In June 2023 SPICe published its first blog about developing a model for parliamentary scrutiny of climate change. This blog provides an update on progress over the last six months, including a spotlight on the work of the Conveners Group – made up of the MSPs that convene each of the Scottish Parliament’s 15 Committees, and chaired by the Deputy Presiding Officer – and gives a look ahead to the focus for the next six months.
Leadership and collaboration
Work to develop the model is underpinned by strategic leadership from the Conveners Group, which agreed a package of proposals to strengthen cross-cutting scrutiny of climate change, as part of Session 6 strategic priorities.
The Conveners Group has recognised that climate change engages the remits of all parliamentary committees and that delivering more effective and enhanced scrutiny would require a collaborative and cross-committee effort. Furthermore it would require capacity building across all engaged in the parliament’s scrutiny function – MSPs, their staff and staff of the parliament. The Net Zero, Energy and Transport (NZET) Committee has a lead role, including  supporting and encouraging other committees to effectively embed climate scrutiny in their own work. It has a role in assessing overall how well the Scottish Government and its agencies are collectively responding to climate change, including in meeting the 2030 and 2045 statutory net zero targets. This over-arching role rests alongside the Committee’s more conventional portfolio responsibilities to measure progress in achieving net zero targets in relation to transport, energy and the environment. Behind the scenes, this means that the NZET convener uses the Conveners Group to update other conveners and suggest and encourage ways of joint working.
Joint working can take different forms. An example is that in October, the Convener of the NZET Committee and the Convener of the Rural Affairs and Islands Committee co-chaired a Futures Forum event on Scotland’s Land: One resource, many uses, bringing together MSPs and a range of stakeholders from academia and beyond. The aim of the event was to support cross-cutting scrutiny of land use within the Parliament and explore how we can best use our land to underpin food security, maintain sustainable communities, and meet climate and biodiversity targets.
Coordinating scrutiny on the forthcoming draft Climate Change Plan
The Conveners Group has also been supporting coordination of scrutiny on the forthcoming draft Climate Change Plan (CCP). The draft CCP is a Scottish Government strategy document which outlines how it intends to meet emissions reduction targets across all portfolio areas and sectors of the economy. These targets have been agreed by Parliament in two pieces of legislation – the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 and more recently the Climate Change (Emission Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019. In June 2023, the NZET convener led discussion in Conveners Group on a framework for collaborative scrutiny of the draft CCP. This was supported by communication between conveners and officials to coordinate planning on how different committees may wish to scrutinise the sectoral impacts on policies within their policy remit.
One outcome is that the Public Audit Committee (PAC) wrote to the NZET committee on 6 November to share insights to inform NZET’s scrutiny of the draft CCP. PAC set out the key issues arising from their scrutiny of the Auditor General for Scotland’s report on How the Scottish Government is set up to deliver climate change goals and their scrutiny of the Major Capital Projects and Programmes falling under the ‘Enabling the transition to Net Zero emissions and environmental sustainability’ theme of the Scottish Government’s Infrastructure Investment Plan. Some of the issues highlighted by PAC were gaps in cross-government collaboration and a need for greater transparency, lack of assessment of the impact of policies and spending on emissions, and the need for workforce capacity and capability in all Scottish Government directorates to deliver on climate change commitments.
Meanwhile the NZET Committee has used its coordination role to increase access to information and promote greater transparency through correspondence with the Scottish Government. In June, the Committee wrote to the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Net Zero and Just Transition to request information ahead of the expected publication of the draft CCP in autumn 2023. This included a request for information on progress that the Scottish Government has made against the 2021 Net Zero Nation: public engagement strategy. The Cabinet Secretary responded in July 2023 providing a brief overview of work to date and highlighting that the Scottish Government would conduct an interim review of the strategy at the mid-way point of delivery in 2024.
The NZET committee wrote to the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Net Zero and Just Transition in November to seek clarity on when the Scottish Government intends to lay the draft CCP in the Scottish Parliament. The Cabinet Secretary responded to say that it was ‘regrettably no longer possible to do so by our own November deadline, we will continue to progress in line with statutory deadlines’. The reasons given were ‘The UK Government’s unprecedented and unexpected decision to renege or roll back on their net zero commitments, including those already announced and accounted for by the Scottish Government’ together with ‘the uncertain economic outlook for the UK as a whole and the constraints of devolution placed upon us’.
