Ms Sharon Finegan:

Yes. I thank Deputy Whitmore for the question. There are a significant number of structural barriers to implementation that have been revealed through the centralised monitoring of the climate action plan. This is one of the benefits of centralised monitoring. In addition to a continued and sustained focus on driving implementation it also allows a perspective to be formed from the centre as to whether there are structural issues. We have been detailing these in the updates we produce with each of the quarterly reports. I will talk the committee through some of them if that is helpful.

The first is around issues of capacity, resourcing, expertise and ownership in Government Departments and agencies. This has manifested itself in a few different ways such as insufficient human resources assigned to the delivery of action; insufficient financial resources assigned to the delivery of action; insufficient attention to climate action at a senior level in Departments; failure in the early assignment of actions to personnel; and the limited action of appropriate expertise within Departments. This is probably to be expected given the scale of the challenge, but it is certainly has come to the fore.

The second piece would be the speed of the legislative process. There have been some delays in some of the more complex and comprehensive legislation that will underpin the transition. I include in this, for example, the offshore wind legislation that is in train. This is very complex legislation.

The third aspect is the complexity of the work on the consultations that are required. Undertaking climate action is rarely straightforward and often necessitates extensive consultation within and outside the policy system. Perhaps further deployment of financial and human resources, qualitatively and quantitatively, might help with increasing what needs to be done in this area. In some cases there has been a delay in undertaking the work as identified in the climate action plan because it has been deemed that further more comprehensive action would be more beneficial in order to drive the implementation of the action. In these instances, measures are marked as delayed while more comprehensive work is undertaken.

Finally, some of the delays experienced have been due to EU negotiations. They create problems for some discrete actions and particularly some of the ones around agriculture, the common agricultural policy and the work going on there. This is often beyond the control of the respective Departments but it does result in recurring delays each quarter.

These are some of the systemic issues that we have identified. None of the answers to those are easy solutions and will need to be thought through very carefully as we develop the next iteration of the climate action plan to try to overcome those barriers, and to see barriers to delivery as things that need to be worked through as part of the suite of measures to drive implementation.