Chamber and committees

Thank you. We have run out of time, so I will draw this part of this morning’s session to a close.

I thank the Auditor General for his evidence this morning, as well as Mark Taylor and Joanne Brown, who has been moved on, which is a routine thing—it is not because you have done anything wrong, Joanne, is it?

I thank you all for your evidence, which has been very illuminating. We will need to consider our next steps as a committee in response to the evidence that we have heard this morning. I now propose to suspend the session in order to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

I welcome everyone back to this morning’s meeting of the Public Audit Committee. The second principal item on our agenda is consideration of major capital projects. I am delighted that we have four witnesses from the Scottish Government to help us with our inquiries on major capital projects: Alison Cumming is the director of budget and public spending; Alison Irvine is the chief executive officer of Transport Scotland; David Signorini is the director of environment and forestry; and Kersti Berge is from the directorate for energy and climate change. You are all very welcome.

We are particularly interested in focusing on the Government’s approach to net zero and the whole agenda around climate change targets. We are a little pressed for time, so there will be no opening statement—we will go straight to questions. Bill Kidd will ask the first couple of questions.

We are a bit pushed for time, so we cannot go into too much detail about particular projects. We have questions about specific projects, so we will come back to those in the course of the discussion over the next three quarters of an hour.

Willie Coffey has some questions.

I will pick up on that theme. Sharon Dowey mentioned the bus priority improvements under the future transport fund. I presume that that involves building bus lanes and ensuring that buses get priority in traffic, even across the Sheriffhall roundabout.

When we look at the budget headings, we see that the planned expenditure on that was £495 million, but only £26 million has been spent. There is £300 million in the budget for Scotland’s heat network, but only £6.4 million has been spent. There is £26 million in the budget for the low-carbon manufacturing challenge fund, but only £750,000 has been spent. There is a planned spend of £180 million on the emergency energy technologies fund, but only £10 million has been spent.

I do not want to miss out Mr Signorini. The peatland underspend has been a bit of an issue as well, has it not? I know that Rhoda Grant has written to the cabinet secretary, who has confirmed that the underspend on peatland restoration in 2020-21 was £12 million and that it was £7.4 million in 2021-22. Why is there such slow progress in those areas?

Sure.

Who will own those charge points in the future?

Thank you—fair enough. Just one other thing from me before I go to Bill Kidd again, and that is a question about the assessment and cost benefit analysis that is made on road improvement projects such as on the A83 or whatever it is. How do you reconcile that with the net zero targets? What criteria is used in order to say, “Yes, that’s going ahead,” or, “No, that is not going ahead.” What criteria is used in order to say, “Yes, that’s been prioritised,” or, “No, that’s been deprioritised?”

Thank you. That was very helpful.

Can I ask each of you if you have got any reflections on the recent Audit Scotland report that spoke about the extent to which there is joined-up working across Government in pursuit of net zero targets?

I will read out a couple of the conclusions from the report. The Auditor General said:

“The Scottish Government does not routinely carry out carbon assessments or capture the impact of spending decisions on its carbon footprint in the long term.”

He also said:

“The Scottish Government does not assess how far the policies outlined in the Climate Change Plan Update will contribute to net zero.”

Finally, he said:

“The Scottish Government does not know how much the policies proposed in the current Climate Change Plan Update will cost”.

Do you think that that is a fair assessment? We will start with Alison Cumming.

Thank you very much for setting the scene with that opening statement, which had a great deal of similarity with the evidence that we took around this time last year.

We will go straight to questions. I invite deputy convener Sharon Dowey to begin.

Thank you. That was very clear and we appreciate that. Craig Hoy has some questions.