Dr. Dermot Coates:

I know I referred to doing a study and looking at firms. I entirely accept that the perception is sometimes that officials do study and that is the end output. It might be instructive to just understand the motivation at work when we undertook this study. We can see that across all sectors of industry and the economy in its entirety we have already eaten into a large proportion of the carbon emissions budget we set ourselves for 2020 to 2025. It is only 2023, but by the end of last year, we had already eaten into quite a bit of that allocation. The more this happens, the more efforts we will need to make in future. This is just unavoidable.

Additionally, we can see that the State provides a broad sweep of initiatives. As I mentioned earlier, though, there is a cohort in the middle that does not take these up. The point of undertaking the study, then, was to communicate that we need to do more in this regard. This was an exercise in refocusing on our risk basis, driven by the data, to say we know sectors A or B are making progress and are on the right track, but that we need to refocus our efforts on those sectors where we can see this message may not have been getting through to the extent we wanted it to.

The Deputy mentioned the management board. Regarding this particular piece of work, I will be discussing it with our own management colleagues next Tuesday. I assure him that they treat this with the utmost importance. It is something we need to drive. I can even say that within the structure of the Department, a previous assistant secretary had made the point recently to me that when he had joined the areas of climate and energy were part but not much of the focus. The staffing and resourcing that have gone into this context in the past couple of years, though, have ensured this topic has become a primary focus. I can say this without fear of any contradiction. This is where our focus is.