, that 2 per cent Spain for what is returned is actually quite a reasonable return on investment when you consider the health benefits and the other benefits that come from more people opting to walk and cycle. I think that putting that gradual budget and gradual growth together will begin to change how we see transport. We've seen walking and cycling as a nice thing to do on a summer's day, where, in reality, other small northern European countries have seen it as a legitimate part of the transport orthodoxy. That's where walking and cycling needs to move to. With that level of leadership, local authorities will react and will follow it, and they already do. Local authorities have already outbid the funds that Sustrans are giving by Transport Scotland to manage. I don't think that it is about necessarily cancelling entire schemes. I think that it is about realigning budgets. How are you going to find the money within the trunk road budget then? That's the area that you've identified where the savings could be made. Can you say a bit more about where, within the trunk road budget, you would be able to find? Given that you are saying that you wouldn't need to postpone or cancel existing projects, how would you be able to release funding from the trunk road budget to bring about the reallocation of funds to active travel? I think that not having access to the Transport Scotland budget and not having access to the people who set that budget to have that conversation. My mind would be like anyone else. I would be looking to see where savings could be made and reallocations could be made to gradually raise that. To answer your question, Mr Johnson, it would be the capital infrastructure spend that I would be looking at. To turn things a wee bit on their head, do the panel consider that there are any areas of planned infrastructure expenditure that are likely to increase rather than reduce the carbon emissions? I'll have a very initial stab. It's to point to the strategic transport projects review and the carbon assessment of that, which the Scottish Government published on an annual basis. That shows that the collective impact of those projects will result in an increase in emissions. That's projects across the board, that's from the Borders Railway, so this is looking to the past, to include, during the A9, the Aberdeen Western peripheral, the improvements to the rail network between Edinburgh and Glasgow, all of those things taken in the round will result in a collective increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Does anyone else have any more to that? In terms of that, having been round the Hodgkin round about Aberdeen on many occasions, being stuck in traffic there, is there not an expectation that some of the other problems will be reduced by the peripheral road? Has that been balanced out in the calculations that have been done by the Government? All the evidence throughout the world is that, where you build more roads, you will get more emissions and more transport. I think that what we haven't necessarily tackled much in Scotland at all is, as we've mentioned many times at this committee, that the vast bulk of car trips are short, three kilometres, is the average. That's across Scotland, so even in the most remote and rural areas, the bulk of trips that are made are short and repetitive. The question, in that sense, is not so much for the movement of goods and services by the trunk road network. How can we give people a better option not to have to use a car, not withstanding that one third of Scots don't have access to a car? How do we give people better information but also much better facilities to be able to cycle or walk and thus reduce emissions in that way? Do we have an analysis of the nature of those trips that are logjamming the Hoddigan roundabout of the morning? Do we know how many of those people are making a very—I'm not being critical of those people—that's their right to make that journey, but do we really have an analysis of how much that roundabout is being logjammed by people making a short trip that could be cycled or made by public transport, but they are making it by car because that's the best option that they've got? Refer back to the report on proposals and policies and the indication that it offers for what role the transport sector has to play. There's an almost 300 per cent increase in the annual emissions reductions required between 2014 and 2017 from the transport sector according to the report on proposals and policies, so something has to change. There has to be a signal either through infrastructure, which will bring a return later in time or through policy or through investment in supporting greater active travel, but a 300 per cent increase in the reductions from the transport sector is required by the action plan that the Government set. From the transport sector, and at the moment, there's just the one policy within the transport sector within the LPP. If I could also ask, it was mentioned about the use and the challenges in the renewable energy sector. It was announced in July of this year that the Scottish Government's local energy challenge fund will support 23 projects across Scotland, sharing £500,000 between them. The fund is for demonstrator projects designed to encourage the use and local ownership of renewable energy. Has anyone got any comment on how that might inform the decision making going forward? The challenge fund is looking to solve some of those problems, whether it's to do with intimacy on renewables or the need for good connections, particularly in remote areas where you've got extra capacity. There are a lot of innovative approaches being adopted in whether it's demand reduction in energy storage and producing a systems approach to it. I think that Scotland is taking the lead in that because we don't have the controls on other levers. I think that that may well be some of the, if we look to the future, those challenge projects are very important. Only a small number of those will go through to completion. There are issues about the scale of funding, the timescales associated with it, because we are adopting new technologies, new approaches. Some of them will fail and actually being prepared to take that risk to invest in projects that will fail is very important because otherwise you won't make that step change in delivery. It is producing that innovation. I think that it's leading to innovation often on a community scale because we can't control things on a national scale, but that may well be the solution for energy systems if we look into the long term, but in terms of energy security, in looking at local ownership of energy, it will make a big difference. However, in the infancy stages, we still haven't seen any of them go through to completion, so they do add a valuable tool in the kit to start ensuring that renewables could provide the future, the 100 per cent delivery that we were talking about, since on its own, it's not possible. I just wondered—I mean, I was in Orkney in last weekend and there's quite a number of electric cars there now in similar Royal Nyland of Mull and I'd been reading that in Norway over 30 per cent of cars are now electric. I just wondered what opportunity he felt to decarbonise transport that was in the use of electric vehicles. Also bearing in mind that, when you look at new technology of any sort, that take of even the most successful technologies doesn't tend to be a linear, it tends to be a hyperbolic curve. It seems to me that we could be on the cusp of larger scale electrification of vehicles. Being in mind that I live and represent a very rural area, where I can assure you it's just not credible for me to walk to work and no matter how fit I get, I'm never going to be able to cycle to work. Do you feel that electric vehicles are an opportunity and you welcome what the Scottish Government is doing to try and promote the use of electric vehicles? I would be much happier with the Scottish Government emphasising electric vehicles as the last mile delivery for goods and services, particularly when you look at the growth in carbon emissions from light goods vehicles. That curve goes up at a dramatic angle, which I'm sure is the result of internet shopping, which is fine. I think that what I would be keen on would be to see how we can get commercial vehicles electrified. Instead of diesel-emitting or diesel powered engines for light goods vehicles, we move to an electric one. My concern with electric cars—I take your point about the rural context, I do. However, the statistics are very clear for transport in Scotland. The vast majority of car trips, even in rural areas, rural local authorities, are short. Within our towns in rural areas, my concern with electric cars is simply moving the fuel source. We're not decongesting the roads, for example, so they'll remain congested. We're not giving people an option to get out and walk and cycle, which improves their health. In that urban context, in that town context, I'm much more cautious about electric cars, but I'm enthusiastic about electric goods