Mr. David Mellett:

To start with the question on the sectoral strategy to deliver on climate action, it is about leveraging our 29,000 staff and the 949 elected members to lead on climate action. All the interactions the existing staff have offer an opportunity to bring climate action into the conversation and be part of the considerations on whatever function or programme is being discussed. In developing the strategy, we identified core staff who were required to leverage the full ambition for the sector. To start with energy officers, we have tough targets in the context of our absolute emissions targets for 2030, so we are looking for energy officers to be deployed in each of the local authorities to help to deliver that. In addition, the energy officers will start to build knowledge and capacity within each of the local authorities which can feed back into the communities to provide advice on the new technologies that are appropriate for them. The second area of focus is climate action community officers. To follow on from the earlier discussions, a continuous engagement with the community for a bottom-up approach whereby we co-create a solution that is appropriate for each community is resource-intense. That is why we are looking for climate action community officers to carry out those engagements, consistently interact with the community and feed back into the different functions within the local authority. Third, there is a need for green solution specialists who will work alongside the planning departments but also feed into the adaptation strategies. We are considering our land use policies and nature-based solutions to adapt to the risks and impacts from climate change.

As regards the overall role for local authorities, one of the major roles in adaptation in particular is to co-ordinate the national and sectoral adaptation policies down at the local level. We identified climate action co-ordinators to assist with that and, in addition, to help to co-ordinate the broader role of climate action - the mitigation and community engagement piece - and co-ordinate the overall climate action team. To assist them, we also identified the need for a climate action officer within each local authority. One of their primary roles will be that cultural change within the local authority so that all 28,000 staff are aligned to deliver on climate action, but also to provide support to the co-ordinator or community officer for different programmes, such as the community conversations that were rolled out with the national dialogue. Those are the positions we identified in the sector. There are different metrics in respect of each of the roles. In total, we identified 170 positions across the 31 local authorities.