The validity of these reasons has been critiqued in the media by the Chief Executive of the UK Climate Change Committee, who stated that the delay was ‘very disappointing’ and that it would mean the independent body’s Scottish Progress Report, due at the end of the year, would have ‘nothing to review’. He also said he was unsure why the UK government’s policy changes would mean the publication of the Scottish report had to be postponed. The NZET committee followed this up with further correspondence to the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Net Zero and Just Transition in November, requesting an update on timetabling and more information to assist in preparation for scrutinising the draft CCP.
A People’s Panel on Scottish Government public engagement on climate change
Alongside climate change and net zero, the Conveners Group also has strategic priorities on participation, diversity and inclusion for committees, including embedding deliberative democracy in the work of Parliament, and bringing about a step-change in post-legislative scrutiny. There is an overview of developments in these respective areas in the SPICe Spotlights on Embedding Deliberative Democracy in a Participatory Parliament and Institutionalising Post-Legislative Scrutiny, both published in November.
Cross-cutting issues like climate change offer opportunities to approach scrutiny from a citizen’s perspective and to use public participation to inform work across Committees. As highlighted in a 2021 report by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy on Post-legislative scrutiny of climate and environment legislation, participative democracy can also bring greater insight and buy-in to parliamentary activities in these areas. In its report on Embedding public participation in the work of Parliament in September, the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee (CPPPC) recommended two further pilots of ‘people’s panels’ in the remainder of this session, one on a policy question and one on post-legislative scrutiny, to test the value of this form of public input to post-legislative scrutiny. People’s panels bring together a random and diverse group of the public and give them the opportunity to learn about, discuss and make recommendations on a policy.
Continuing its scrutiny of the Scottish Government’s approach to public engagement on climate change, the NZET Committee agreed in September to carry out post-legislative scrutiny of section 91 of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, which places a duty on Scottish Ministers to have a public engagement strategy on climate change. As part of this, NZET made a proposal to the Conveners Group for a deliberative democracy exercise involving a people’s panel. This was agreed by Conveners Group in October. The panel’s work will take place in spring 2024, and these deliberations will feed into Committees’ scrutiny of the CCP this year – and could also be used to inform the Scottish Government’s interim review of the strategy at the mid-way point of delivery in 2024.
The Scottish Budget 2024-2025 and climate change
Since its conclusion in December 2022, the Scottish Government has been working to implement the recommendations from the Joint Budget Review (JBR), which aims to increase the understanding of the impact of spending decisions on emissions in Scotland. An overview of the JBR recommendations and progress to December 2023 is provided in the SPICe blog on How can we track the impact of public policy on emissions in Scotland? It highlighted that at the time of the 2023-24 Scottish Budget publications, the information published provided a relatively limited set of data from which to scrutinise spending decisions in Scotland from a climate perspective.
The Finance and Public Administration Committee’s guidance to other committees on the Budget process 2024-25 highlighted climate change and equalities as mainstreamed issues to focus on. SPICe analysis of committees’ pre-budget scrutiny for 2024-2025 shows that both were a feature of around a tenth of recommendations, with a notable increase in those relating to climate change. This analysis also highlights that across all committees, one of the main conclusions was that the Scottish Government needs to better demonstrate the link between policy and spending decisions and National Outcomes and do so in a holistic and cross-portfolio way.
Implementing Strand 2 of the JBR, the 2024-2025 Budget contained an expanded taxonomy of capital spend to cover most resource spending in additional to capital. The publication of the new taxonomy is the first opportunity for Parliament to consider how this taxonomy approach supports budget scrutiny. The SPICe Scottish Budget 2024-25 briefing highlights however that the enhancements so far do not tackle the big challenges in understanding how this spending will contribute to meeting Scotland’s climate targets. It also highlights that with the data currently at their disposal, the Scottish Government is not able to quantify how much existing policy commitments will contribute towards progressing further to meet the interim 2030 or 2045 emissions reduction targets, or what volume of future emissions have been ‘locked in’ by existing policy commitments.
The Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Act 2019 requires that future CCPs include estimates of the costs and benefits of policies to reduce emissions, so this is likely to be a key area for scrutiny once the draft CCP is published.
Enhancing institutional support to Members to access diverse expertise and research
To enhance institutional support to MSPs and those who support them to scrutinise climate change, the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) has dedicated in-house resource to facilitate access to the most relevant and recent information and research. This includes front-line research expertise, as well as support to deliver the Conveners Group strategic priority, facilitate integration and alignment of work with other Session 6 strategic priorities and embed monitoring and evaluation.