vehicles. I would like to see the Government do much more on that front. First of all, I would like to say that we support the Scottish Government's action plan for electric vehicles. All the work that we've done and any other work that I've read that tries to paint a picture of what the 2050 world would look like has a large role for electric vehicles in it. I think that one of the key findings that came from a piece of work that we commissioned from Element Energy was that the number of electric vehicles that you need in order to fulfil your climate change requirements will depend on the extent to which you've also complemented those with wider sustainable transport measures. We would need 350,000 electric vehicles by 2013 Scotland if we stabilised traffic levels in 2020-10 levels, if I get that right. Basically, the demand management, if you stabilise your traffic growth, the number of electric vehicles that you'll need will be considerably less. It will be 1.5 million just to achieve the same emissions reduction. If the Scottish Government sees a role for itself in supporting the deployment of new technology and to ensure that that investment is best spent to deliver the best return, it has to be matched by complementary measures in the wider transport system to reduce demand. You mentioned Norway, which is a great example of where there's been very rapid uptake in electric vehicles. That's in part because of the tax incentives that they're able to do, which aren't available to the Scottish Government, but it's also because of the exemptions that electric vehicles are afforded to congestion charging, so your major Norwegian cities will make it very attractive to drive your electric vehicle in. That would rub up against the issues of congestion, but they also happen to have better infrastructure for active travel, cycling and walking. They can be part of an urban transport system, but they do need that holistic approach if we're to support them in the right way. One area that we're seeing investment in, which is very sensible at the moment, and you can see it around Edinburgh, with Edinburgh City Council, electric vehicle vans going around, fleet cars, taxis, dundees doing some interesting work around electric vehicle and taxis. There are areas where you can make targeted impact, which would do an awful lot to mitigate the emissions associated with those types of vehicle use and those transport journeys. Adam, sorry, it's Alex, my apologies. Got that far already. I wanted to look a bit at the quality of the information that we're being given and our ability to effectively evaluate the expenditure on infrastructure. First of all, can you tell us if you believe that we're being given the right information in order to evaluate the effectiveness of policies? I'll have a first stab. Sometimes we get the right information, but at the wrong time. For instance, with regards to the publication of the budget, typically we get level 4 figures, which relate to, if you're interested in understanding the extent to which the budget matches the requirements of the report on proposals and policies, it's those level 4 figures that are useful. They typically come out anything up to four weeks after the draft budget has been published, quite often after committees have taken evidence and their scrutiny has passed. That's a real issue and has been repeatedly raised by ourselves and by other witnesses and picked up by various committees, both this one and the Energy Committee. Yet we still see this delay between the publication of the budget and those figures that relate specifically to what the report on proposals and policies says. We also have a bigger challenge with that document, the Climate Change Action Plan, that RPP, in understanding the effectiveness of the policies that it's got in there. It attributes emissions savings to different policy lines, yet we don't have, as far as I'm aware, a very rich and accurate monitoring system that lets us know whether or not the assumptions in the RPP are bearing out. We're continuing to make organisations like WWF continue to advocate for support according to what the RPP says, but we're at stages of delivery now with many of these policy areas where we need to have a more reflective understanding of what's effective, what's hitting barriers, where the challenges are, so that we can understand just how effective the RPP assumptions are. Might I also add something particularly in around the carbon accounting? In the very early days, particularly around strategic transport assessment and the carbon accounts that were created for that, they were quite simple, but they were state of art at the time. The key also for some of the information is that it's partly about timing, as Dr Gardner said, but it's also about as the innovation and methodologies to work out what is actually happening from various decisions moves forward, actually picking up those new techniques and applying them. I guess that's why one of the messages from me being here today is that there are tools and techniques that at the moment are innovative and only tried by a few people, but as they become more refined, then there's an opportunity to actually do some quite sophisticated accounting and in particular to start matching up those different activities and actually see what taken as a whole, what does the carbon account look like. With that in mind, one of the things that we found as an institution when we were trying to understand is this bio heat plant, the best thing to do for a low carbon piece of infrastructure. It ended up being much more complicated than we ever imagined. It hasn't stopped us doing it because we still believe it's the right thing for us as an institution to do, but what has led us to be much more nuanced about is how we might influence a broader system to actually also make it the right decision for the whole of the carbon system for Scotland and beyond. It really speaks to Mr McKenzie's point about the electric vehicles. If you've got something sound in place and you've got the infrastructure to have something sound in place, that evaluation of it will change as the electric cars in that instance change themselves, but also as our ability to account for them changes as well. I think that those two things need to move alongside each other. Are the carbon accounting methods being used by the Scottish Government to evaluate their policies as up-to-date, as cutting-edge, as they could be or as they need to be in order to assess policy effectively? No, not yet, but that's another reason to give evidence. There are probably as up-to-date as they can be given the understanding of how to do carbon accounting from four or five years ago, but there's an opportunity for the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government to leap forward and get on to the cutting edge of it, as that's slowly but surely emerging. One of the other problems is that, with the carbon accounts within the Scottish system, there are many different ones. Each of them do different things, so a better clarity about what the carbon accounts do is quite important. If I can maybe illustrate that with a very clear example from the Climate Change Act, there is a requirement to produce production carbon, so what carbon is emitted in this country. At the same time, the Climate Change Act requires a consumption carbon figured to be tabled each year, and whilst the production carbon is drawing back, the consumption carbon is increasing. Obviously, the control that Scotland might have over those two modes, if you like, is quite different, but having the conversation about how these different accounts look when you reflect on each other is by far the most important thing, because that's where the learning comes from. What are the limitations of the current carbon accounting methods being used with the Scottish Government? Are there any areas where there are inaccuracies creeping in that we should be aware of going forward? I would say that there are three areas where there might be limitations that could be addressed. The first is the extent to which the infrastructure plans and the RPP are not fully integrated together and played out as to how these things fit together. If those policy aspects could be better fitted together, the carbon accounts associated with them could also be better fitted together. As an account of our contribution, if you like, is to put information behind better quality decisions and joined up aspects of considering transport and heating and all the elements together. The second limitation is that particularly in previous sessions, where we have looked at the carbon account of the budget, that carbon account is produced, but it doesn't seem to inform any decisions. The accounting to the decision nexus is quite often missing. I would say that that's a limitation, not for all forms of the carbon accounting, because obviously the production accounts and what we might need to do under section 36 etc is joined up, if you like, to decisions, even if a timing might be somewhat delayed in the present moment. The