Good morning everyone. I'm sorry for that technical hicc-up. Welcome to the 7th meeting of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, a brief reminder that social distancing measures are in place across the Holyrood campus. At agenda item 1 today, we have consideration of whether to take items 5, 6 and private. We are agreed. We are agreed, thank you very much. Agenda item 2 is consideration of a statutory instrument on the national bus travel concession scheme for young persons Scotland. amendment order 2021. I refer members to paper number one and we are joined remotely by the minister and officials this morning to discuss this statutory instrument. I welcome Graham Day, minister for transport, Tom Davie, head of bus strategy and concessions policy, Debbie Walker, operations and business manager, Transport Scotland and Dorothy Cohen, Solister Scottish Government. Welcome everyone this morning, thank you for joining us. Minister, this is the first time you have appeared before the committee so we look forward to working with you in this session. This instrument is laid under the affirmative procedure, which means that Parliament must approve it before it comes into force. Following the evidence session by the minister, the committee will be invited at the next agenda item to consider the motion to approve the instrument. I remind everyone that Scottish Government officials can speak under this item but not in the debate that follows. I now invite the minister to make a short opening statement, so over to you minister, thank you. Looks like we don't have the minister online right now so we will suspend briefly. Welcome back to the seventh meeting of the net zero energy and transport committee. Minister, good morning. Apologies for that brief technical interruption. This agenda item is consideration, as you know, of a statutory instrument on the national bus travel concession scheme for young persons Scotland, amendment order 2021, which is laid under the affirmative procedure, which means that Parliament must approve it before it comes into force. Minister, I understand you have an opening statement on the statutory instrument, so I will pass over to you. Good morning to colleagues on the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to make a few opening comments on the national bus concession scheme for young persons Scotland, amendment order 2021. The initial order to establish a national bus travel concession scheme for young persons was approved by Parliament earlier this year and came into force on 1 April. The draft amendment order will raise the upper-age limit for travel under the scheme from age 18 and under to age 21 and under. The draft order also amend the reimbursement terms for bus operators carrying concessionary passengers under the scheme, establishing a rate of 43.6 per cent of the adult single fare for journeys made by under 16s and 81.2 per cent for journeys made by 16 to 21-year-olds. Free bus travel for people under 22 years old will help strengthen our response to the climate emergency, support our green recovery by embedding and sustainable travel habits in young people. If it is approved by Parliament, the order will come into force on 12 November this year and we are working with our delivery partners to allow young people aged 21 and under to be able to travel under the new young person scheme from 31 January 2022. I commend the order that the committee can hear and, of course, some haven't answered any questions that members might have. Thank you very much, minister, for that opening statement. The first question is from Mark Ruskell. I wanted to ask you about how we build up towards a successful launch on 31 January, because, up to now, the message has been, do not use public transport during the pandemic. What we are going to see through the introduction of this concessionary travel is a real relaunch of bus travel in Scotland. How are you preparing for that? How are you getting the message out there that, on 31 January, buses are open for business, young people will be able to travel for free and enjoy the opportunities that that will bring? Mr Ruskell, there is a cost plan around building up awareness of the scheme. The scheme's launch today is obviously the first stage in the process. I will bring Debbie Walker in, because Debbie is in charge of the implementation of the scheme, and she can perhaps provide more detail on exactly what is happening. Hi, thank you very much. We have in place a marketing team with our marketing agency, who are building together the graphics, the design, the package that is going to be put in place. Work is on going with that at the moment, and that will kick off. We are working with COP26 to do a soft introduction to it, with a big kick-off of that commencing in January. Okay, thanks. Does that help? That's a useful kind of question. Great. It would be good to see a bit more detail on that coming through when that's ready. Can I ask you about what you see as the kind of indicator of success for this policy? What would you see, say, within the first year? What would you expect to see if this policy is a success? I'm sure it will be. Related to that, do you see increasing the number of families, for example, using bus travel? The focus is on under 21s, but do you think that that will drive more people on to the bus, including fare paying passengers as well? That would be the ambition, because we are all in the business of trying to increase the uptake of bus travel by all age groups. That particular age group is the one that relies most heavily on public transport. What we are trying to do here, Mr Ruskell, is to embed bus travel as a professional bus. Can you hear me still, convener? Yes, yes, we can. Okay, sorry, I cut out there. In part, this is about embedding bus travel as a preferred means of transport for this age group. In terms of success, it is a big project, because you are right to point to the fact that we are coming through the pandemic. In the first instance, we will not initially see the kind of levels of usage that we ultimately are going to see. There will be a soft period in which we will undoubtedly see an uptake in usage, and we will have to build on that. We have estimates, but they are guestimits, frankly, about levels of usage. However, we are confident that this is going to be a major success as a policy. Thank you, convener. I have three very quick questions for me. Minister, given the reimbursements for the under-22 and over-60 schemes to bus operators is significantly less than 100 per cent, what is your modelling show could be the impact on adult fares, so the 23 to 59? Is there any risk that adult bus fares may have to increase at any point to compensate for lost revenue? Do you want to give me your other questions? Do you want me to answer that one, Mr Kerr? If you can answer that, First Minister. Okay, that's fine. We don't believe that to be a risk, because we are working very closely with the bus operators on this scheme. The levels of reimbursement have been shaped very much on that dialogue, and we are committed to returning to those numbers in due course, if anything emerges that suggests that the levels of reimbursement aren't appropriate, so we don't anticipate an issue of the type that you're flooding. Very grateful, and thanks for the clear answer, minister. Second point, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I believe that the funding for the over-60s scheme was cut in 2017. Given people seem to be working longer, particularly as we recover from the pandemic, is the intention to reverse that cut? Is there a risk that some people might feel that you've cut support for the over-60s scheme in order to pay for the under-22 scheme? You appreciate, Mr Kerr, that 2017 was something before I came into post. All I can tell you is that the over-60s scheme is working effectively and efficiently. We have a very good working relationship with the bus operators, and I see all those schemes sitting alongside each other funding independently the various aspects of what's delivered here. Again, I don't see an issue here. This is a scheme that I think is going to enhance what we have currently and certainly not have a detrimental impact on anyone else, because, apart from anything else, the greater uptake of bus usage that we have, the more sustainable some of those more endangered services are. Thank you. Finally, for me, if I may convene, what assurances, minister, do the bus companies have, that the on-going £55 million subsidy costs from government to support this scheme will be sufficient, are baked in and can't be reduced in future years? Do you know off the top of your head which budget this is going to come out of? It's important to recognise the relationship between the bus operators in a variety of ways with the Scottish Government and the various teams who work for us with them. This is a fully funded scheme. It will remain a fully funded scheme. It will develop in its nature as the numbers come to the fore. As we get a bit clearer idea of how many of each age group are actually using the buses, I can tell you that the circumstances in which this has been put together has very much been a team effort. Thank you. Good morning, minister and your officials. This is very welcome. What I would like to ask today is what is the Government's response to the everyone-aboard campaign, which poverty alliance is leading its support by 120 organisations? That would expand the scheme to everyone under the age of 25 and people who are in receipt of benefits. Is that the direction of travel that the Government wants to go in? At what point will the scheme be reviewed once it comes into force next January? We have a substantially good working relationship with the poverty alliance on a number of transport-related issues. With regard to a specific point about extension beyond that, Ms Wenhan will know that the priority here is the under-22 scheme, which is aimed at. However, we are planning a fair fares review that will be taken forward in due course to look at the whole draft of bus-related and other transport-related fares, and the range of discounts and concessionary schemes. It would be wrong of me to prejudge what that review will throw up. We are aware of many asks in relation to fares across public transport. Everybody would like to see this expanded in a variety of ways, but the way to do that is to have a proper review that looks at this holistically, and then we can reflect on the findings of that review. As well as the ability to access buses for free, we need to make sure that young people, in fact, everyone has access to bus services in the first place. On Friday, I joined with some of the thousands of youth climate strikers in Glasgow who are marching ahead of COP26 and who all want sustainable travel. One issue was raised with me about a reduction in bus services. Having the free bus pass is great, but if there is no bus to get on, it is not really much used to anyone. On that holistic approach, what is Government doing to make sure that communities have proper bus services, including students, particularly those in my area where they have lost the X1 bus? I was told on Friday by students from University West of Scotland that the special bus that was put on when the campus moved stopped running at five o'clock, and that is not much good to students in Lanarkshire. Can the minister and the team take that away and look at that as well, please? Ms Llyny knows that she and I have met to discuss the X1 bus. Among other topics, even though the X1 bus is not something that the responsibility does not sit with Government. She also knows that I am passionate about developing access to bus services. I think that that is going to be pivotal as we respond to climate change moving forward. The specifics about individual services, as she knows, will sit with local authorities or regional transport partnerships. However, if I give her the commitment that we have shown during the pandemic with the additional support that we have given to bus operators to ensure that as many services as possible—now, at various areas of the area, but it is certainly north of 90 per cent of normal services that are currently running, she should take as an indication of our view about the importance of buses, specific issues relating to the area in which she represents, and I would direct her to talk to relevant local authority or the regional transport partnership. It is basically just to ask you that the local authorities are going to be the ones that are going to be responsible for the roll-out of the scheme. I am still a local councillor, so you will probably not be surprised to hear me asking that question. However, what additional support will be needed or given to ensure that the local authorities have the scheme ready to go when it comes into place in January 2022?  We are working with our delivery partners, so our delivery partners in this are Improvement Service and Netpo, which is the national entitlement card programme office. They manage the application process and work with local authorities to deliver that. Improvement Service has established a Get Your NEC, which is an online portal that the majority of the 32 local authorities have signed up to, which will hopefully take away the brunt of the application process, because people will be doing it online. We are also working with our delivery partners and the local authorities to make sure that they are aware of what needs to happen, that they have application processes in place, that they are ready for the launch date. We are getting feedback from local authorities and working through that with them. As yet, nobody has raised serious concerns, because we have the online application process, which we anticipate that the majority of people will use, and it will just be a small percentage of the population that will need to go in to do face-to-face applications. We have procedures in place, and we are working with them to make sure that it will be as painless as possible for the local authorities. That is a very quick supplementary question. Are we ensuring that we are getting the message out there for young people to apply now, so that we are not having a huge amount of applications at the beginning of January? Do you want me to answer that one? Sorry. At the moment, we are not pushing that message out there. Our marketing is going to be launching in January to do that. We are looking at a more controlled manner. We do not want people to apply for cards now because the application process that we are looking to promote has not been fully tested yet, so we want to make sure that the systems are tested and that the streamline is possible. Everything is ready to go, so we are not pushing that message of applying now for your card. We would prefer people to wait until January when we have everything in place and ready for the launch. Thank you, Jackie. Liam Kerr, to be followed by Fiona Hyslop. Thank you again, convener. Just because Jackie Dunbar just asked you about local authorities, I wonder if you can tell me. In the papers that we have got, it stated that if the reimbursement is too low, the bus companies may need support from a local authority. What plans would you have to give support to what are already cash-strapped local authorities if they suddenly find themselves in a position where they have to subsidise bus companies because the reimbursement is too low? I do not recognise that concern in the first instance, because I have explained earlier that there is a lot of engagement around the reimbursement rate and it will be monitored very, very closely to ensure that we do not get into that sort of situation. However, we are working very closely with local authorities on a variety of issues and we will ensure that local authorities are not in that position