Overview of the Act and General Notes Interpretation Part 1: Emissions Reduction Targets Inserted section A4 (Budget-setting regulations)
17.Inserted section A4 deals with the setting of Scottish carbon budgets by regulations. (Section 13 of the Act makes further provision about the first exercise of this regulation-making power.)
18.As inserted section A2 states, a Scottish carbon budget is to be an amount of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Subsection (2) of inserted section A4 makes clear that the regulations setting a budget may, but need not, do so by expressing it as a number of tonnes. The Scottish Ministers may instead set a budget for a given period using a formula for calculating the number of tonnes that constitutes the budget for the period. Rather than say that the budget for the period 2026 to 2030 is x mega tonnes, the regulations might (for example) say that the budget is x% of what emissions would have been had the baseline level of emissions continued throughout each year of that period. Specifying a formula in the legislation, rather than directly specifying a number, means that the budget amount at the end of a budget period may be different from what it would have been had the budget been specified as a number calculated at the start of the period using the formula. This is because changes in knowledge and methodology in the climate-science sphere mean that the formula’s input values (such as the baseline), although historical, may nevertheless change over time, so that the formula’s output may be different in 2030 from what it was in 2026.
19.Subsection (3) of inserted section A4 requires the Scottish Ministers to set budgets so that each budget covers a 5 year period, with the exception of the final budget which may cover a shorter period. The final budget period may be shorter than 5 years because the budgets are to operate up until the net-zero emissions target year, which may fall fewer than 5 years after the end of the preceding budget period. Inserted section A5 (discussed further below) allows the budget periods mandated by inserted section A4(3) to be adjusted by regulations.
20.Subsection (4) of inserted section A4 requires the Scottish Ministers, when making budget-setting regulations, to have regard to the target-setting criteria and take into account the advice they have received from the relevant body. Subsection (5) requires the Scottish Ministers to lay before the Parliament a statement about their compliance with subsection (4), and subsections (6) and (7) specify other matters that must be addressed in those statements. The “target-setting criteria” are set out in section 2B of the Climate Change (Scotland) 2009 Act. The “relevant body”, at the time these Notes were prepared, was the UK Committee on Climate Change. Section 20A of the 2009 Act allows for a different body to become the “relevant body” by virtue of an order made by the Scottish Ministers under section 24 of the 2009 Act.
21.Regulations under inserted section A4 will be subject to parliamentary scrutiny under the affirmative procedure. This is because section 96(4) of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 applies the affirmative procedure by default to any regulations made under a section of that Act. Section 96(4) is relevantly modified by paragraph 5 of schedule 3 of the Interpretation and Legislative Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, which requires section 96(4) of the 2009 Act to be read as referring to the affirmative procedure as defined by section 29 of the 2010 Act.