third element of the limitations, then, is the understanding of what the carbon accounting might be telling us. That's a limitation that we all share, it's not solely the exactly. I think that's where a partnership approach between the folk who are very good in this field and people making the decision on the ground would be necessary, because like most new forms of accounting, we have some idea about how they operate, but we couldn't truly know until you try them out, test them and test them in real decision making contexts. Along with innovation in technologies, accounting information is a technology of sort as well, and the innovation there relies on people experimenting with it as well. I think there are the limitations of the underlining joined upness, the joined up of the carbon account decisions, and then the joined upness, if you like, of the ideas about how to do this well with the practice of doing it. So I think that there are three elements in there. Notwithstanding what I said a moment ago about interpretation, are there any elements of the accounting process which are now or in danger over in the future producing errors or inaccuracies in the figures that we interpret? Some of the accounting accounting is pretty tight and pretty clear, and that's, if you like, the national level accounts that the Climate Change Act targets and that the RPP looks at, for example, they're pretty tight. I guess the kind of areas where there are much more range of estimates, and you'll see from the paperwork that I've presented, huge ranges of estimates, is more the what if kind of questions. So if we did this, what might be the broader effect and what might be the dimensions of that broader effect? The error bars there are enormous, and so it's not so much the singular figure that's important, it's knowing that it is highly uncertain, which is probably the most valuable thing. So again, the level of accuracy and usefulness and reliability of different forms of carbon account are different as well. So some of them are very tight and really quite robust. Others, particularly the what if type questions are much looser, and they're knowing how big your ranges are, probably the more important than what are the actual numbers at each end. So these types of figures or interpretations would be more useful to us in a one, two, three, five-year cycle than a 20, 50 cycle. For example, yes, yes. But it's also, and this is where I think it does relate to the other points that people have made about infrastructure, is that even for us as a university having a glimpse of how negative our positive choice to go for biomass might be on the broader system alerts us to maybe wanting to say something about land use policy and forestry policy as a way of supporting a micro level good choice to be a bigger good choice as well. So I think it's not purely, you know, three to five years, it can be quite long-term views that be informed by that as well. Do we dare to look on the micro level? I think it's really important that we look to evaluate Scotland's reforms as they are ongoing. So if we look at the energy efficiency programmes, we are going to be repeating the installation of measures in 1.6 million homes. But are we learning from that? Because there must be ways that we can do things smarter, the use of different approaches to construction, possibly off-site construction. We're probably not doing enough to evaluate the effectiveness of our programmes. Are we getting the benefits of the measures that's to people with minimizing the rebound effect, the efficient use of their heating as well? There are 32 local authorities delivering area-based schemes. How much are we doing to co-ordinate shared learning from that so we can get the best from it to take advantage of it? We also have very different housing in Scotland compared to the rest of the UK. A lot of the overall approaches to assessing the energy efficiency is based on the UK level, rather than taking into account the traditional build that we have in Scotland with far more tenements or the much more exposed location. There is the need for that research development to ensure that we make the best approaches to improving our housing and that we feed the practical experience into theoretical models to ensure that we make the best use of the large amounts of funding that is required to improve the energy efficiency. It was just for Professor Bevington, probably, again. We were talking about normie earlier on. Given that we have already changed the methodology for carbon accounting in Scotland, are any other countries ahead of us in this area? How do we compare ourselves internationally if there are different levels of accounting across Europe and the world? I do not have full view of all the carbon accounting going on, but the views that I have in individual countries are that they tend to do carbon accounting in association with the things they either do well or do badly. The other place that I follow with a bit of depth of knowledge is New Zealand. Their carbon accounting for particularly animal and agricultural produced CO2 equivalents is very sophisticated for obvious reasons. They have lots of runaments. 50% of their impact is agricultural for their carbon, so they are really focused on that. Where Scotland is best in the world is because of the early innovation with the Climate Change Act and because of the RPP, but also because of the joined-upness and the size, the integrating accounts of how everything links together is where a big potential lies. It is not fully realised, but that is where the excellence lies. I do not think that there is anywhere that is doing the whole thing better than here, but there are parts of the world that are doing, if you like, their problematic carbon better. The whole nitrogen, carbon, land, water, flux, for example, is modelled superbly within New Zealand on an agricultural system basis, but that is because that is their problem. It has quite different emission problems. I would like to ask the witnesses if they can define the intrinsic benefits of low-carbon infrastructure investments, the social, environmental and economic benefits of that. If they can define them, are they taken account of in the current budgetary system, or should they be? I will have a first up. I think that there is partial recognition of the broader benefits of the infrastructure decisions that the Scottish Government makes with its capital investment decisions. I think that the recognition of the benefits, particularly that low-carbon infrastructure has to play, are acknowledged but not necessarily then borne out in the actual decision making, so we see language that reflects the value of low-carbon infrastructure, but as Sarah alluded to at the beginning, we still see only a 50 per cent of our capital investment being aligned with low-carbon infrastructure. The task force commission from Green Alliance to look at what particularly the role of the public sector was in catalyzing investment in low-carbon infrastructure, what the benefits were, identified particular attributes of the public sector's contribution to this type of infrastructure through, for instance, supporting enabling infrastructure. One example would be district heating networks, which are necessary in order to connect isolated district heating communities, so you get greater benefits of scale. Support emerging infrastructure, such as energy storage, where there is a need for intervention to support that market and reduce the risk. Support innovative low-carbon technologies, which Theresa provided an example previously of where the Scottish Government's the Energy Challenge Fund is doing that. Leveraging additional private sector investment, there is significant evidence of that in the energy efficiency sector, where the public sector's investment can be shown to pull in significant returns from the private sector. Addressing market failures, which is what this is all about, the climate change problem being the biggest market failure and the need of the public sector to, either through investment or through regulation, correct for that. Those are the particular roles that the public sector has to play in instigating or supporting greater deployment of low-carbon infrastructure. Others might want to speak to the wider benefits that that has to bring. I am happy to have a stab at the transport benefits of emphasising greater low-carbon. We talked about electric vehicles. We have a major bus manufacturer in Scotland, and I think that switching our buses to more electric buses would have a benefit straight away for that manufacturer. In addition to that, if we have fewer short trips being made by car in an urban context as we do in northern European cities, air quality improves. At the moment, we have an issue about air quality in our towns and our cities, both in terms of a health implication but also in terms of finds that local authorities are facing from Europe. In addition to that, all the evidence from towns and cities in northern Europe that have emphasised greater movement by a low-carbon