because this is a scheme that is being funded through the agreed mechanisms that we have with the bus operators. Right. It is just because your papers say that local authorities will pick up the pieces if it gets to that stage, which was the reason for my question. However, I have heard your answer. Given that the bus companies will presumably have more passengers for less revenue, what incentive do you foresee for the bus companies to add new routes, particularly in rural or outlying areas? Mr Kerl is conflating two different issues here. This is a scheme that is designed to persuade more young people to use bus services. Sitting alongside that, I will look at the provisions of the Transport Scotland Act, which will empower local authorities and regional transport partnerships to work with bus providers to develop the provision of routes. They may make a degree across over, but they are separate things here. No further questions, convener. Thanks, Liam. Let me bring in Fiona Hyslop, please. Thank you, minister. Obviously, this policy will save young people cash. It will help support behaviour change to tackle climate change. Thirdly, it may provide sustainability for bus companies that otherwise might not have that. I know that the Government moved rapidly at the start of the pandemic to keep bus companies afloat. The question is about the finances of this. It needs a bit more detail. In terms of ensuring the reimbursement rate, which will be a symptom of success in the first two things that I talked about, the more young people using buses, when will you assess the delivery of bus services in relation to targets, and when might the committee get some report as to what that movement will be? So when are you expecting to review it? I'll bring Tom Davian to answer the specific question. Okay, thank you minister. We are committed to monitoring and evaluating the scheme. We are in the process of commissioning evaluators to don't take a baseline study basically on what's happening before the scheme becomes operational at the end of January. We are then going to return to that in one year's time to see whether the scheme is working as anticipated, whether anything is happening that we were not expecting to happen, and then I think we're due to come back to it in, I think, after three and after five years. So there's a sort of a main evaluation point, first evaluation point, is one year in one first year of operation. I'm assuming that's the same. What are we looking at things like? So that's 31 January 2023. Oh, I guess so. I'm not sure promising it's going to be exactly on the 31st of January. We'll have to undertake field work and surveys and so on, and then write a report on that. And then that will be produced and that will tell us how we're doing. So, and I appreciate the minister said that the issues of bus services are separate and distinct, but there's clearly an interrelationship between the success of young people using the bus service and the availability of bus services. So in a constituency like mine, where it's easy to travel by bus east west, but difficult to travel by bus north south, going back to the point of sustainability of services, and many young people wanting to travel in the early evening, going back to a point Monica Lennon made, is there an opportunity here during that year, not waiting for that year, but during that year to get better alignment with local government and their provisions, because actually that would be the sweet spot if we could not only get more young people on buses, but actually have that sustainability and improve services in particularly semi-rural and rural areas, particularly in the evening. I'm not sure, minister, if you want, I can say a little bit on that. I'd be interested in the minister's response, because he obviously can help make this happen. I think it's a very, very good point that Fiona Hyslop makes. I can see that in my own constituency as well. So there may well be a sweet spot that emerges in this. We are working with bus providers. We could look at some improvements of the type that she is preferring to do through the regional transport partnerships, of course, but I would just make the point to her that there will be the initial phase in this where we may not see the level of uptake that we are ultimately going to see as we come through the pandemic.  By that point a year from now, we'll have a clearer idea of the opportunities that arise from this. Thanks, Fiona. A final, very brief question from Collette Stevenson. Thanks, convener. Good morning, minister. We've touched upon the impact or potential impact that it might have on local authorities in the regional transport partnerships. Do you see any impact at all on the procurement of the frameworks for the school transport when that gets rolled out? We recognise that there is a possibility of an impact on school transport, and that's why it's difficult to quantify it at this stage, as you'll appreciate it, and that's why we're having that close dialogue with local authorities to monitor this as we move into the roll-out of the scheme. We are alive to it, it's a very good question, but it is one that we're engaged with local authorities on. Obviously, within each local authority minister, you can understand that there will be various different frameworks and tenders, and it's how we can align that as well, because there could be a three-year framework or a four-year framework, and the impact on the private transport providers as well. I recognise that there could be negligible impacts in most places, but there could be significant impacts in certain other ones, so we do recognise that. I just offer the member the reassurance that, in the bus space, the interaction to regional transport providers, local authorities and Transport Scotland is a significant interaction, so it is something that dialogue goes on about all the time, so we are on top of that. There are no more questions from members at this stage. That takes us to agenda item 3, which is the formal consideration of motion S6M-00962, calling for the net zero energy and transport committee to recommend approval of the draft national bus travel concession scheme for young persons at Scotland amendment order 2021. I now invite the minister to move this motion and, if he wishes, to speak further to the motion. Thank you very much. Minister, and let me ask if any members have any final questions for the minister. Mark Ruskell. Just to make a brief point, convener, which is that I think this is going to be a brilliant policy. I think that it's going to be transformational for young people. I've met so many young people, particularly in rural areas, who are really excluded by the price of bus travel. There is a wider issue about the quality of services, but having had constructive conversations with a number of bus companies, they're looking forward to this coming in. They're looking at how they improve services on the back of this. I think that this is going to be transformational, I think, for many people in rural areas. I was also pleased to hear from the minister about the commitment to a fair fair fairs review as well. I think that there will be a point where we need to consider wider public transport. I know there's interest in ferries, for example, about free ferry tickets or whatever. I think considering all of this in the round is going to be important, including any moves to extend the age limit further. But yeah, very, very welcome. I hope that there's a successful launch at the end of January. The publicist can get out there, and the message can get out there to young people and families that free bus travel has now arrived. Thank you, Mark. Let me bring in Fiona Hyslop, and perhaps after that the minister can respond in his winding up statement. This is a very strong policy for young people, the climate emergency, but also sustainability of buses. I think that the devil will be in the detail on the reimbursement rate, as raised by Liam Kerr and, indeed, Jack in the Bar. I think that keeping close alignment with local authorities is going to be key in the success of this. I think that Collette Samson raised a very important point where you have a situation, for example, with bus contracts. If you look at the individuals where some young people can get free bus transport because of the school transport legislation, but some don't. We have many families where people perhaps don't live together, and sometimes if they're living with one parent, they don't have access to free transport. That obviously is going to have an implication for this policy as well. We welcome the broad thrust of that, but I would encourage in terms of the sustainability of bus companies themselves. What does that mean for individuals and how they live their lives will be an important part in, yes, the promotion, but also in the detail in working with local authorities, not just with their transport contracts, but also with the education department? I would encourage the minister to consider those things as the policy is, I hope, successfully rolled out. Minister, there are no further contributions from members. Would you like to address those issues in your summing up? Very briefly, convener, because I know that we've taken up quite a lot of time at the start because of the technical problems. It has got enormous potential as policy. It is a fantastic opportunity. I just want to reiterate that we are alive to the risk of some unintended consequences. That is why it has been developed so closely with partners to ensure that we avoid any negative consequences of that. Fionna Hyslop has raised a number of very good points there. Obviously, convener, in terms of the review process, we will be happy to engage with the committee further on this, presuming that this goes forward today. The alignment point is a very good one. As I said, we will commit to take all that away and include it in our thinking going forward. Thank you very much, minister. The question now is that motion S6M-00962, in the name of the minister for transport, be approved. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. Following this vote, the committee will report on the outcome of this instrument in due course. I ask the committee to delegate authority to me as convener to approve a draft of the report for publication. That brings us to the end of this session. Let me thank the minister once again and his colleagues for joining us this morning. I will now suspend the meeting before we hand over to another panel of witnesses. Thank you. Welcome back everyone. The committee will now take evidence from a variety of important stakeholders. We are hearing from two panels this morning. First, we will hear from representatives of Scotland's climate assembly and members of the Scottish Youth Parliament's Transport, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. I welcome our panel this morning. We have Susie Townsend, head of secretariat, Jocelyn Richard, assembly member, Katie Reed, children's voices programme manager, all at Scotland's climate assembly and Liam Fowley from the Scottish Youth Parliament's Transport, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee. Good morning. We are delighted that you could join us this morning and thank you for taking time to be with us. As we have a large panel this morning, it would help broadcasting if members could indicate the panel member their questions are addressed to. For our witnesses broadcasting will operate your camera and microphone. There is no need for you to do anything on your side. We will now move to questions. The first thing that I wanted to say was thank you all very much for the tremendous amount of work that you have put in in this area and for the raft of recommendations and policy ideas that you have put forward. Those are enormously helpful for this committee as we look at the transition to net zero. It is very helpful that the views and opinions that you have represented reflect a wide range of public views. The first area that I wanted to explore with the panel is about the main areas of behavioural change that you think will be necessary in our journey to net zero. A lot of the recommendations that you have put forward will require behavioural change across a large number of sectors, such as transport, business and consumers. When we had the cabinet secretary Michael Matheson before the committee a couple of weeks ago, he identified behavioural change as one of the greatest challenges for policy makers. I thought that it would be a good topic to bring up with this panel because you are well placed to comment on what you think behavioural change might mean in reality because you represent a wide cross-section of the public in Scotland. With that context and brief introduction, perhaps I could start with the climate assembly and get your views on the main areas of behavioural change that individuals across society would be looking at. Susie Townsend, perhaps I could start with you. Thank you very much indeed. Firstly, thank you very much to the committee for inviting us to come before you today. Just to note that the assembly is entirely embedded in the Scottish parliamentary process, which is unusual for our systems assemblies. We are delighted to have the opportunity to talk further about the recommendations that we have made and to do it in a cross-party spirit that we have had throughout the establishment and operation of the assembly. We feel that the committee has a really important role in helping us and really acting as our champions and advocates. We are very grateful to talk a little bit more about the details, both of the recommendations and the principles behind what the assembly has suggested. I will let Jocelyn talk a little bit more in detail about some of the recommendations. On behavioural change, what struck me as a facilitator of the process was the appetite that assembly members had for behavioural change. When they were provided with good evidence about what was needed across the range of activities, whether it was travel or heating homes or diets, the key things that will have an impact on reducing emissions in Scotland. People really had an appetite to make the changes required. I think that Jocelyn might talk about this a little bit more, but the very strong message that members gave was that they wanted everybody in Scotland to understand the impact of activities in the way that they now did. They felt that people of Scotland want to make a difference and that they want to be world leaders in reducing emissions, but often people do not know how to do it. They really felt that it was important that people understood how changes they could make would make a difference. First, I will let Jocelyn reflect on that. I will give Katie a chance to talk about what the children said on those issues. I would like to begin. Can everyone hear me? Yes, we can. I would like to begin by saying that what Susie said is very true. Before I was an assembly member, although I was aware of climate change, I did not appreciate the extent of how everything around me, all the choices that I make, reflect on the carbon emissions that I make into the environment. The first thing that I would say is that the people in the assembly certainly had an appetite for change once we were presented with the information, but that is a main thing. The people in Scotland first of all need to know the situation regarding the climate emergency so that they can be aware of what the potential they have as individuals is to change our carbon footprint. There is a lot that we can do, and behavioural change is really at the basis of a lot of it. One of the things that people are unaware of is that their general consumption, how that affects our carbon footprint. So much of carbon emissions in Scotland comes from the very things that we