The Scottish Government Needs A Rethink To Meet Net Zero Ambitions

14th February 2023

The Fraser of Allender Institute report today on the Scottish Governments plans for NET ZERO paint gloomy picture.

What was the project?
We were asked to explore how the Scottish Government can better assess the impact of its spending choices on emissions and improve its carbon assessment of the Budget to support parliamentary scrutiny.

We spoke to many people across the Scottish Government, agencies, Parliament, other governments and the wider policy making community. We wish to thank the Scottish Government for its openness and transparency throughout.

What did we find?
The points below are our own reflections.
Implementing change at scale requires a clear understanding of existing processes and potential intervention points. Effective recommendations require suitable incentives and coherence with existing practices. We therefore first set out to understand how policy development is current applied across the Scottish Government.

Our research found that there is a significant gap between the intentions of processes and how these processes are being applied. These processes include business cases (project planning), impact assessments (considering specific impacts, e.g. on equalities or island communities) and economic appraisal (identifying which project options provide the best set of social outcomes for the cost).
This is hugely concerning given the importance of these processes to setting clear objectives, identifying value for money, supporting evidence-based policymaking, documenting information and ensuring policy matches the overarching strategic goals of Government. These processes are also responsible for collecting the data required to assess the emissions impact of policy.
These processes appear to be regularly missing key components, insufficient in quality, performed too late to genuinely influence how decisions are made or missing entirely.

In some areas, there appears to be very limited challenge, scrutiny or governance arrangements around many issues that are broader than simply balancing the books. Civil servants have been unable to point us towards who is responsible for questioning the existence or quality of business cases or the social and environmental impacts of policies.

Without policy development processes that clearly lay out the objectives, inputs, and outputs of policy within Government, it is hugely challenging to produce an accurate carbon assessment of the Budget that can produce meaningful, non-spurious results.
What are our reflections on the Scottish Government's response?
We welcome the Scottish Government's acceptance of our recommendations to introduce a Net Zero Assessment and dedicate a section of the Budget to the climate. Effective implementation of this Assessment would highlight Scotland as a clear global leader. It is not yet clear whether this Assessment will play an important role in day-to-day policy development within Government or will just be used to generate information for the Budget. We suspect both will apply - a significant step forward that the Scottish Government would deserve credit for - but want to highlight this concern until more is known.

What is clear is that insufficient progress is likely to be made without rethinking how the Scottish Government currently operates internally. We have substantial concerns around existing governance, processes, oversight, challenge, culture, and the lack of clout for any individual area to influence internal processes in a way that can support statutory climate ambitions. Governance structures, in particular, appear to be driving several of these issues.

No government has solved all of these issues and we appreciate that not all governments would have been as transparent throughout this project as the Scottish Government has been. We hope that the Scottish Government continues this transparency with a frank and open discussion around how it plans to develop its internal processes. Any consideration of tinkering around the edges would not be taking a hugely challenging set of net zero targets seriously.

Decisions being made now are locking in emissions many years in the future and government-wide change is a slow process. In December, the CCC stated that "Scotland's climate targets are in danger of becoming meaningless". Our project has found that integration of climate targets into internal processes is severely lacking and so we echo this sentiment. Immediate action is required if the Government wishes for its climate targets to remain rooted in reality.

Read the full report HERE