method—walking, cycling, bus provision, tram or whatever—in the public transport mode, show that those are towns and cities that people enjoy living in. They spend more time shopping in. There is more time spent in recreation within the town itself. It is a more prosperous town and a more prosperous city. There are lots of good examples of that. I would see those as associated benefits of emphasising a greater level of low-carbon in terms of transport. Can I follow up on the transport side of things? We heard mention earlier on about the strategic transport project review, which is conducted on an on-going basis. What I am asking here is whether low-carbon infrastructure can score higher or lower when taking into account which projects we should be prioritising. I have a project in my constituency, which is a bypassing may bowl. People have been campaigning for about 50 years on road safety, congestion and economic grounds for such a bypass. That is not a low-carbon infrastructure project, but I would score it very highly. I am asking you why a low-carbon infrastructure project should be scored higher than that particular one. Why should a low-carbon infrastructure project be scored higher than the bypass to fund something else? In terms of the Scottish Transport and Praisal Guidance, I understand that time savings is a big driver for assessment. I do not think that it takes everything into the round. The thing about transport is that everything has to be seen in the context of where that project is and the effect that it has. There is no one rule that will fix it all. I do not want to deny you your bypass. There might be lots of benefits. There will be health benefits and other benefits to may bowl as well, not just in terms of other time-saving benefits in terms of goods vehicles getting through. At the moment, I do not think that low-carbon capital infrastructure investment does score very highly, so it does not really feature in the strategic transport projects review at all. I have a motivation that really supports Ms Bray's earlier point about behaviour change in households, but perhaps relay what we are trying to track in a research sense at the institution where I work. What we are trying to do is to take our energy bills in-house, which will have an economic benefit given that we are working on a variable, but a fairly fixed income. We will be able to spend more money on our core purpose as opposed to on electricity. There is an economic benefit for us as an institution as we invest in low-carbon infrastructure, although it takes a lot of investment, but it will pay back. I think that there are further spillover effects that we are identifying through a series of other research projects. One is the spillover effect in terms of how people who work for us view their energy-saving behaviour as both at home and at work. It really follows very much an eye-will-if-you-will kind of ethos in that if our institution is seen as trying to reduce our own carbon footprint, they feel much more motivated to be part of the behaviour change that is required of people working for us to actually help to support that as well. Many of our staff take that from their home life, come into work and then almost see it being ignored at work, then they are not motivated to do that. The fact that we are trying to innovate in low-carbon infrastructure as an organisation is really enthusing staff, seeing themselves as part of a bigger work and home seeking to address those issues. What we are also finding is that we use ourselves as a case study for a lot of our teaching with our students. If we are going to particularly—this is where different forms of carbon become quite important—we have quite a large international cohort of students and their footprint of them coming and going from us for their education is actually quite large and we have a sense of what that is. Even though it is their footprint, our behaviour induces it and indeed the wish for a world-class education system will induce transport carbon. At the same time, we think that there is something to be said for bringing students, particularly from countries that may be not so advanced in thinking about climate change, to a country that is innovating in a series of ways. For us, a big spillover effect of our own innovation, but also the innovation in Scotland, is the ability to teach and communicate and take that back with other students. For example, our Russian students are always amazed by recycling. They have never seen it before. While we may occasionally beat ourselves up at being not very good at most things, we are really good at lots of things. Likewise, the whole idea that you might start building low-carbon infrastructure, the charging points for electric vehicles outside various parts of the university, those spillover effects, if you like, as being an exemplar and seeking to articulate what we are doing as a nation or as an organisation, is also important in knowledge terms. The energy efficiency programme is very different from any other capital programme. You are looking at carrying out works to 60 per cent of the housing stock in Scotland that is below the required standard. That is affecting millions of people. It is not just when they occasionally drive down the A9 or whatever, it is every day of their life that they will be benefiting from the improvement of the energy efficiency of their homes. That leads through to a number of things. It is across Scotland, so you are looking for jobs across Scotland. You are looking for long-term jobs as well. Currently, it is not the people there who have got the skills to do the jobs. There will have to be a big training up of people to do that job, to ensure that those jobs remain within Scotland. However, if you have a long-time programme, people will see that as something to invest for the future. You have jobs across Scotland. The health benefits and a number of people are under-heating their homes, which results in respiratory issues, particularly among the elderly population and young children. There will be direct benefits there through to the health service on it. You then look to see that there will be savings in people's individual amount of people who are spending on energy, which allows them to invest in other things within the local economy as well. It is very labour intensive compared to a high-tech approach, which means that that money stays in Scotland. It is a very different programme because of its widespread nature. You are not spending that much on any individual home. It is large amounts when you do it at the scale that we are proposing that it needs to be done. Do you think that other effects are taken account of when it comes to budgetary decisions? I do not have the detailed knowledge of how those are taken into account. It is very unlikely because it is so different from any of the other big infrastructure programmes. It is much easier to evaluate the benefits of putting in the fourth road bridge compared to doing huge works across all our housing stock. That begs the question. Should all those factors be taken into account when we are making capital investment decisions? Dr Gardner? Absolutely, there should be. I think that all of this... So, how do we gather that information? How do we put it into the system? I think that there needs to be an explicit recognition of the longer-term benefits or costs associated with decision-making for our infrastructure and a greater effort to account for the preventative spend consequences that can be attached to infrastructure decisions that we make today. A big thrust of the low-carbon infrastructure taskforce work is to recognise or to highlight that the decisions that we will be making now will be those that we are living with in 2050. If we make the wrong decisions now and we lock ourselves into the high-carbon infrastructure that contradicts the Climate Change Act, we will have to spend considerably more money to retrofit that and to fix it. Yet, that longer-term perspective needs to be brought to bear on the infrastructure decisions. I do not know if that is right, but there is often a sense that the policy decisions within the RPP are considered in the context of the Climate Change Act. There is not the same explicit acknowledgement with the capital budget and the infrastructure budget is not so closely aligned to delivering on the climate change act. It does not have that same read across, the same effort to try and match one with the other. I think there are some things that could be done such as ensuring that there is a carbon price on our transport projects, which would go a long way to recognising the long-term costs of some of the road-building programmes and what is associated with those and would elevate up those active travel investments that would also, if we also accounted for the improvement in the air quality that we would experience in our urban environments, would also bring those right to the top. It is where you draw your boundaries around the consequences of your infrastructure decisions, and at the moment I fear that we draw them too