buy, the services that we use, the choices that we make in our daily lives, of how we go about making the choices with our diet and our general consumerism. Those are things that we need to try to make people see a new norm. One of the areas that we can look at are the choices that we make with our diet. I do not think that a lot of people realise the effect that their dietary choices have on our carbon footprints. One of the things that we looked at as an assembly were things like carbon food labelling. Many assembly members were in favour of things that will give people the opportunity to make their own choices and change the way perhaps they eat. Other areas are transport. We had recommendations that we were looking at to develop public transport, certainly in cities that revolved around the bus systems, making active transport more available through cycling lanes. What we recognised is that the solutions to those problems are going to be very, very dependent on where you live. We have a large urban population, but we also have rural areas that are classified as accessible or inaccessible, and we are going to need different transport solutions depending on what areas we are looking at. For cities, we are looking at an integrated bus service that provides services to everyone that reduces car usage. We want to promote active transport through cycle lanes and the ability to walk to places. People are very interested in reducing carbon emissions through transport. Home improvements and retrofitting are very important to the climate assemblies. A lot of our homes are old and poorly insulated. They do not pass the EPC band rating of level C. That contributes to people being in fuel poverty. Eliminating fuel poverty is one of our recommendations that we want to eliminate fuel poverty. Those are some of the things that we were talking about in the assembly. I would like to bring in Katie Reid for her perspective and Liam Fowley of the Scottish Youth Parliament. Thank you for the opportunity to represent the children's perspective and the children's contribution to the Scotland climate assembly. Ultimately, it would be wonderful if the children could be here this morning, but due to school times, I will share some of their reflection this morning with you all. I echo what Susie and Jocelyn have shared about some of the key points that came out of the adult climate assembly element. A lot of those were really echoed by the children in the parallel but far and much interconnected process that we went through with the children across Scotland involved in Scotland's climate assembly. I just wanted to raise a few key points that are summarised in the children's report, which was laid in Parliament in June. Key things that came out for the children were children's recognition that not everyone in Scotland actively knows about or cares about the climate emergency and wants to be part of the solutions. Children recognise that not everybody wants to make big changes to their lifestyle, and a lot of this comes down to knowledge and understanding of the impact that their lifestyles make, but also the solutions and opportunities there are, and the support that is in place to support people to transition to more environmentally friendly lives. Children also describe thinking about attitudes and popular trends. The experience of the children themselves is that often they can describe wanting to ensure that they feel included and accepted by their peers. Often things like popular lifestyle trends or having the latest toys, latest fashion items or even technology can be something that acts as a barrier to children and their families by implication, and being able to make sustainable choices. That feeling of feeling included and part of something can often be a barrier to that shift in lifestyle changes. I think a lot of that, and one of the key things to come out of the children's investigation was around education. A lot of the children that were involved—this is something that on a personal level really shocked me—was highlighted by a lot of children that they had very little understanding of climate change and of the climate emergency and solutions that are available to us here in Scotland. Like the adults who went through the climate assembly process, the children were learning about not only the science but the solutions and opportunities here in Scotland. As a result, children have gone on a huge learning journey and can now look back over the past year and reflect on just how much they have learned and are reflecting on their individual lives. Just one child last week was sharing that, as a result, he is now not littering in the playground and he is encouraging his friends not to litter when he sees them doing so. Not only are they beginning to take their own individual changes in their life, they are starting to have that wider effect on the peers as well. That part about the children's culture action around learning and education and climate making is something that is really mainstream, but it is also something that not just looks at the curriculum element but is part of the ethos and the holistic way that children are taught in schools and in their communities. It is really important and definitely something that will help to inspire and motivate people to take those lifestyle choices. We also have to remember that children themselves do not always have the capacity in the agency to be able to make those choices. I wanted to share a quote with you from one of the choices, because I think that this highlights the relationship with adults and the responsibility of adults to realise children's rights when we are thinking about the climate emergency. This is from a child aged 11 from the Western Isles who is involved in the climate assembly. It can be very difficult for children to make environmentally choices, because usually it is their parents who make them. They do not really get the choice. You cannot just say, right, I do not like what we are doing. I want to finish off there as a reminder that often children who are, as many have shared this morning, very passionate about the climate emergency and being part of the solutions, but that responsibility often lies with adults in order to support them to bring about those changes. That is some fascinating insights into the perspective of children in this area. I am sure fellow members will want to take some of those issues forward. Let me bring in Liam Fowley of the Scottish Youth Parliament and address the same question to Liam. Thank you, convener, and morning everybody. Thank you, first of all, for inviting the SPT, the democratically elected voice of young people in Scotland. I will first of state that everything that I will discuss here is something that we have discussed with young people as well. We have consulted young people on these issues consistently over the past three or four years. All our national campaigns over the past three years have had an element of climate change, environment, etc., involving them, which gives them a flavour of the importance that young people place on them. I think that, as well, Kate and I are probably starting in from the same hym sheet, in the case of children, young people have the same views, perspectives and experience. The main thing when I talk to young people about this is about education on how to live sustainably. Young people do not always have access to that, and if they do, it is not consistent across the boards, even from not only local authority to local authority from school to school. As well as that, young people will find that they wish to live sustainably, trying to make sustainable choices, but they do not feel that they have the accessibility to do that. They do not have the affordability or they do not know where to start when it comes to the main highlights. Active travel is a massive part of young people's views on that as well. They really want to be considered to take active travel, to be able to do active travel, but again, the infrastructure that they feel is not there, especially in more rural communities, and they do not feel that they have the affordability to try to get into active travel either. I will just keep it short and I will not repeat anything that Katie said. Thank you to all the panel members. That was a fascinating opening exchange. You have set the ground well for other members to follow up on some other issues. At this stage, let me bring in Collette Stevenson, who has a supplemental question in this area. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to each of the panel. Thanks for your contributions within the climate citizen assembly. It is very thought provoking. One of the things—I thought it was very timely that you were in attendance today, given the fact that we have got our UN climate change youth climate conference today in Italy. I was just wondering if you had any interaction with them. I know that there are two young people attending from the UK. I was just wondering if there had been any interaction at all about ideas and putting concrete things going forward. Do you hope to interact with them, if you have not already, on the back of the conference as well and hope to share some good ideas going forward? I will put that to Liam and Katie. As an organisation, we have not engaged with the event in Italy, but we are doing work on the sidelines of it. We have a co-project coming up shortly on the moment, which is an event for children and young people to get involved and have discussions with decision makers about the climate change, environment sustainability and how they want to see the world change. We are promoting young people to get into these conversations locally, nationally and also not having anything to do with Milan. We are very supportive of it, we should say, and we do believe that children and young people should be at the heart of the decisions, because we know that they will be the most affected by them. I just wanted to say that the children's participation in Scotland's climate assembly is, as far as we know, a kind of world first. There has been a lot of international interest in the fact that children here in Scotland have been brought into this deliberate democratic process. As a result, we are working with Scotland's climate assembly to support children's participation in the kind of influencing element of the climate assembly in the run-up to the report from the Scottish Government, which is due by the end of this year. As part of that, that is supporting children to also engage with the international forum around climate emergency, connecting with other children and young people around the world to talk about their experiences with holding leaders to account over climate action. Just to add to Liam's point about the moment, we are really encouraging elected representatives here in Scotland to reach out to children and young people in their communities to support them to host a climate surgery on 29 October, the week before COP26. Our intention behind that is to support children and young people to support decision makers to take forward children's culture to action when they themselves are engaged in conversations at COP26. Thank you very much and welcome to your parliamentary committee. The climate assembly report was very clear, very direct and set out clear actions that are expected to be delivered and the Parliament debated it with a cross-party support and indication previously. You are in a very powerful position. I just wondered if you could explain the journey that people were on as part of that climate assembly that clearly some people will have come in with particular views at the start, but there was an evidence base and a great deal of consideration and understanding, and then your ranking. I just wondered if you could maybe give us an indication of what issues you think shifted most during the course of the assembly's work to give us an idea of perhaps what we have to challenge most in people's understanding in terms of how we get that change, behavioural change that the convener talked about. Perhaps I don't know whether Jocelyn wants to go first. It was a very interesting journey. We were selected over 100 people from a very broad range of experiences and opinions on the importance of climate change and how much we believed that it was an urgent issue. Throughout the course of seven weekends, we saw expert witnesses discuss all different kinds of issues from heating, transport, lifestyle, diet and land use. I think that this deliberative journey we were broken into two different streams. There was so much information that we couldn't all listen to this expert information all the time. The stream that I was in was diet, lifestyle and land use. The amount of information that was presented by expert witnesses in each of those streams was phenomenal. I think that everyone, I would say almost certainly underwent quite an expanse of experience in learning about climate change. I think that a lot of people are unaware of the breadth of our carbon footprint. I think that a lot of people think about fossil fuels. They think about home heating and insulation, but they don't think about our general consumption, about the building industry, about agriculture and food waste. As an assembly, we came to realise the complexity of the problem. It's not just one or two things, but I think that the key issues for me certainly were the recognition of agriculture and food, the role that they played in the climate emergency. Transport and travel is a very big sector, and it is a sector that has not been showing any decrease in emissions over the past few years. It is something that we recognise that really needs to be tackled. Certainly, the increase in air emissions over the past 15 or 20 years has grown substantially, also private car use. Those are major issues that I feel the assembly wants to tackle. We were also just looking at how to reduce our emissions. We were looking at a more holistic approach. The question that we were given was how should Scotland change, tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way? That effective and fair way also played a very big role in what we were looking at in the assembly. As a result of that, we have issues of things like how do we measure having and how do we measure not just using GDP as our index, but how we can develop 20-minute communities, things that we looked at dealing with the climate emergency in a more holistic approach. One of the main things of generating our recommendations and producing this very comprehensive and very ambitious report was to start that discussion. We have given, hopefully, in our report, Parliament a set of recommendations and a set of overarching goals that we have identified. It is hard to pinpoint one or two because they are so interlinked and they are so important. During our process, we were told to try to focus on the main things. We tried to produce a report that is very focused rather than too broad, so that it is a bit vague. However, it was almost impossible for the assembly members to limit things because all the expert information that we gave was so important. We have a lot of overarching goals. We have a lot of recommendations, but we realised how important it was to look at all of that. We have given Parliament this report. We have said that those are the things that we think are important and that we would like you to look at. This is what we would like the discussion to be about. It was an amazing process. I think that everyone who came out of there personally has changed the way that I live my life and the choices that I make. It was a very positive thing. I know that my colleagues will pick up on a number of the areas that you have raised. My other question was about communities. There is a strong recommendation about empowering communities in