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Just to be clear, this committee, and other committees, may make recommendations about the climate change plan, and the Government’s intention is to reflect on all the recommendations and finalise the plan ahead of the next election, so that there will be a cast-iron, agreed climate change plan. There will be nothing for the new Government to do in reopening that plan, and it will be tasked with delivering the actions that are in it.

Will the exact balance of actions that the Government can take during the next five-year carbon budget be forthcoming in the climate change plan?

You have rejected regulation. There is now a heavy reliance on the UK Government making decisions about the wholesale price of electricity, and other stuff may or may not happen. Will all those policy options be spelled out transparently in the energy strategy and the climate change plan, so that we can see what the impact will be?

The emissions impact of the legislation.

Go ahead.

I am reading the submission from the Institute for Public Policy Research in Scotland. It says that ���˿��� will have to decide to approve the carbon budgets

“effectively in ignorance of the policies they would then have to support in order to see the budgets delivered.”

The lack of information is concerning, and it perhaps plays to those, such as Mr Lumsden, who want to weaken ambition for the carbon budget, rather than people such as me, who want to strengthen that ambition.

No climate change plan—not even a draft one—has been submitted. We have only an incredibly thin indicative statement. The Government has rejected the advice of the UK Climate Change Committee on livestock and on peatlands, and policies on heat and on traffic reduction have been dropped. There is no energy strategy as yet. When it comes to Peterhead power station, there is uncertainty about the existing power station, let alone the prospect of a second one.

There are a lot of unknowns here and, quite frankly, I do not know whether this carbon budget is ambitious enough, because it lacks the transparency that successive committees of this Parliament have called for in advance of setting targets, objectives and aspirations around climate change. Although I will not vote against the budget, I find it very difficult to vote for it, because, without that detail, I do not know what it is that we are voting on at this point. I will therefore abstain.

I am struck by just how important electrification is going to be in all areas of our lives. Beyond the important UK Government decision on electricity market reform, decoupling gas from the electricity price and allowing CFDs—especially the new CFDs that you have outlined this morning—to reduce costs over time, what can householders do? How can they be supported to reduce their electricity costs?

At the moment, the market is providing low-cost tariffs. For example, under EV tariffs, people pay 8p or 8.5p per kilowatt at night, typically, as opposed to 25p to 30p per kilowatt during the day. What supplementary measures can the Government take to support people? Battery storage in the home would enable people to shift a great proportion of their electricity consumption to the night time and, as a result, they could benefit by signing up for those far cheaper rates.

I do not know what the picture should look like for householders and consumers, but, beyond the big question of electricity market reform, which householders are not able to influence, what measures can people take in their homes? What should the Government be doing to support them on that journey?

Do you think that those variable, far cheaper electricity prices will be a fixed feature for consumers and householders? Can consumers and businesses that supply technology such as night-time battery storage be certain that it will always be possible to buy cheaper electricity at certain times and thereby save on bills?

Thanks, convener. I turn to buildings—both homes and other buildings. Earlier, you put it to us that there is a real need to switch to much more efficient technologies that are lower cost for consumers but also much lower carbon. I ask you to reflect on the change that we have seen in expectation. In the 2020 climate change plan update, the Scottish Government had a very ambitious programme—well, it was not a full programme as such, but it contained an ambitious target of a 63 per cent reduction in emissions from the building sector to 2030. That clearly represented an enormous ramp-up of a range of technologies, although the programme at that time did not really specify how that would be achieved. That differs quite a lot from what you are now putting forward in the balanced pathway, which sees a much greater adoption of technologies than in the third and fourth budgets.

Can you offer a bit of narrative as to what you think has changed around the expectations on building carbon reduction in recent years and what is now the realistic pathway?

So you really see the reduction in electricity price as a trigger, whether it is for transport, for home heating or for people shifting over to electrifying technology. At the moment, we are not quite there in terms of a market signal being sent to consumers that it is obvious that they should switch to an electric vehicle and an air-source heat pump.