narrowly, and as a result we prioritise short-term investments on big bits of kit over distributed investments across Scotland that would have long-term benefits. Just one example, just to say that on energy efficiency, analysis has shown that that offers a return on investment of 2 to 1, so it is very competitive when stacked up against other traditional infrastructure investments. Is there a low carbon task force of any views on that? Well actually I think that Sam has very eloquently expressed those, but actually I wanted to make the observation that the committee really is putting its finger on the number of the problem here, because the Scottish Government is trying to mainstream climate change considerations, but it is also trying to balance those with economic considerations and it is your bypass, it is things like that. The economic considerations do not necessarily sit naturally with the low carbon pathway, so investment in your roads infrastructure for example. I think that the points that Jan was making around having better read across between the infrastructure investment plans and RPP, and actually thinking about social infrastructure and the impacts on social infrastructure spend, so we have all touched on that. The spending down the line, which happens as a result of not having taken the low carbon infrastructure decision, if we could get better at capturing that, counting that and building that into our infrastructure decision making, it would be extremely valuable. I do not know if Jan has any thoughts on how that might be done or achieved. Again there are social accounting techniques. One of the things that occurs to me particularly around the energy efficiency is that you can put a social account alongside that. Given increasing warmth and well-being, what is the human benefit of that? Should you wish to, you would be able to model and get some sort of gas on the reduced health costs that are borne by economically, but also the health costs that maybe do not represent in the economic system but are borne by people? It is a particular programme where a realisation of those multitude of benefits that come from low carbon, and low carbon being pro-social as well, might be a very interesting case study to set up quite a study around that. I am pitching for this lady because she is a person that is the expert to do it. I suppose that my first question is largely directed to Theresa Bray. The Scottish Government has made a commitment to making energy efficiency and infrastructure priority. You will probably know that the First Minister has already announced a significant part of her manifesto in terms of her commitment to building 50,000 affordable homes over the course of the next session of Parliament. Given that those new homes will have to comply with part 6 of the energy standard efficiency part of the building standards, they really are energy efficient compared to older housing from a previous era. To what extent can we do that with new housing in terms of reducing our carbon output? I think that we have made significant progress along the lines of suggestion of increasing the number of energy performance certificates at sea or above over the past few years. I wonder if you could confirm that. What bothers me is that we are reaching a problem area that I feel with the existing housing stock that has picked much of the low-hanging fruit. Over 60 per cent of accessible lofts have been insulated, over 60 per cent of cavities have been insulated. Given that we have got maybe 800,000 or more of our homes at 30 per cent or so in that hard-to-treat category, how much more yield realistically in carbon terms and energy efficiency terms can we get from the older housing stock? My final point on that same theme is that the committee is dealing with the private rented sector bill at the moment. Landlords, for instance, who are responsible and spend a lot of money insulating their properties and doing all that work, do not get a penny more in rent for it nor do the people, nor do the social housing landlords get higher rents for well-insulated properties despite the fact that tenants have significant savings and fuel bills. In terms of house sales, houses that are well insulated do not command higher prices necessarily despite the energy performance certificates. To what extent do you think that market forces in not being aligned and not being sensitive to energy efficiency are actually unhelpful and how can they be made to help? I appreciate that. I am touching on a lot of areas and I will move on to the other territory with my next question, but I wonder whether you could address those points and any other panel members. I do not dispute the need for new housing. New housing is not replacing existing housing in the exceptional cases, but we need new housing because of population growth, because of changes in household size. It is a desperate need for new housing for everybody to live in, but the vast majority of the stock that will be here in 2050 has already been built. Over 80 per cent of that stock is there, so there is that need to it. We talked about low-hanging fruit. It is probably only the lowest of the low-hanging fruit that has been addressed. There still are figures that are probably slightly better than you say in terms of lofts and cavities, but we see how we can overcome those issues to do with lofts. There are not difficult issues about how to treat lofts. You can do access to things about tenements that we still have. A lot of tenement lofts have not been insulated, and that is not because of technological difficulties, but it is how you engage with householders. You have got multiple occupations there, and we should be using the Tenement Act to get that done. There are lots of practical things that can be done, but it is organising of the market as much as anything to make it happen. We have done very little on our pre-1919 stock, and that is not to say that things cannot be done on that stock. It is good housing for the vast majority of it, the tenements that we have or the older housing. There are things that can be done, the new approaches that Historic Scotland are looking at, the issues about the ventilation within those houses. There are things that have stopped putting in double glazing within Historic properties that there are now ways of overcoming that. There are things to be done, which are not that difficult to do and perhaps not quite as easy as a standard insulation of a loft or standard cavities, but there are things that we can be done and are not a step change in the level of expenditure that is required. There will be some properties that are such poor condition that you should not be looking at insulating and that they should not continue to be lived in. It is a very small proportion of the housing, but there are some, particularly those houses that have been extended numerous times and have never had a proper work done to them. There are things that need to be done, but going on to your further question about valuing energy efficiency, I think that the real difficulty with one of the reasons why energy efficiency is not valued and so you cannot add to the price is because there is so little housing there that looking at the rental properties people just need a house to rent or a flat to rent, and they cannot put the value on that. There are issues about house prices as well, that it is very much driven by location on that, and if you were able to choose between two houses with all the same factors, energy efficiency may come to it, but the way the market is currently operating is that there are too many conflicting demands and there is not enough supply to be able to make those choices there. With regard to the private rented sector, some of that housing is in the worst condition, and there are real issues about the return that has been made by private sector landlords on housing and the housing that they are letting is sub-standard. There is the need for minimum standards to ensure, at the point of rent or the point of sale, that those properties are brought up to what should be considered as an acceptable level of housing for people to live in, and that unless we introduce minimum standards that is not going to happen, and it is not just about energy efficiency, there are issues about disrepair in a lot of our private venting stock, our private rented stock is the worst stock that we have in Scotland, and there is a need to improve that. With the returns that are happening to private landlords and the low interest rates, there is very little justification to say that they should be looking at higher rents to support that. They can afford to do it, and there is a need to ensure that that happens. If I could just tease out one further issue that is kind of allied to what we have been discussing. I have heard that an energy expert advised a constituent of mine recently with an older traditional home just to knock it down and build a new one. It was on the basis that this home was in the hard-to-treat, and when I talked about hard-to-treat, I was not just talking about