the report to develop localised solutions to tackle climate change. If either you or your colleague from the Climate Assembly would want to address that, and you also talked about learning and understanding and being in such an important process for the climate assembly itself, I can maybe ask Liam in particular if he would like to comment on progress, particularly on climate education for young people. The community's questions to the climate assembly and the education's questions to Liam. Liam, do you want to go first on climate education and then we can maybe go to the cameras on you so we can talk about it? Is that okay? I want to shop for me. Surprise. That's totally fine. As I mentioned before, education is probably the biggest one young people will discuss about. We did a national campaign in 2019-20. That national campaign was decided by 10,000 young people in Scotland. It was pack it up, pack it in, is what it was called. That specifically consulted young people all over Scotland from a diverse range of backgrounds, not just the same area, so we had a big cross-section of community experiences there just to see what the difference is between each young person's experiences in school, specifically in education. One of the major calls was about education. They wanted to do something, but they didn't know what to do, how to do it, what they were actually going to be doing about it. That hasn't really changed over the period. We have done our manifesto consultation as well recently, which is a further large-scale consultation piece of work, which included strong representation from children and young people that education had to be improved. Not only education that they get at the moment is a very small-scale, scratch-the-surface sort of element, but the real changes that they had to make were being included. The Climate Change Act key household climate change education economics all need to be included is what was there. The food element on living sustainability and physical education, the act of travel elements were considered to be in there for children and young people in there as well. In education as well, there is always this call for a human rights-based approach on it, and not only as education as a whole but in the climate sphere as well, that young people should be involved in making that education co-design in the curriculum as well, because young people know what they want to learn more about, and there may be no areas of certain aspects as well. One of the biggest points is about continuity. One young person and one local authority is getting a very different experience from education to another young person and another local authority. We have seen instances in which that differs from school to school. Consistency is key there. Even taking it right back to the smaller steps of things, like picking up your litter and why it is important, young people will always understand that, because they have not been told why it is bad, they have just been told that it is bad. They do not understand the full negative effects that it will have as well. Young people call for the understanding. They feel like they have seen their colleagues as many young people are climate-engaged, and they want to make a change. They are doing their own research. There is the other sector of young people that are not engaged, but they want to be, and they do not know how to start because they have not been given the education in a consistent approach. I am very conscious of time, colleagues, but perhaps if Jocelyn from the Climate Assembly can talk about communities and your recommendation about powering communities and particularly what funding and resources you think are needed to help people to take power themselves to take action. I think that the community recommendations were again to do with this, one size does not fit all, and it is important that local communities are enabled to take initiatives to do things that work for them. Again, echoing much of what was just said, it is things about local transport issues. It might be local heating. One of the things is community low-carbon heating was discussed, so you might develop systems of heating for social housing areas of social housing. Things along that line are recycling. One of the things that we discussed was upgrading recycling centres into re-use centres. That is something that is very important. So much of our food waste, our general waste ends up in landfill sites where produces large amounts of methane. We talk about carbon, our carbon footprint, but it is really our greenhouse gas emission footprints because we also have a lot of methane that is being produced. It is things along that line. We are looking at social housing aspects, heating and active transport. We are also being able to develop local skills to work in some of the businesses that we want to encourage people to shop locally and to recycle things locally. I am not really in a position to—that was not my stream and I am not really sure about funding for those things. We did talk about funding for the local re-use centres and I think that was an amount equivalent to the current value that is given for the recycling centres to upgrade that facility. There are also initiatives for community land purchase, if that was something that could be used on a local community level. It is all about enabling communities to develop a system and put in place a system that helps them locally to reduce their carbon or greenhouse gas emissions. Thank you very much, convener. Thank you, Fiona. Let me bring in Monica Lennon, please. Thank you, convener. This is fascinating so far. I have had the privilege of taking part in some Zoom events with climate assembly members. I have met some of the children here at Parliament and there are so many questions, but I suppose in terms of starting somewhere I was struck by Jocelyn saying earlier on that people do want to do the right things and talked about tackling climate change in a way that is fair for everyone. Can we just get a sense of some of the barriers that were discussed? For the 100 and so people who were involved in the climate assembly, people came from different backgrounds, but aside from education and perhaps knowledge, what other barriers are people facing in terms of making those behavioural changes? How concerned are people about the affordability of some of the proposals and the impact that might have on people who are already experiencing, for example, fuel poverty, which has been mentioned? Maybe come to Jocelyn on that and I'm happy for others to indicate they want to answer. Fuel poverty is something along the lines of 25 per cent of households at the moment live in fuel poverty. One of the things that would greatly help to tackle that is if we were able to upgrade the energy efficiency of our homes. I mentioned earlier that a lot of the homes in Scotland are very old. They have been built out of stone, they are not well insulated, they have damped. It is just the type of housing that we have inherited over the years in Scotland. I think that when you talk about the barriers that prevent people from doing things, two of the things that I would identify are that people don't know what to do with their home energy efficiency. There is a financial problem that is able to do this as well. One of the things that we did recommend was that grants—there are grants made to all. This would be very costly, but we would have considerable savings made through our energy reductions. I think that it was 2025 that we recommended that grants are given to home owners by improving our energy efficiency in our homes, by replacing our boilers. That will greatly help to reduce fuel poverty because people will not have to spend so much money heating their homes. I am not sure whether Katie wants to add from a children's perspective. I know that when we had a chat before, there were children who came to the Parliament who had never been on public transport before. I think that there is a danger that politicians make assumptions about people's living standards and about their knowledge. How do we make sure that everyone gets to play their part in tackling climate change and that issues around poverty and just lack of awareness are not holding young people back? The first part of that was this. I hope that I have managed to catch that. There was a slight delay with the camera and the audio, but it is your question around the barriers that children themselves are facing. Would you mind repeating just so that I have that? Yes. I was just briefly reflecting on the fact that we have met before at the Parliament with some young people and we talked about the fact that, for some young people, that had been their first time on a train. We often make assumptions about people's living standards and backgrounds, so how do we make sure that this is really inclusive and that all children can participate? We have talked about the importance of education, but what else can we do, Katie? Thank you for repeating that. The joys of the challenges of digital working can make both difficult. I think that your question is really important. It is one that allows us to reflect on the climate crisis, the children's rights crisis. Children are acutely aware that people, children and adults have completely different lifestyles, experiences and circumstances here in Scotland, and throughout the climate assembly we are reflecting on their own lives and some of the challenges that they experience in their day-to-day lives and looking at how those for themselves can be barriers. We are also thinking in a compassionate and empathetic way about how other children are going to be impacted by the climate crisis and the barriers that they face to bring about the changes and solutions that we need to see here in Scotland. Some of the things that you highlighted there around education and it is making sure that children from all walks of life have the opportunity to engage in conversations and be part of the solutions in their schools, in their homes and communities. That was really clear evidence that came through the whole process that children want to be part of aspirations and want to find opportunities to connect with people in their schools and homes to share the ideas that they have. Essentially, ensuring that children's participation is at the heart of community-led action to support an intergenerational approach to the climate crisis where children's rights are upheld in specific to some of their culture action around how children and adults can work together might be of particular interest to you and those here today. Children are really passionate about thinking about the well-being element of the climate crisis. Obviously, there is a real surge in evidence showing how the climate emergency can be incredibly anxiety-inducing and there is a lot of concern for the impact that the media, the news and the general debate around climate change is having on children when they are absorbing that information. When children are able to engage in this in a really hope-based and children's rights-based way, they feel empowered and supported to be part of the solution. That can stem to also how they build those relationships with adults in their communities, in their schools, in their homes and how they can be part of those conversations. I think that some of their calls to action around community-led, community gardens, finding opportunities for shortening the school and work hours so that children and adults can come together and be part of community-led projects such as sharing libraries, creating spaces for recycling centres and coming together for other types of initiatives that can support those kind of relationships to build. It also helps to create that intergenerational approach to tackling the climate change crisis. Thank you, Katie. I wish the Children's Parliament well with the launch of the climate change makers scheme. I just briefly have a question for Liam. Liam, we had the transport minister giving evidence to committee this morning and really pleased that the committee has supported the statutory instrument on increasing national bus travel concession scheme to include 19 to 21-year-olds. I know that many people would like that to go further, to include people up to the age of 25, and there is a wider campaign to go further again. How important is it, from your point of view from the Scottish Youth Parliament, that under 25-year-olds have access to that? Alongside the concessionary scheme, you talked about some of the challenges, particularly in rural areas, about access to bus services. How much of a problem is that? If we do not have good public services, can people really play their part in decarbonising transport and helping to address climate change? Thank you. It was fantastic to catch earlier the approval of the statutory instrument. That is an amazing step in the right direction, which young people are incredibly grateful for. It is going to see a true difference in Scotland and how we all play our part. Yes, it is a step in its direction. Of course, there is always more to go in that, extending that to under 25-year-olds, and the rail networks as well. It is useful, but if there is no accessibility or the infrastructure is not there, that becomes an issue, so they cannot utilise it as much. Ruraly, young people, it is a massive issue. Not only if I take my own situation to be quite selfish, but if I want to get a train to my place of work on a Sunday, there is no hope of me being able to do that. I have to make a decision to drive or try to find the alternative transport or lift share or something along those lines. The accessibility is not there for young people more so in rural communities. The longer journeys, the time of the journeys are longer, but the buses are less frequent, for example. Young people want to try to make those changes. Frankly, it can be easier to get the bus and train, but it is just not a viable option. The affordability aspect will change now, but especially in rural areas, affordability is just a no-go. In relation to public transport as well, safety of young people is one that is regularly brought up, not only on public transport, but in school contracts, for example. Are the seatbelts working? Are the buses overcrowded? When particularly young people identify as female when they come home from an evening out, for example, they probably want to make the decision to get a taxi over getting a bus because they do not feel safe getting on public transport. There is the safety and infrastructure barriers there. The concession to travel will make a great difference in relieving that, because train fares and bus fares have not been viable for young people, especially if they are on low-paying jobs as they tend to be in part of employment. That is a major barrier for them. The concession to travel will certainly help that, but there is still a long way to go in making transport more equitable and more accessible for young people and making sure that they truly can access it and make the right decisions. That is all very helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Monica Collette Stevenson to be followed by Mark Ruskell. Thanks very much. I just wanted to ask Katie, when you touched upon education and climate education as well. Again, it was really thought provoking and even some of the reactions coming from the young people as well and how they can be involved. We are still rolling out the deposit return scheme, so I wanted to ask about that. I know within East Kilbride, which is the constituency that I cover, we did a pilot scheme with a reverse vending. It was an incentivisation to collect litter with the 20p return. What they did was rather than keeping it for themselves, there was some kind of incentivisation scheme that they had done for the full