Through the Conveners Group strategic priority, all Committees also have access to an external climate change / net zero adviser. The specialist adviser works with the NZET Committee but acts as a shared resource across all Committees, to support Committees on matters such as the latest science, technical issues and the challenges of policy coherence. Part of the work of the specialist adviser has been to offer support to Committees to consider the relevance of climate change to the policy areas within their committee remit. Alongside this, work to illustrate how climate change impacts on policy areas across subject committees to help embed net zero scrutiny within the remits of all committees is underway.
The Conveners Group has also pursued ways of increasing access to the best external advice and evidence on climate change. This includes establishing relationships with advisory bodies and with academic institutions. For example, the UK Climate Change Committee now provides an annual update to the Conveners Group, most recently in October. This enables Conveners to take the issues raised at these sessions to their own committees to inform their scrutiny work and to support the work of Conveners Group in relation to its twice-yearly sessions with the First Minister.
Alongside this, the NZET Committee is using its leadership role to consider approaches to bring more diverse research evidence and technical expertise into committee work. Several of these mechanisms were highlighted in the House Of Commons Liaison Committee’s 2019 report into the effectiveness and influence of committees and the 2021 independent Stirbu report on the power, influence and impact of Senedd committees.
To support this work, the SCPB has formed a new partnership, fully funded by UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), with the University of Edinburgh as host institution and the universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde and Stirling, who along with Edinburgh hold an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA).
The Knowledge Exchange Manager – Climate Change Scrutiny is a new post to enhance academic engagement with and impact on the Scottish Parliament in relation to scrutiny of climate change mitigation, adaptation and related policy responses across the Scottish Parliament, in line with the Conveners Group strategic priority. The new role provides focused support to develop diverse networks of expertise on climate change between the Scottish Parliament and academics in Scotland, the UK and globally and to develop mechanisms to support the use of research evidence in parliamentary scrutiny of climate change across all policy areas.
Officials in the Scottish Parliament, UK Parliament and other devolved legislatures continue to work closely together to support the pilot of Thematic Research Leads (TRLs), funded by UKRI-ESRC, and from 2024, across UKRI. In particular, with Professor Tamsin Edwards, Professor in Climate Change at Kings College London and the UK Parliament TRL for Climate and Environment – to strengthen networks and connections with the wider research community on climate change.
Reciprocal learning and raising awareness of the unique role of legislatures in the climate emergency
Monitoring of the work to develop a model for parliamentary scrutiny of climate change in the Scottish Parliament demonstrates that progress is being made and more committees are considering the relevance of climate change and net zero to their remits and are applying a climate ‘lens’ to scrutiny of non-climate and environmental issues. Analysis for Conveners Group in June shows that 13 of the 15 committees had undertaken relevant scrutiny, including work with a substantive focus on climate change and net zero, scrutiny of other issues through the lens of climate change, work to weave it into scrutiny of other issues and procedural work. Many committees noted that they intended to continue this work or to increase focus on it.
The Scottish Parliament is keen to share learnings from this work, to inform approaches taken to scrutiny of climate change and other cross-cutting issues in other legislatures, and to learn from other legislatures to inform considerations on how best to further develop the model. As part of this, Conveners Group submitted evidence in September to the House of Commons Liaison Sub-Committee inquiry on Scrutiny of Strategic Thinking in Government.
The Scottish Parliament is also building on work from COP26, where it worked with the Scotland’s Futures Forum, GLOBE International, the UK Climate Change Committee, and the Nordic Council to explore the role of parliaments in the climate emergency, including hosting the GLOBE International COP26 2-day Legislators summit. COP28 was held from 30 November to 13 December 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and a recent SPICe blog provides an overview of COP28 climate change negotiations and how they connect to Scottish climate policy. COP28 marked a step change in the presence of legislators at COP, with GLOBE International hosting the first-ever Parliamentary Pavilion at a COP. The Scottish Parliament worked with GLOBE International and Scotland’s Future Forum to host two events at the pavilion to explore the role of legislatures in tackling climate change and how they must evolve to deliver their functions in the context of the climate emergency.
We will continue to publish further blogs on this work as it develops. In the meantime, if you want to find out more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for blog alerts. Or if you have ideas you want to share on how we can develop our knowledge exchange activities around climate change, get in touch with us on academia@parliament.scot.
Abbi Hobbs, Senior Analyst – Climate Change Scrutiny
Graeme Cook, Head of Research and Sustainable Development Scrutiny
Featured image by the Scottish Parliament.