loft spaces accessible or otherwise, I was talking about the whole home, because I am sure that he will agree with me that it is important to insulate the complete envelope of the building, not just the loft space. What concerns me here, and I think what this energy expert was getting at, that in terms of the achievable U values, what is per metre squared per degree Kelvin, that it just wasn't good value to treat this home in terms of the opportunity of increasing its insulation just didn't make sense, neither in economic terms or energy terms, by comparison with building the equivalent new home. Do you feel that there is some merit in that argument? It is always a difficult thing to say that somebody's home is no longer fit for purpose. We have some of the oldest stock in the world, in the UK. If you look at some of the remote properties in rural areas, you have often had small button ben, it has had the extension added in for the kitchen, it has had a loft conversion, and lots of things are just making do. There will be some housing that is not fit for the 21st century. It may not also meet accessibility standards as people get older. Can those houses be adapted so that they can maintain living in their homes? If you are going to be spending £30,000 on doing up a house that may well be in the wrong location and without accessibility standards, not all homes will be able to bear that. It is a very small minority of homes. It is only 2 per cent of homes in Scotland that are the lowest energy efficiency G rated. Those are the ones that sometimes you can do things on to those homes, but for a few of them you say, actually, are we better building a new high-quality energy efficiency home that has accessibility to other issues, to other services as well, instead of being two miles out of the local hamlet that they are able to access to some other people as well? We do have to occasionally question whether we should be building all homes. We have seen that in some of the housing stock that was built in the pre-war summer tower blocks. We have accepted that housing is no longer acceptable, but perhaps in other housing we have to times do that. That is very useful, because Mr Lauder mentioned housing. I think that I would like to make mention of transport and transport connections, particularly when we are building a new estate or a new group of houses. If we are building them in a location, if we lock in the need to use the car for every trip so that we do not give at least some option to get to either a transport hub or ensure that there is sufficient design put in to allow a bus route to be through the estate, we may undo the energy efficiency of the housing stock. People feel that the only option that I have is to take the car, no matter how short the journey is. I think that we need to give a bit of thought to that. It strikes me that the Scandinavian experience seems to be that the transport links are the first thing that go in and are considered. The housing is designed around that, so that new build is as accessible and as well linked as it can be to the local area. That is a very interesting point. I am very grateful to you for mentioning that. We are undertaking a routine branch review of the planning system at the moment. Do you feel that there is quite a yield, a lot of potential gain here? Rather than spending the money in terms of how we plan the next 50 years of built environment and infrastructure, perhaps we go back to learn lessons from our forefathers, where people primarily walk to work because the housing was close to the place of work, as well as some of the transport hub issues? Do you think that, without much expenditure at all, we could make some real gains? Yes, I think that the policy that we have, the planning policy called designing streets in Scotland, is a exemplary policy that is very, very good. If we were delivering all new build to that design, we would have a grid pattern, linear builds that would allow people to access. I totally appreciate that, in the modern world, people do not necessarily live near where they work. We have built in commuting and sometimes long-distance commuting into our housing developments. We have missed an option where we are creating new public transport links, such as new rail lines that are being reopened and roads. We are not doing enough to ensure that we are building links from the new housing stock to those to allow people to use public transport and then for the onward journey. That takes another point, which is how public transport is joined up. Is it possible to make a more seamless journey via walking or cycling to a transport hub, a frequent visitor to Switzerland, where it is very easy, even in quite small towns, to make a very well-joined up journey, so that you can walk, you can get a bus or you can walk, you can get a train and you pretty much know that the whole thing is joined up? I do not think that we have designed that into our housing planning. I also think that we have had, but perhaps designing streets will help that. Perhaps the planning system could do more to encourage greater building on Brownfield within the urban setting, rather than continually build outside the town, so that the town continually grows and we compromise the green belt, so that distances become greater. It might be possible for us to make distances much shorter. Dr Gardner, do you want to start? Very quickly, just to go back to the energy efficiency point and to try to unpick the real value of the designation of energy efficiency as a national infrastructure priority, which is a particularly welcome commitment, is how it changes the nature of the approach to energy efficiency from being an annual cycle of uncertainty around what the budget might be and an absence of any clear goal to hopefully providing a very clear outcome, which the Scottish Government will provide. We would urge them to set that goal as being a minimum of a C by 2025, but by establishing that very goal-orientated approach it puts the energy efficiency programme on the same kind of standing as other infrastructure projects where you would never envisage pursuing a bridge development without knowing where it's going to end. We should take the same approach to our energy efficiency structure. We need to know what that goal is. It will provide a very clear market signal that will help ensure that we get that training and upskilling, because there's a clear market being created as a consequence of that level of ambition. It was to reinforce the value of that designation but to say that it needs to be complemented by a clear outcome so that everyone knows what we're working towards. Anyone else? I just wanted to add to John's comments. In our long list of 10 projects, low-carbon transport hubs is one of them, as well as re-engineering city centres. Equally to the housing question, transport location, the location of public transport is vital, but water supply and energy supply need to be taken into the mix when we're looking at planning policy. I'll maybe move on, because that ties in quite neatly to my next question, which is really about what infrastructure areas that you feel should be priority areas for government in terms of spending but also in terms of other government policy. We've touched on planning and other spending areas but also complementary policy areas where we can achieve greater effect. Of the 10 long list projects, they roughly divide into three categories. One is transport, the second is energy and the third is energy efficiency. We're looking at energy from waste water and growing local energy economies and so on. In taking the evidence and looking at the peer review of the 10 projects, we've begun to realise that identifying it down to a list of three from 10 is probably not going to be what we thought. In a way, those projects are straw men, if you like, but looking at them in the round has enabled us to understand the systems approach. It's exactly what Jan is saying about the systems approach to this. You do not take a decision on one of those projects without impacting on one of the others. In fact, I think that the short list that we might end up with will look very different to how we'd perhaps envisaged it, so we might have a transport one, an energy one, an energy storage, energy efficiency one. To take it back to where the emissions are, I said earlier how 50 per cent of our emissions are from the heat sector. It's an area that is crying out for leadership and investment. It's an area where there's an absence of private sector investment. There's a lack of confidence as to what the development of that sector will be in the future. There are uncertainties that come from Westminster. We may hear this afternoon about the future of things such as the renewable heat incentive, but there is a very clear case to be made for the Scottish Government combining its planning and its regulatory powers with targeted investment of its capital infrastructure in order to bring together isolated heat pockets, district heating pockets. Edinburgh is an example of where there's a