school. There was a competition that was a competitive. Is that something that you have seen yourself when you have been working with the children's parliament in terms of incentives and initiatives to roll out to try and promote climate change locally? Thanks very much for the question. It's not something that I've come across in terms of our conversations with the children. I think that in this instance it would be worth speaking to children and young people directly themselves. I don't feel in a position to be able to answer on their behalf. Last week we did have an event with the children where they reflected on the process of the climate assembly, which will be launching online tomorrow, the recording from it. In order for people here today to hear from them directly on some of these issues, I would urge to have a watch of that tomorrow. That's good to know. Thanks very much. I was struck by what Liam Kerr was saying about public services and how we get that public voice into public services. If we're rolling out under 22s free bus travel and there are still concerns that young people might have about safety or about quality of services, do you see a value around this type of process, this deliberative democratic process, in terms of how we get the voice of people into how public services are managed? If so, what does that look like? Does it look like an assembly? Does it look like a citizen's jury? I'm interested in your perspectives on how we... It seems to have been a very successful process. I'm delighted that it's come up with such a substantial report as much for government to consider in there. I'm thinking about how we should embed this type of deliberative democracy more deeper as we start to tackle the climate emergency and reform public services in a way. Liam Kerr, if you want to kick off. Yes, thank you very much. It's a really important question and something that young people do feel strongly about because we discuss with them a lot about this, not only on the climate but on all issues that young people should really be at the heart of these decisions being made and being involved in a meaningful participation process, not a tokenistic one. I think especially over the past 18 or so months with the Covid-19 pandemic, young people have felt ignored and we've seen through our own organisation that young people are now really trying to get their voices heard more and more, which is of course fantastic to see. The processes need to be meaningfully dealt with. They need to be co-designed with young people and these are really long. They'll end up being longer processes. They can't just be let's crack a young person into this meeting because that's not meaningful participation. Getting young people actively listened to and feeding back on what those young people are saying. They're saying, this is what we've done or this is why we can't do it, getting them to make recommendations and review things for you as well. Given them feeling like they've got the power, because they do have the power, they'll have the equitable power, as you do, for example, or that other people in the room is a really important point, young people do want to be engaged in this. You're not going to struggle to find young volunteers to get their views heard on that one because they are very active in this sphere, not only climate, but in general decision making that we may engage with young people, they engage with meaningfully. We're getting a broad range of ages, voices, races, sexualities and experiences with young refugees, for example, as well. It does provide really good insight and thought-provoking opinions. There's no one-size-fits-all arrangement as an important point as well, so I wouldn't say a specific example of what would be required for a specific discussion, but a meaningful one is probably the overarching statement in the table. Maybe if I could bring Katie in as well on this and just ask, who should really lead on this?  It's been Government that's commissioned this, but does it have to start that way? Could this be driven by schools or councils, or should it be driven by, I don't know, public service operators themselves, or where's the starting point for this type of work? Absolutely. I guess the starting point is the commitment here in Scotland to the forthcoming incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is about the re-dibation of children's rights, of which part of that is their right to participate in decision making processes, and thinking about younger children. I know Liam Smith, and he's really powerful about the contribution that young people make to decision making here in Scotland, and the appetite there for young people to be part of the decisions that are being made here in Scotland. If we're thinking about younger children right from birth up to kind of teenager age, if you like, where there's less opportunity to have a say in decision making processes, we've really got to think about what actually works for children of this age, and Liam alluded to the fact that it takes time. It certainly does take time. It also takes a lot of creativity, and it does take a lot of commitment from adults to do things a bit differently. I do think that reflecting on the climate assembly as a process, when we were invited by the secretariat to support it with the meaningful participation of children in the climate assembly, it allowed us an opportunity to rethink what deliberative democracy can look like when you involve all generations. And just reflecting on the process from October to March, when the children were going through the deliberations just like the adults were, and then feeding in through short films, and then having kind of dialogue back and forth between the children and adults towards the end when they were forming their recommendations and calls to action. But also thinking about what's happened since is really interesting, because what we're seeing is that the children are equal parts. I'd love to hear Dothland's reflection on this if possible, but what we have seen is how the adult's attitudes throughout that process, many of those attitudes changed as a result of the children's participation. The children encouraged adults to take some of their recommendations further. The children's calls to action were stronger, and therefore the adults had to reflect on their own and actually strengthen them before laying them in Parliament. So I guess what's happened there is that by bringing all generations together, we're actually kind of accurately representing the mini-Scotlands that assemblies seek to achieve, and therefore it really does set us on a really positive path if we're thinking about realising children's participation. How can citizens' assemblies, whether that's a national level, a local level, a community level, it could be at a school level, how can we use that model, improve on it, and work to include all generations going forward. And just one other point about this current phase, your children have been meeting with the adult assembly members and cabinet secretaries and ministers to discuss their calls to action and their recommendations. I think that just seeing the children in that space, it's far from child-friendly, but the children have loved it, and they've said actually being able to be part of those conversations has shown us that our contribution to the climate assembly is just as important as the adults. So I do think there's a lot to reflect on and learn from this past year, and I do think as a model, I know there's a commitment within the manifesto SMP, for example, to make children's contributions part of citizens' assemblies. So I'm really keen to see how this progresses, and from our own experience here at Children's Parliament, I'm happy to advise on what's worked, what could be done better, and how we can work with children to make sure that this works for them. Jocelyn, have you got any reflections on what Katie was just saying there in terms of the involvement of young people in that kind of exchange idea, that cross-fertilisation of ideas, I think, between generations? Yes, I mean it was excellent, and I agree with everything that Katie said. Having the children as part of the assembly experience was amazing. We often saw videos that they had produced about what they were thinking, how they were dealing with things in their own assembly, and everyone in the adult assembly after watching those videos was so inspired and so encouraged. If we were having a day where we were hearing particularly gloomy evidence on the future of our climate emergency, we were all uplifted by hearing from the children, and it was partly the way they were willing and able to deal with the situation, but also how they were willing to engage with the solution as well. You really felt there is hope, because this is a generation that is coming up that are really willing to tackle this, they want to tackle this, and we were all inspired. I think that it did influence our thinking in a lot of ways. It is so important to have the children involved, because they are the next generation, but there is also that link between the two generations. Children learn about climate change at school and they go home. They say, I want to plant a garden, I want to eat different food, and so much of what we have been talking about, the behavioural change, is about changing the norm. What, for instance, I do as an adult is so much influenced by what I did as a child, so in the west we eat a lot of meat, for instance, but we do that because our parents did that, and their parents did that, but we have the opportunity here to break that link, to create that behavioural change, so children can do that. They can grow up in a new norm in many ways, in their expectations of travel, in their dietary expectations, just in their attitudes towards consumption. They also can extend that link into the adult population, and I think that that is a really important way that we can all tackle climate change together effectively. Thank you very much. There is room just for one more question. I am going to ask Justin just about something quite specific here. It is in relation to how we change the places where we live. There has been a big discussion during the Covid crisis about road space, about changing road space, perhaps losing some car parking spaces, extending footpaths, changing the urban environment. I was wondering if that is something that came up during your conversations and what the thinking was about the need for that change, whether that was something that was supported or whether that was an issue that perhaps was ducked. I do not know in the conversations. It did come up in terms of the 20-minute communities, because I think that the 20-minute communities are a system that has been used in other places around the world. It has been used successfully in San Francisco, to my mind. However, it is about making an environment where you have everything at hand. In an environment like that, you have less of a need for cars. You can move more towards active transport. We need to move away from private car use. That was one of the things that we discussed. In order to enable us to do that again, we need to provide a local infrastructure that enables us to go about without needing cars. The two are linked together. Even if we all use electric cars, there is still a huge carbon output from the cars themselves. I think that the overall goal that we want to move towards is active transport. We would want more space in our urban communities that are devoted to cycling paths and being able to promote active transport in that way. Thank you and good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for coming along today. I would like to ask Liam and Katie a question, if you do not mind. I am keen to hear what you think the top priority is that the young people want us to hear today. What is a strong message that you want ringing in our ears by the time that we finish, because I think that it is pretty important that we hear this? I do not know who would like to go first, either Liam or Katie. I am happy to go first. I think that one of the resounding messages that comes through from the children is about involving children. This is about younger children as well as young people in decisions being made about the climate emergency and actively listening to children and making sure that they are fed back to you as well so that they know what contribution that they have had and what that has led to is really fundamentally important. Again, that links back to what goes on in my and I have shared this morning about the importance of children's rights and ensuring that children's rights to a healthy environment are seen within the context of children's participation as well. Liam? Yeah, and on a very, very similar vein to Katie, make decisions with young people and not for them. Do not leave young people or do not leave us, I should say, as an afterthought. Thank you. Thanks very much, Jackie. I had one final question to the panel. COP26 is coming up in Glasgow in about four or five weeks' time. It is a unique opportunity to raise awareness about issues around climate change and hopefully highlight some of the behavioural change that is going to be required. I would like to get a sense from the panel about how much public awareness there is around COP26 being held in Glasgow and what more can be done to promote not only the conference itself but some of the issues around behavioural change. Perhaps I could start with Susie on that question and then bring in Liam. Thank you very much indeed. I think that there is a reasonable level of awareness. I think that perhaps there is also a bit of skepticism around how much action is really going to be taken. That goes back to the question that Mr Ruskell asked about citizens assemblies more generally. The assembly members have done the most amazing things and have made incredibly detailed and specific recommendations and general recommendations. What they now need is to see some action. That is where the public perhaps are more widely with COP26 as well. There is some ambition, but they are waiting to see why that really transforms into action. Maybe Justin is better able to speak to the public for you. I will let Justin come in. I think that there is also, I would agree, a fair level of awareness. People are very interested in watching to see what happens at COP26 because, following the Paris agreement, varying degrees of progress has been made in meeting the commitments that have been agreed to. I think that the public in general feel that it is, as a global community, we are very good at signing up to these targets. I think that the public really need to see some action now about meeting these targets and seeing some real timetables in delivering on our promised pledges. I certainly think that it is an amazing opportunity to be hosting COP26 in Glasgow. I hope that the benefits of having the meeting there will ignite a certain enthusiasm in the public to tackle the climate emergency. I think that people need to know why they are being asked to change. I do not think that people will be against the change if they understand why they are needed. We need to have a very clear link between what we are asking people to do, the behavioural changes that we are asking them to make and the reasons why they are necessary. I think that that will be something that would be very worth pursuing to strengthen that link. I agree with both Susie and Jocelyn that there is a fairly reasonable amount of awareness of COP26. I think that there is not as much awareness about what is going to happen after COP26. There is a two-week large-scale event happening on the roads that will be closed, what is happening next and what could actually come of it, much like on the same vein as Jocelyn said. I would say that, in relation to young people, there has been an element of disheartening there that young people have not felt has engaged with this particular event in total. I think that there are a lot of organisations doing good work on it, as I have mentioned before. The moment is part of that. We are now engaging young people, and I am sure that other organisations are doing local elements as well. What is the large-scale engagement with children and young people? What is the plan for that? In Scotland, there is really good with engaging young people. I think that there was probably more opportunity for engaging with young people in a constructive manner. However, awareness is there that COP26 is happening. As Jocelyn said, the fact that is happening in Glasgow is really spurring conversation on nationally. Thank you very much, Liam. Unfortunately, that brings us to the end of our allotty time for this session. Thank you very much to each of our panel members for being here this morning and for your fascinating insights into this area. I am sure that we will be meeting again as the committee takes our work programme forward. I will now suspend the meeting for a panel changeover. Thank you. Welcome back, everyone. I am pleased to welcome our second panel of witnesses this morning. They are Terri Ahern, chief executive Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Ian Gulland, chief executive Zero Waste Scotland and Nick Halfhide, director of nature and climate change, NatureScot. