Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

There are major issues about how it all fits together. It is a significant concern.

The council is a member of a European network of fiscal institutions and we have undertaken a survey to determine what the state-of-the-art is in Europe. One or two countries are strong in this area. For example, the UK and the Netherlands have performed proper assessments. Most other countries are in the same boat as us, with their governments falling behind in terms of starting to figure out the implications. It should be a major priority for the Government to understand the full economic and budgetary impacts of this major re-engineering of our whole society. We need to figure out what the impact will be on the public finances.

If it is going to cost a lot of money, we must start thinking about how it is going to be funded and how the public finances are going to be maintained in a situation where we will be facing significant costs relating to climate change.