number of district heating bits of infrastructure that, if they were combined, would offer the potential for other heat loads to connect to those. That won't happen in the absence of, I suspect, support from the public sector in the provision of that pipe work. The other area, which will sound a little repetitive, I suspect, but just to highlight how the emissions from the transport sector are pretty much the same now as they were in 1990. Despite the fact that we've had growth in car kilometres, but the reason that they're the same as they were is largely because of efficiencies that have been driven by EU directives. We do need to start to plan our infrastructure to support low-carbon behaviours if we're to drive down those emissions. I refer back to how the RPP indicates an expectation of a 300 per cent increase in emissions savings in the forthcoming years. Infrastructure decisions won't secure that policy decisions will have to do that, but longer term it's an indication of the level of change that we're going to have to see within our transport infrastructure. One of the infrastructure projects that the low-carbon infrastructure task force, we didn't identify these. These came from Jacobs. We commissioned Jacobs engineering firm to canvas opinion amongst different stakeholders. One of them was the upgrading and improvement of our existing rail network. For instance, looking at how do we the line from Perth to Inverness, which is for all those that have to travel on it, is subject to any number of different problems as you might get held up by other trains because it's single carriage at various points along the line. Looking at opportunities there to increase the capacity of our existing rail network is a clear example of where we need to make the alternative to the car a more attractive proposition, and that's the place where the Scottish Government's infrastructure budget could be well targeted at. At the risk of repeating an earlier point, forgive me if I do, I think that where transport sometimes works in isolation is that it doesn't look at for example the health implications, not just in air pollution, which is definitely having an effect and that there's a figure of £2 billion being the cost of the economy of failing air pollution, but in addition to that congestion. In terms of health, we're now looking, as I understand it, from the chief medical officer at 10 per cent of the NHS budget being spent on treating the symptoms of obesity, a big driver for which is inactivity and the inability to be able to have everyday walk and everyday cycling to and from the places that you go to and which you might use your car. There's a major implication for transport there in helping health to hit its targets and reduce the burden on its budget. I think that those two things could be combined much more closely. I don't think that they necessarily are at the moment. There's a very useful tool produced by the World Health Organization called the HEAT tool, health economic assessment tool, which is used. It's the point that I wanted to make earlier, convener. I'm not sure that that tool is used in the appraisal of transport projects, particularly small local transport projects. We use it in the evidence that we give to the sustainable and active travel team whose funds we manage and they give benefit to cost ratios of £13 to £1 spent, which is a pretty good return on investment. I think that that's a tool that could be used more widely and it would bring together health and transport. I think that that's a complementary benefit of a greater investment in active travel in terms of walking and cycling. Are there any investment programmes that have already been undertaken by the Scottish Government that have been very effective and that we can perhaps magnify, expand and roll out across Scotland? The project that we've been running for five years is called Community Links. It's growing every year in terms of the funds that we manage. It's a match-funded partnership between local authorities and other stakeholders and Transport Scotland. We act, if you like, as the holder for that budget. Every year, we're over-subscribed with ideas. I've mentioned the benefit to cost ratios. I think that they are very successful. It's been a pivotal project in helping Edinburgh, for example, to where it's getting to now. That's a very good evidence. In addition to that, there's growing evidence from other towns and cities that that programme is beginning to have an effect. It's early days. It's only five years, so the data set is not substantial enough to make a big assessment on it. However, yes, that's a project that is going well and is seen as a success throughout the UK. Thank you very much. Very quickly, just to flag how the district heating loan has been a competitive process, and we've seen investments in district heating across Scotland as a consequence. They need to be brought together and where possible, in large, so that it's not too isolated, but we're getting network development rather than isolated district heating. However, that's a fund that would be great if it was able to continue. Finally, the energy efficiency now is a programme that, albeit we would say that the funding hasn't been adequate, but it's beginning to show its benefits. We're beginning to see, year on year, the number of properties that have had loft insulation or cavity wall coming out. You're beginning to see the impact of that. What we're urging is that it's not at a scale that will reap the transformative benefits that it can offer, but there's a lot of learning from that and a lot of benefits that have been enjoyed as a consequence of the existing programmes that we've got on energy efficiency. What's the converse of that? What infrastructure investment should be avoided in the future if we are concerned about achieving our targets, climate change targets? I think infrastructure that supports high carbon behaviours that is dependent, so a road building programme which envisages that all of those roads will be low carbon because I'll have electric vehicles driving on them isn't a coherent vision of the 2050 future that we're heading towards. You can't replicate existing car use with electric vehicle car use, so a road building programme that is dependent on the mass deployment of EVs at the scale that we see internal combustion engines being enjoyed today doesn't square up. We have to see a greater realignment of our trunk road investment towards those bits of infrastructure that, as we've talked about this session, offer wider benefits, not just the low carbon benefits, but the wider health benefits that John talked about, the obesity challenge that Scotland faces and the UK faces. We need to step back from the perspective that we often bring to our infrastructure decisions and try to see them further in the round. If we did that, we'd begin to be a lot more critical of some of the decisions that we've made in the last 10 years or so and see the benefits of the alternatives. Anyone else? Reinforce that point, because I don't think there's a list of things you would never seek to do because infrastructure has multiple aspects to be social, economic and whatnot. Dr Gardner's point is that you would look very carefully at design and not take normal design for granted. I think that that's maybe also a part of the hesitancy around this table. You say, what would you stop doing? Well, it's invidious to choose what you'd stop doing, but anything you had to do, you'd have to do much better. I think that's probably maybe sums up where we're at. In that vein, it's been suggested that an independent Scottish infrastructure commission should be set up in order to more effectively direct infrastructure investments, both the public and private sectors, towards a low-carbon Scotland. Do you agree with this initiative and could you explain how it might work? I think that it was in our evidence, so perhaps I should have a go at explaining it. Yes, I agree that this is a sensible suggestion. It is a suggestion, but I think that one of the points that I think is behind a lot of what we've talked about today is around governance and decision making and integration and being able to see the whole when making decisions. Part of the reason that the low-carbon infrastructure task force came about was because we weren't observing the existence of a pipeline of low-carbon infrastructure projects, so it was a response to what we regarded as a need to identify those projects. I think that there is a need for that infrastructure development and that plan to be taken forward in such a way as to ensure that we have confidence that it's consistent with the Climate Change Act. That requires some scrutiny, whether that be an independent commission or a separate governance process that the Scottish Government establishes would be open to debate. However, I think that bringing in expert opinion into the room that understands the infrastructure challenges that we're facing as we make the transition to a low-carbon economy, we can see where the need is most pressing, we can see where