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us this morning, and thank you to NatureScot for your written submission to the committee in advance of this session. We have around 60 minutes for this session, just for your information. We will now move to questions. My first question is to all of the panel members. It relates to what practical steps your organisation will take to achieve the transition to net zero, what you plan and how you plan to do things differently and what are the key challenges that you will face in the transition to net zero. Perhaps I could start with Sipa, move on to zero waste and then NatureScot. Thank you. Thank you, convener. Can I just clarify the question? Are you talking about net zero in terms of our operations or in the work that we do to influence others? It is a good question, both actually, but primarily the latter in terms of your role in implementing policy towards net zero. Sipa has two fundamental roles. We have a role in flooding as the morning alert and strategy organisation in the flooding system, and we regulate about 34 sectors of the economy. The main way that we will help with net zero is through our regulatory work. So what we have done under our one plan of prosperity strategy is traditionally what EPAs do and it was right to do in what I call the first phase of EPAs is deal with individual site issues. Those individual site issues tend to be about local pollution. The most high-profile one in the last few years has been the flaring incidents at the Exxon Shell site at Mossmorran. We will continue to be very tough and hard on those and work with businesses to solve those problems. What we have added is what we think few EPAs do, which is to have a big focus on systemic issues such as the climate emergency or the nature emergency. We have a sector planning approach. For example, our most compliant sector in the last few years has been the whisky sector. Most of the distilleries are highly compliant. The whisky industry itself has objectives about decarbonising, using fewer materials and using water, because water scarcity, particularly in the part of Scotland, where the majority of distilleries are an increasing issue because of climate change. Our new approach is to continue to focus on those site issues, but the big thing that we are doing differently is to work with those sectors on how they decarbonise and not just at their sites but through their supply chain. For example, in the whisky sector, one of their biggest impacts in terms of climate change is that it is a boutique and high-quality product. It is in very heavy bottles, which are very energy-intensive to produce and very energy-intensive to transport. That is an industry that gets that. It understands the future and is trying to innovate. We see our role as a regulator as to how we work with the industry and other bodies such as Zero Waste Scotland to support them in that innovation. Another example would be—I will continue with that sector—that we regulate the whisky sector and say that the barley growers both face water scarcity because of climate change. How do we work with them, not distillery by distillery or farm by farm, but the sectors together, and say that we should come up with systemic solutions to reducing water use? When you use less water, you will tend to use less energy, so you will be cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and you will be dealing with one of the consequences of climate change. I could go through many examples, but the key thing that I would say to the committee is that there are lots of other things that we could do, such as education programmes, etc. When I got to sleeper, I said, look, keep Scotland beautiful and others run those, we'll contribute, let's not duplicate, let's not double up, we're a regulator, let's take the strategic approach with industries and help them innovate to reduce their carbon emissions. The one other example that I quickly give is in the Grangemouth area, where the Government officials from the industry side have asked us to head up a regulatory hub. There are a number of businesses that we regulate at the Grangemouth complex. The Grangemouth complex needs to decarbonise over time, adjust transition, how does regulatory innovation, not just by seaper, but by the range of regulators out there, both Scottish and UK and local, from the local council, support innovation towards net zero? Had we made powerful, quick, nimble decisions that get behind business innovation, quickly say no to the wrong things for the environment and quickly say yes to the things that will help Scotland to make that transition? That's our main way of focusing on net zero, convener. It's through the way we regulate in a more strategic and innovative way. Thanks very much, Terry. Let me address the same question to Ian Gulland, please. Okay, thank you very much, convener. Thank you for the opportunity to come along today. In terms of the immediate focus on emissions, certainly territorial emissions, Zero Scotland is very much focused on supporting what is existing recycling and reuse operations across Scotland, both at the local authority level and at the private sector. It increases performance, but we are also working very closely with the Scottish Government on the route map, the waste and circular economy route map, which will set out ambitions to get the targets to 2025 and beyond, i.e. 2030 targets. We are very much focused on reducing food waste, obviously, as well, not just household level but through the whole supply chain. From a household point of view, food waste in Scotland is almost three times the impact on climate change that plastics have. Most people are very animated around taking action on plastics, but food waste is one of the big challenges that we still need to address. Zero Scotland also provides support to all businesses in Scotland to produce resources and energy efficiency on behalf of the Scottish Government. We are doing intensive programme, particularly for SMEs. We also provide low carbon heat expertise to a number of the large-scale projects that are now being developed and put in place in Scotland. We have also been working with a number of public bodies agencies to develop their own net zero plan but to deploy strategies using our own experience at Zero Way Scotland and our own tools. We are also very focused not just on the territorial emissions but on the consumption emissions that Scotland has. 80 per cent of our carbon footprint comes from the production and use of materials and products, half of which come from outside of Scotland. That contributes significantly not just to climate change but also to global biodiversity loss. 90 per cent of biodiversity loss and water stress globally is accountable to the extraction of raw materials for those products and materials. Recent report by Zero Way Scotland highlighted that, for every one person in Scotland, we consume 18.4 tonnes of materials. That is something that we are very keen to address. That is about invading the circular economy, not just in our everyday lives but in every sector and business in Scotland. We have a range of services and support to individual companies, to sectors as well. What are we doing differently? We are working in partnership with the vice of SEPA and economic agencies in Scotland to target real impactful opportunities in key sectors in Scotland, where we know that there is not just a carbon saving to be made but more importantly, there is an economic gain in creating jobs and inward investment. We also have an organisation that is quite ambitious. We aspire to reduce our impact and achieve the targets. We are already net zero ourselves, but we know that we can go further. We have highlighted the fact that, during Covid, working at home reduced our home operation footprint by almost 75 per cent. On the back of that, we have decided to embed home working and agile working going forward. However, we need to do differently. It is further that partnership approach, not just with Government agencies, the private sector, sectors and local communities and local authorities. We cannot do that alone. There is quite a queue at our door for support both from the private and public sector and third sector. We cannot do that alone. We need to empower and upskill not just other agencies but other parts of society to provide support both for themselves and for the members of organisations and individuals in their communities. Part of our focus needs to be on how we upskill, how we embed the knowledge and expertise that we have in as much of Scotland as possible so that we can net those targets. Thank you very much, and the same question to Nick Halfide, please. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to everyone. At NatureScot, our starting point is that the climate change crisis is inextricably linked with the nature biodiversity crisis. We have to tackle the two together, because there is no point in tackling one without also tackling the other, because we have to do both together. Our work is characterised in three areas in relation to climate change at the moment, all of which are predicated on the restoration of nature and natural systems. The first is about reducing emissions from nature. We are working heavily to restore peatland and to retain and improve the amount of carbon in our soils and marine sediments. That is to ensure that those do not release carbon or reduce the amount that they release into the atmosphere. The second is action with nature to sequester carbon. That is working not only around trees, both conifers and native woodlands, but across all our habitats. We are working in, for example, our coastal areas to improve the coastal habitats so that they sequester carbon but also help to protect our coastlines from erosion. We are also looking to expand our native woodlands, for example the Scottish Atlantic rainforests, and to improve the soils in our farming areas, because those are potentially big sequesters of soil. Thirdly, often the Cinderella of all our work around climate change is our adaptation work. We know that there is an amount of climate change that is already going to happen. It is embedded in the system, so we need to make our nature, our natural systems, more resilient because through making them more resilient we will help to reduce the impact of climate change, so the increased drought that we are expecting, particularly in the east of the country, the more dramatic rainfall and flooding that we expect further in the west, and also a very significant coastal erosion. We are tackling all of those three simultaneously, and what we know from nature-based solutions is that the sooner we implement them, because there is a time lag, we need to do them quickly so that we get the benefits as soon as possible. What we are doing differently within NatureScot is ramping up the scale and reach of our work. We have been very active for many years across the restoration of nature, but we need to move much more quickly, so we need to upscale, for example, our peatland restoration work. We need to work much more quickly with local authorities on things like coastal protections through sand dunes and salt marshes. We need to work very closely with the Forestry Commission and landowners to improve the rate at which both native woodlands and conifers are planted, and so on. There are many challenges around the scale, while we are ramping up the amount of work that we are doing. We need to make sure that all our partners are also able to ramp up, and that is both within the public sector, working with local authorities and other public agencies. Crucially, and you heard earlier on about communities, we can increase the skills and capacity within communities to do local actions and to take advantage of the advice that agencies such as NatureScot can bring on the funding, but how they can activate that at a local level. Finally, within the organisation, most public bodies, we are on a rapid journey to net zero ourselves, both within our buildings and transport, but also the way that we manage our land. We own about 30,000 hectares of land. That already sequesters a considerable amount of carbon over 7,000 tonnes a year, so how can we increase the amount that that sequesters and also help in the resilience of those communities in the immediate vicinity of our land? Thank you very much. I have a brief follow-up question for each panel member, and a brief answer would be very welcome if possible. Do you have targets or metrics you track or follow or measure to look at the progress of your actions and the impact of your actions? Perhaps, if we could follow up with the same order as before, starting with Teria Hirn. In terms of our own performance, which I did not talk about, our own greenhouse gas emissions, we will have targets that will track. We have reduced over 50 per cent over the past 10 years, so we will be setting targets each of the following years. In terms of the way that we regulate, we would have measures and targets for a couple of programmes where we run mandatory regulatory activity, the emissions trading scheme, the CRC, so there will be a number of businesses that we regulate on carbon and we will have measures in there. With the other work that I talked about, we will not have targets because it is voluntary work on behalf of the businesses, so we can regulate distillery in the example, one of the two examples that I talked about, and there will be legal limits that they have to meet for local discharges. The voluntary work of how do they decarbonise in their supply chain, we would not have targets for, but we will make commentary and report on. What we would do in all our work is look at the Government's targets for each sector and try to align our effort to contribute to the Government's target for that sector being met, which is one of the advantages of our taking a sectoral approach the best time ever. Thanks, Terry. Same question to Ian Gullen, please. Yeah, so all of our work is really framed by assisting Government targets, whether that's the recycling target for 2025, waste prevention target for 2025, also the food waste reduction target for 33 per cent by 2025, our work with businesses similarly to support them achieving those targets and obviously the energy efficiency targets set by Government. On