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At the moment, we are bound to the previous climate change plan, which is in action. I am not going to put anything partial in the public domain, because that is a really tricky situation to put yourself in. A lot of people are relying on a credible climate change plan that is informed by CCC advice, our different approaches to the various emissions envelopes that we want to put forward and the new five-year carbon budgeting process. If you were in my position, you would probably feel the same. I do not want to put anything in the public domain that is partial or unfinished or has not been deliberated on. Obviously, I work with all my Cabinet colleagues on this, because it is not my portfolio that makes all the delivery commitments to reduce emissions—it is a cross-Government approach. If I were to put anything out there that was not fully informed by the CCC advice or the secondary legislation that we will bring forward, it would be partial and probably subject to a great deal of change, so I will not do that.

However, I want to leave you with the fact that the work on the climate change plan never stops. It is an iterative process. The climate change plan is a living document that is being worked on by me, my officials and my colleagues all the time, as we look at potential areas for getting the most emissions reductions possible in a fair and just way with the available budget. That process never stops. Obviously, the key moment is aligning it with the advice from the CCC, which we analyse. I will not put forward a climate change plan in draft form to the committee or wider stakeholders until we have run through all that advice and discussed with Cabinet colleagues what that means for their individual portfolios and all the different sectors in society.

That would be a matter for the committee. The committee has its processes for the scrutiny that it wants to carry out—

Yes. The committee is part of the Parliament, and the committee has its own process. However, I believe that the process for scrutiny of the climate change plan provides a minimum of 120 days. I hope that you appreciate that I want to get the plan to you as soon as possible.

Yes, I will. You wanted a short answer—yes, I will consider that. We will look at that.

The convener wants me to be short and sharp, so my main takeaway is that we must be honest about what gets us the largest reduction in carbon emissions with the budget that we have and for which there is agreement and appetite as part of a just transition. I am having a conversation with my colleagues in the Cabinet—with regard to land use and transport, for example—about which areas we can accelerate and go further on, within our limited budget, that will make the biggest difference. Maybe we have tried to do too much and the process has been too piecemeal. We are looking at which areas we can we bring our limited resources into in order to have substantial change.

Land use, transport and construction. A lot of work has been done in the housing area, around energy performance certificates, for example. A lot of work has been done on construction. There is also peatland restoration and work on the skills for that. We have been doing reasonably well on peatland restoration, and that is the big-ticket item with regard to carbon sequestration. We are in the position that we are in not because there has not been enough money associated with that work—£250 million over 10 years is a lot of money—but because we have not had the capacity, in the form of a trained workforce, to do that work. We need to look seriously at that area, which comes back to the point about embedding work across portfolios.

Yes.

Let me take that away. Obviously, my officials and I will talk about the trajectory of the timescale. I do not think that we will have a climate change plan available at the same time as the secondary legislation; I just do not think that that is doable. However, we want to make it available as soon as possible after that point.

Yes—hence the need for the targets to be in secondary legislation, as that will give future Governments a chance to assess how far they have come in five years and what needs to change with regard to those targets.

I made the point earlier that, in certain sectors, things might go really far down the road of emissions reduction in a way that we did not expect—there might be some kind of change or something might happen that enables that to be the case. Other areas might not be able to go far enough—the picture might change and might need to be examined flexibly. That is another reason for setting the targets in secondary legislation. It is not just about what the Government does but about future Governments aligning with the 10-year climate change plan and the long-term setting of three budgets to cover the period up to 2040. That will be crucial.

Well, it is, because that looks to see how we are meeting the five-year carbon budget and where we are on it.

It is important to mention that one of the reasons for having a five-year carbon budget is that there are fluctuations in year. All bets were off during the Covid pandemic. Straight after Covid there was a massive reduction in car use all of a sudden because, during the pandemic, people had not wanted to go on trains and so on. Having the assessment over five years allows for such fluctuations to be ironed out.

When it comes to scrutiny, two reports will come out every year: on greenhouse gas reduction and on how we are meeting the provisions in the climate change plan.