the Scottish Government has a particular role to play to catalyze change, which I think would be really advantageous. Since our president, Sir John Armit, who's in town later on today, is a commissioner on the National Infrastructure Commission, it won't surprise you to learn that the institution of civil engineers at any rate thinks that infrastructure commissions are a good idea, largely because the life cycle of infrastructure, as the committee understands, only too well runs beyond parliamentary terms and requires cross-party support in many instances if it's to be delivered effectively, if it's to be designed, planned and delivered effectively, but equally, if you're going to make decisions around looking very carefully at the why and actually looking at maintaining existing infrastructure rather than building new and actually making decisions about when you don't build new infrastructure. It remains to be seen the extent to which Scottish Government or how Scottish Government will relate to the National Infrastructure Commission, or indeed exactly what the National Infrastructure Commission means is that a UK-wide infrastructure commission or whether, indeed, there should be a separate Scottish infrastructure commission. The types of issues that the National Infrastructure Commission is looking at in the first year perhaps don't seem at first sight particularly of relevance to Scotland, however, since they're looking at Northern Powerhouse and Cross Penine Transport and so on, however, I would certainly the issues around energy and energy storage are of keen interest to us in Scotland, particularly since we have a great deal of expertise and indeed the energy storage much of it is in Scotland, in the UK, but also the cross-border rail is of particular interest to us and high-speed rail and transport issues like that, which could— What are the benefits of having the commission and how much would it cost to establish that in Scotland? I would certainly be happy to come back to you on how much it might cost. I'm not clear what the costs are associated with it. I don't think that there are any great order of magnitudes since it's largely comprises of external experts who give off their time and the institution will actually be supporting the infrastructure commission in terms of some of the national needs assessment work that it's doing, but in terms of benefits, having that arm's length body for governance from government who can give a clear sense of direction who can try and get cross-party support around particular issues and particularly when those issues are perhaps politically difficult to take, having an infrastructure commission advising government and trying to gain cross-party support on those types of issues can be a very valuable contribution. It's worked particularly well in countries like Australia and Canada, where they've had infrastructure commissions. I was just going to ask how we avoid the well-known situation when you set up a commission and it sets up a list of priorities and governments simply pick from that list based on their own political priorities. It's interesting that the initial work on the infrastructure commission was done on behalf of the Labour Party by Sir John Armit. In fact, it's been adopted more or less wholesale by the existing Government in Scotland, but it's certainly a risk that you identify. I'm not quite sure how we overcome that one. That's politics, I guess. Scotland has sought to be a leading country in the world in terms of the climate change arena, and certainly we've been acknowledged by people like the United Nations as being a shining example of the quotation. We've got a way to go to fulfil that ambition. Can you suggest innovative ways that can put us at the forefront in this field into the future? From my sector, I can't offer you an innovative way. I think that what we've seen in other small northern European countries is the way to go. It's not terribly innovative. It might be innovative to us to follow the Swedish model. Perhaps one innovation is the Swedish model of aiming to have no fatalities on your roads. Vision Zero is what it's called in Sweden. That has meant a very radical redesign of how roads, streets, residential areas, shopping areas, speed limits are set and enforced, how roads are built and how they are maintained. That would be innovative, so that might be one to follow, and the rest of it is just good practice from other countries not so different to us. I would echo that and say that it's really not innovation that's required but often leadership. We have world-leading climate legislation, but there are other countries around northern Europe that have world-leading climate policies, and in many cases they're the norm, and we can do an awful lot to learn from those, whether that being district heating from Copenhagen, which isn't to say that it's just automatically can be transferred wholesale over here and be applied, but there's learning that can be enjoyed. Similarly, in the transport round where there's plenty of European cities which are able to demonstrate thriving, productive, enjoyable places to be that have very, very high levels of active travel. These are attractive cities to be in, so I would caution against a kind of search for innovation. There will be examples, particularly in the power sector, where there's a need for new technologies, but more often than not it's the need to apply what we know is necessary, so demand management measures within the transport sector have been highlighted by the Committee on Climate Change, they've been highlighted by this committee in its previous considerations. They were in the very first draft of the report on proposals and policies, and yet they've never really featured and they've never come to the fore, and it seems it's perverse to think that we can secure the climate change targets, the low-carbon economy, enjoy the benefits of a cleaner urban environment without matching our investment in public transport with also demand management measures to encourage people to get into that public transport. We're not looking at a huge big project that you can have your stickers over to say that this is going to be a low-carbon solution to all our needs. Lots of things we want to do are actually probably not going to be visible to anybody long-term if you carry out the improve the energy efficiency nobody sees it, the form of heating that we have, whether it's district heating or individual boilers won't be seen, but I think the thing we should be looking to be really proud of is having a culture that embraces the low-carbon approaches that with start thinking about things that you start looking at one of the standard things about valuing the increase in house prices, that is not necessarily good for society. Actually having a culture that values the role that we're playing in society, that values the role that individuals can enjoy the cities they live in because of the low-carbon approaches with active travel, that they can live in houses that they enjoy living in, that they're the public spaces that people enjoy, it will make a much better place for people to live in. It might not be something you can be as easy to assess, it will hopefully make people happier to live there, and that's what we should be looking to value, not having some large infrastructure project that you can put a sticker on. One of the great joys of being called as a witness to these kind of committees is I find out huge amount of what's going on from my co-witnesses and other things, so I envy you your position in many ways. But I think really coming back to Dr Gardner's point, one of the innovations that I think is available to Scotland, especially given the passage of time since the passing of the act now, is actually to learn from ourselves. I think there's no silver bullet of innovation out there to find out, but there must be multiple innovations around active travel, around infrastructure, around all sorts of things, and I think at the moment that knowledge and learning is probably dispersed across our whole community. So some way of drawing that together to really find out in the last seven years what really worked well, what might we learn from and take forward. So I think that that would be a very valuable role, which might be a convening role, which the Parliament and Government itself is also very able to exercise. Thank you for that. Who wants to find what, Ms Theon? No, it's just worth adding to that. I think that the setting of ambitious targets shows great leadership, and the Scottish Government really has to be congratulated on that, because that sets the bar. Do members have any final questions? Do the witnesses have any points that they want to place on the record that they haven't done so far? No? Great. In that case, it only remains for me to thank the witnesses for their evidence this morning and their patience. That's almost two hours, so thank you very much indeed for your time and the evidence this morning. That concludes today's committee business. I close this meeting of the committee.