the circular economy, I mentioned the material flow account number of that that we produced in the summer, and there is obviously an active conversation going on not just with Zero Waste Scotland but with Government around what a metric could be for Scotland in terms of describing our circularity going forward. It was obviously a global index for circularity at the moment, and a number of countries are looking at that as a way of training our circular economy activities in target setting. In turn, our next zero is our own target to reduce the actual absolute emissions as an organisation when we have them set and approved by our board and with an action plan in place. Obviously, as I said, we launched that plan before Covid and the Covid experience has shown that we can go faster and quicker in terms of our wider footprint, and we are reviewing that target as we speak. Thanks very much, Ian, and the same question to Nick Halfide, please. Hi, yes. We have some existing Government targets and metrics, particularly around woodland expansion and peatland restoration, but beyond that we are developing some clear matrix and targets for nature restoration more generally. They will be presented in the new Scottish Biodiversity Strategy by October next year, and they will have, as a minimum, within them the international targets, which will be agreed, hopefully, at the COP15 Biodiversity UN conference in Kunming in April and May next year. Internally, yes, we have absolutely some very strong targets and metrics to get us to that net zero position as soon as we possibly can. Thank you very much. I believe that Liam Kerr has a supplemental in this area to be followed by Fiona Hyslop. Yes, thank you, convener. Very briefly, Nick Halfide, on the answer that you have just given. You talked in your opening remarks about the crisis of nature and biodiversity loss and then you have just spoken about the targets for biodiversity. Do you have plans to baseline biodiversity at the moment to ensure that the impact of any new policy ideas or the work that you talked about upscaling can actually be measured for to achieve those targets? Honouring already in place across a whole range of different biodiversity indicators, and that will be our baseline, so to speak. We are also undertaking some work internally at the moment, which we will engage with stakeholders in the coming months about what success would look like for 2045. When we have halted the loss by 2030 and restored by 2045, do we have a green understanding amongst ourselves about what the success of a restored nature would look like? We are obviously expecting targets to be embedded within legislation in the third year of this Parliament as well. I believe that Monica Lennon has a brief supplemental in this area. I do. Thank you, convener. Very briefly, I am just a follow-up question for Nick. Clearly, we are all concerned about biodiversity loss. Something that I have heard over the summer is that organisations are very concerned that we have had a loss of biodiversity officers and staff with expertise in local government. Is that something that you are aware of? Are we seeing a declining workforce in terms of the staff available to local government who can advise on biodiversity and protect the species? If so, what can be done to address that? Thank you. It is difficult for me to speak on behalf of local authorities because I do not have a full picture across the piece. I would say that local authority is going to be absolutely key to driving forward local nature networks and to bringing together all the partners at a local level to drive forward a more integrated land use planning at that local level to try and make sure that we have all the different parts of a very complex system working as smoothly as possible both for local benefit but when you add it all together so that there is a clear national drive to halt the loss of biodiversity. Thank you. Monica Lennon, if you are on his lot please. Thank you and good morning. The Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate and Welfare Committee when he appeared that we are facing a twin crisis of a climate crisis and the crisis of nature and biodiversity loss and that clearly biodiversity loss is equally important as climate challenges and change. I want to ask NatureScot in particular, Nick, if you could say what do you think the Government should be doing more of to ensure that the biodiversity loss is not somehow overshadowed by the climate change crisis and to both SIPA and net zero. What are you doing as organisations to make sure that the twin crisis are being dealt with with equal importance and priority? Nick, can I come to you first please? Yes, absolutely. Thank you for this question. I think that my first point is that all of the actions that we take to halt the biodiversity loss will have a benefit for dealing with climate change. If we restore nature, it will help to sequester carbon, reduce carbon being put in the atmosphere and make us more resilient. The two are very closely interlinked. However, there are a couple of other things that we have to be careful of. Some of the things that we do to solve the climate change problem are not necessarily good for biodiversity, so we need to be careful when we are doing a lot of, for example, monoculture or growing crops to then burn for electricity. That is not necessarily for biodiversity or how we do it is really important. What I would say is to answer the question about what the Government can do is that the Government has set out a really very ambitious series of actions for NatureScot and others to take forward. In particular, the development of local nature networks and putting at least 30 per cent of our land and seas in some form of protection so that the nature there is protected and also the reforms, particularly to the common agricultural policy, as was how we help farmers. If we add all those things up, this is actually a really powerful way forward. However, there are probably one or two areas where we could move more quickly, possibly in the agricultural space, and we will need to do more in our uplands to try and help the upland areas where there is a lot of peat. There is also a lot of potential for the regrowth of native woodlands and how we can reduce the pressures that are keeping those peatlands from it being in poor condition. We can restore them, how do you retain them in good condition and how do we allow our native woodlands in the uplands to flourish. That comes around helping to deal with deer numbers and other herbivores, as well as to incentivise our land managers and our communities to really engage in the possibilities that those areas offer. Obviously, to do that in a just transition way, a lot of those communities understandably feel very threatened by the changes that are coming, both at a business level but also many rural communities rely on people working in the countryside, so we need to upskill and see that there is an opportunity and that there is hope in a different way of managing the land to meet those broad biodiversity and climate change objectives. Thank you, Nisupa. If we have not got them, maybe I should go to net zero first, then. I am not sure. Oh, we have got Terry back. Terry, can we maybe come to you next if you heard my question? Yes. I think that the targets that have been set are the critical thing for Cepert, because the question behind me is the point that the history of environmental management, whether it is in any of our areas, has largely been about particular points in a system, whereas the biodiversity crisis, the climate emergency, are about systems problems, so systems solutions are needed. My only comment, really, is that the more that Government can set clear targets and aims, the more it allows agencies like mine to style our programmes to deliver against those systems challenges. We have been given a set of quite powerful responsibilities by the Parliament, both to mandate things and also to help people on a voluntary basis. I think that the thing for us that makes those most useful for whether it is the climate emergency or the nature emergency and the biodiversity crisis is to have those targets goals set with clear policy aims and then allow us to get on and play our role in a co-ordinated way. If you have anything to add to that, Ian, are you okay to? To echo what I said before, about 50 per cent of global climate emissions and 90 per cent of biodiversity loss and water stress comes from the extraction of materials from the earth. That is the real thing that we need to think about if we are going to try and solve those two crises. That is really down to the fact that we just use too much stuff as a global community, and we need to do something about it hence our approach to the circular economy. More importantly, the work that we are doing is reducing demand. The circular economy reduces demand for virgin materials, so it eases pressure on some of the most troubled parts of the world where biodiversity loss is more protracted, particularly thinking about textiles, reducing demand for textiles, particularly cotton, and food, where a third of all the food that is grown globally is wasted. We did not waste so much food globally, so there would not be so much pressure on land for intensive agriculture. Obviously, by eliminating waste and reducing waste going to particularly landfill, we are going to act in the way of culture, like flight tipping, and that is going to reduce pollution items being distributed in the environment, which, again, contributes to biodiversity loss. Obviously, a lot of the work that we are involved in looking at circular solutions for organic material, both organic waste and byproducts of industry, can re-utilise that back into whether that is regenerative agriculture or other applications on land to increase the carbon intensity, the carbon sink, as well as the fertility of soil that is going to just reduce biodiversity more, but it has to increase biodiversity as well. My second question is about the programme for government and what it means in terms of priorities for you, in particular in relation to land use, if I can come to you on that. I also have a small supplementary, but perhaps meaningful, that there is an increasing tendency in urban areas for people to pave over their gardens, so I would be interested in just a sense of land use from a very localised point of view as to what impact that might have in the short or longer term. However, the big picture is about the programme for government. Again, perhaps I will do it in the same order. Nick, then Terry, then Ian. Thanks very much. Can I just clarify the question around the programme for government, if I may miss this one? It's what's your—what are the big priorities for you from that? I'm also particularly interested in land use and what that means in terms of what that's requiring you to do and the priorities within that and any pressures that might have. Okay, okay, that's very clear, thank you very much. Yeah, priorities for us within the programme for government, the first thing to say, it's across all land and sea. So, whilst we're obviously thought of as often the people who do the protected stuff, we're actually having to work across all land and sea because how we manage that is really important not just for dealing with the biodiversity crisis but also the climate crisis. So, in protected areas, we will be looking to increase the amount of land that is protected for nature to 30 per cent at both land and sea and having meaningful management in place to make sure that that nature is as restored and revitalised as possible. But as important is how we work within the farming sector and the forestry sector and within the marine environment to try and to encourage the change in practice. So, for example, within the agricultural sector, we move to a far more regenerative type of agriculture that protects and enhances the soils, makes space for wildlife within that sector and again doing the same within forestry and coming to our urban areas. What we want to do is continue the work that we've been doing for a number of years but massively scale it up to try and bring nature within our cities. I was on site just a couple of weeks ago to see how we're working with communities in a couple of tower blocks, about two hectares of land around and about, many car parks at the moment, how we can green that space for that community, bringing wildlife in, help dealing with localised flooding issues, make the land more porous, bringing butterflies and bees, the pollinators. If we can do that across urban Scotland, we will increase how wildlife is into our cities but also make our communities a much happier, more fulfilling place to be. Just to give you one example, when I was visiting on site in Southside the other week, a little girl comes up to me and says, I'm just so excited as you're redeveloping the car park around us, you're going to put in a place for me to ride my bike. I've never had that before, so it's the human element as well as bringing in the wildlife element that I think is really important in that land use transformation from our cities right up to our mountain tops and out to see them back again. It was interesting to hear about your going from concrete to green, my concern is going from green to concrete in some areas, but if you could maybe ask Seeper if he can talk about their priorities as well. Broadly speaking, if you're with the overlay of the programme for government with the focus on creating a circular economy and net zero emissions economy etc, that provides us with the basis if you turn to land management in the rural area not too much to add to what Nick said in terms of farming. We've got a lot of success when I ran the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, the Ulster Farmers Union used to say, could you please look at the way Seeper works with the NFUS and try and bring some of that innovation back here. There's a good record of working with the farming community in Seeper. A lot of that has been reducing individual impacts. Again, as Nick was saying, how do we now use that strength of relationship and the success that's been had to make systemic change? It changes in farming practices that create a more regenerative form of farming that can not just reduce impacts on the environment but regenerate and repair environmental damage. Our main focus will be working with the Farmers Union and some other interests on those sort of changes in the rural area. In the urban area, what we've done is trying to radically change the way we play our role as a planning consultee. We have about 80 staff dedicated to commenting on planning applications. When you think about that, we've got environmental experts that Scotland has paid for and they're making a contribution when all the ideas are being formed and they comment towards the end and we might get a bit of change. The flooding experts we have, what we've done is trying to shift them to get up front. Glasgow is a great example where there is still a lot of redevelopment opportunity along the Clyde, but all of that area is potentially at flood risk. You can just say, well, don't develop it, but we do want to have economic and social prosperity if there's an opportunity. We've taken our flooding and planning experts and said, sit down with Glasgow City Council and the other councils, with Scottish Enterprise, with communities, with developers and businesses, take that flooding expert that Scotland has invested in and try to help people to come up with innovative and creative ideas to use urban land in a very different way. Scottish Board is another partner in that. We still always retain our right at the end of the process. We're very clear about this, so it's fair and open for people. If we want to recommend to a council that we don't think something should go ahead, we still reserve that right to do that and that's proper, but why just do that only? Why not put that expertise that Scotland has invested in and put it up front in the system? I've made a bit of a distinction between our approach rural and urban. Some of the things cross over, but I hope that explains the way we're trying to contribute to systems. Obviously, the Scottish Canals have done a lot with Glasgow, particularly in development, in terms of flood management, but that land use and flooding is maybe something that we might want to come back to at some point. Maybe Ian from Net Zero, if there's anything that you want to add in terms of programme for government priorities, I'm not sure if the land use aspect is any further to what you've already said. No, we don't have anything specifically on land use directly, but as I've said, a lot of our work does support land use more generally. It's something that focuses for us on that circular economy, the acceleration of that, looking at progress that we've already made and how we can scale that up. Obviously, the proposed circular economy bill will be a focus for us to support stakeholder engagement and that. Obviously, the Government probably mentioned the route back, and I've mentioned that already in terms of not just achieving targets by 2025 but what come next in terms of ambition. There's also a £70 million investment programme in local authorities that we are involved in as well, and we're very much looking at that as an opportunity to supply materials into our own circular economy opportunities here in Scotland. I hear that there's mentions of continuing to tackle single-use plastics, work on textiles, and I've mentioned that as well. Already, that will have impact, hopefully, on land use going forward and further commitment to support producers to roll out the deposit return system for Scotland. Thank you very much. Fiona Collette-Steamonson, please. Thank you, convener. It's still good morning. Sorry, I was just checking the time. There's still good morning to each of you, and thank you very much for your contributions. I wanted to really zone in on net zero, so Ian, I'll ask you a few questions in terms of our waste. I had a brief look at your submission in terms of your funding, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you specifically, which is in terms of net zero, was the EDF money that you just get, and how long have you still to go with that? Is there any impact there going forward when it is likely? Has there been any impact? Are you getting support from the Government when that stops as well? The other thing that I wanted to touch upon in your submission was about circular procurement. Putting my accountants' head on here, it's about visibility for me in terms of procurement and where our waste goes and who effectively is dealing with our waste from the household to the local authority. What role is the end destination reporting, the audit trail there, in terms of our waste? Do you think that that's something that's quite visible? Do you think that the local authorities have a bigger role to play in terms of where that waste goes? For instance, if you have your local binmen picking up your waste and then it maybe goes to a veridor site, where is the visibility there in terms of that as well? The other aspect is just recycling and reuse of products such as steel. What role will use play and what advice should we give out in terms of that as well? Okay, a couple of things, a few sets of words. The question is about the ERDF funding, which is supported by the ERDF funding, European structural funds, which we've been investing in supporting businesses for a number of years now. In fact, it was one of the first European funds to support the circular economy. When we applied it, it was seen as a very pioneering approach by Scotland. It's been quite a success in terms of learning, but now we have a significant healthy pipeline of businesses approaching us for support, which shows again that the circular economy is alive and thriving here in Scotland. However, that funding does come to an end. European structural funds will end in December next year, so obviously what happens is that we are obviously in various discussions with both government colleagues and beyond government. It's obviously not a follow-on programme as such, because the UK Government has proposed a shared prosperity fund, but how that is going to be deployed is not quite clear yet. That is obviously concerning for us in terms of whether the healthy pipeline of businesses is looking for support if funding is not available. In terms of circular procurement, it is very important that we start to use particularly public sector procurement to create a market for circular economy businesses here in Scotland, so we are thinking about rental and leasing. I think that the question that you particularly were asking about is what happens to our resources from local authorities after they have been collected in terms of where they end up. That is a valid point. I think that there is obviously concern from time to time. We have watched TV programmes and we have seen UK plastics ending up in further parts of the world and being left abandoned next to jungles, and obviously even plastics finding their way into the marine habitat as well. I think that that is also a concern. What does happen to our waste once it has been collected for recycling in terms of the end destination? I think that more and more people are beginning to ask those types of questions. A lot of people want to know where their stuff is coming from now, so there is a growing demand from both consumers and businesses. Where is my material coming from and what are the implications in that supply chain? You are thinking about child labour, critical materials and conflict areas of the world. What is happening? People are much more particular about clothing and stuff like that, but you are right where their stuff goes to. I think that there is a responsibility in all of us, both authorities and the private sector, to make that transparent to householders as well, where the tears are not just going, but what has been turned into and what has it been recycled into? That is a great story to be told, particularly if we are going to engage with more people to do more recycling. I know that the SEPA might have a particular view on the actual legality of what happens to waste and how transparent or otherwise that system is currently. I cannot use the analogy of fair trade sometimes. We are very old as countries of where our coffee comes from and such like and supermarket in Britain now. You only use fair trade or sell fair trade products. It is a bit of a fair waste, as I call it. We really need to understand what the implications of our waste are. In Scotland, we should not just from an environmental point of view, but from a moral point of view, start to think that shipping our waste out of the country is not possibly helping other developing countries with some of the situations that they find themselves in. We are obviously exporting opportunities to reprocess that material as well, so that is our economic story to do much more with that waste here in Scotland or those resources here in Scotland. You mentioned steel. Steel is one of the opportunities that we see in the SEPA economy. We currently export quite a lot of decommissioned steel from the decommissioner of the North Sea. We process steel any more in Scotland, especially cut-up and shipped off to other steel manufacturers in some other parts of Europe and beyond. However, we have a demand for steel in our infrastructure going forward particularly. That is clearly an opportunity to see how we can use electric arc furnace approach to start reprocessing our own steel here in Scotland and one creating jobs, but also in terms of the embedded carbon in that steel, because Scotland has renewable power. It is the third greenest grid in the world. Our steel would be much more advantageous to be used in terms of the climate rather than shipping in steel from abroad, which potentially has been made in coal-fire furnaces. It is a massive opportunity for us both economically and environmentally to really think about that system. That goes back to Terry's point about system thinking. Everybody just looks at it in one aspect. If we look at the whole steel system for Scotland, how could we create a more circular economy here in terms of the flows of material into and out of our infrastructure? It just needs a number of parties to come together and make that type of connection. We have an opportunity here. We have a demand for steel going forward in terms of the structure that we require for our next zero between now and 2045. Do we need those materials? Why are we making use of the materials that we already have with our society? It is still a great example of how the circular economy could transform particular material management for economic and social and climate goals. I am really interested in hearing about our steel in the manufacture and recycle of our steel. I am keen to know more about it. I am happy to have a conversation with the committee on that. I am sure that we all are, because it is really interesting. It would be good to know if we have a case study on that and what role we can play in the committee about how we can promote that. I am very happy to share more information on some of the work that we have done in terms of steel. I know that other parties in Scotland have been looking at that as well, so I am quite happy to share that with the committee afterwards. Two supplementals are very briefly, if I may, which arise from that line of questioning. I will put those two again. Where are you, first of all, with the development of plans to ensure that plastics from the deposit return scheme are ultimately recycled in Scotland rather than shipped abroad? Obviously, that is under the control of the producers. Now that legislation has been passed, there is obviously a scheme administrator of Circularity Scotland, who is now in play, who is putting the implementation plan together. We are supporting them. They are, as an organisation, very keen to exactly what you said, to have the plastics that are going to be collected through the scheme reprocessed and repurposed here in Scotland back into the supply chain to create climate and economic opportunities. We are working directly with them as other parties and government landscape to support potential for reprocessing capacity to be built here in Scotland. The scheme is not up and running yet, so we have some time to hopefully land that project. The second question arises from Collette Stevenson's line of questioning. There was a cut in the Scottish Government budget to Zeroway Scotland of £4 million between 2019-20 and 2021. I have had a brief look at your last accounts. The Scottish Government grant was down by £1.5 million in 2020-21. Presumably—or one would have thought—this would have had potentially quite a significant impact, so the question begged is what impact has the cut in funding had in your ability to deliver the outcomes that you are trying to? The funding cuts are related to ARDF. The match funding that we need for ARDF and, as we started to look towards the end of that, there will be significant impacts. In those programmes, the bulk of the money that we have been supporting from ARDF is, as I said, a set of circular economy businesses at an early stage of development, supporting individual companies. We have supported over 240 individual companies over the past couple of years. Without that money, we could easily say that we are going to have to reduce the amount of businesses that we will support. However, there are other parts of Government that have access to fact funding, such as the green jobs fund. It is about working in partnership with other parts of Government to see whether we can provide a better interface for some of those businesses and introduce them to other parts of support that is available. However, as I said, we have a healthy pipeline of businesses. Circular economy is now a central part of Scotland's ambitions around climate change. We have a minister—a new minister—that has been appointed to lead on circular economy. It is definitely an opportunity to scale up businesses and circular economy strategies at local authority level. Funding is going forward as something that we have to keep an eye on, but we recognise the bigger picture of funding that is available to public sector agencies such as ourselves. We want to try to say that the fund has done—obviously, our fund does—leave or in private sector investment. We do not have the figures in front of me, but it is about for every pound, and a lot of three or four pounds comes in from the private sector. There is a growing appetite from the private sector to support circular economy businesses. That was one of the aims of the fund, which was to almost demonstrate the art of the possible in terms of circular economy, so that private sector investment, whether that was banks or angel investors or venture funds, would take the circular economy most seriously. That is beginning to happen now. There are also conversations that my team is having with some of the private sector investors to understand what a following programme for a better world would look like. There is a lot of interest in that space, and there is a role that we can play to provide the interface and the early support for businesses into that pipeline. I have questions for Zero Waste Scotland and then for SEPA. Yes, I will start with Zero Waste Scotland. Ian, according to the latest SEPA data, progress on recycling has slowed and reversed. Under 45 per cent of household waste in Scotland was recycled in 2019, but we are seeing huge variation across the country. East Renfrewshire at the top of the league table, almost 68 per cent of household waste recycled. South Lanarkshire, where I live, 46 per cent. Glasgow, which is hosting COP26, 25 per cent. Shetland, only 17 per cent. My question is why are we not making more progress on recycling rates in Scotland and what needs to be done to rapidly improve that? Without getting into the individual councils, one of the other challenges is that we might want to ask ourselves whether we are measuring the right thing. Those measurements are in tonnes of materials, and that has been a historical way that we have measured the recycling rate. There are incremental increases in household recycling now. The carbon intensity of what has been recycled has increased significantly, about up 17 per cent in the last few years. That is because, again, we have been able to use a world-renowned carbon metric that allows you to look at different recycling opportunities, different materials and target the ones that are much more carbon-intensive. Hence, over the past few years, most councils have proactively engaged around food and plastics recycling. Obviously, plastics are not very heavy, but the intensity of plastic recycling has improved. By measuring the carbon, there has been a great shift in recycling performance if you measure that, but perhaps not when you mention tonnes of materials. However, there is obviously difference across different authorities. Again, part of the work that we are involved in, particularly around the route map, is assessing how we will hit the targets in 2025, but more importantly looking at best practice or good practice across different authorities and trying to understand why some authorities are performing better than others. Housing-type approaches are communications. Obviously, the recycling improvement fund that I mentioned, £70 million, is an opportunity for councils to further advance some of the recycling schemes that they already have. Our evidence continually sh