Net Zero Assessment: Pilot report

5. Governance

35. The Governance of the pilot was designed to ensure that policies undergo a NZA in the early stages of development. The initial discussions and assessment are carried out during early policy design and planning stage, before any policy decisions are made, in order to play a role in guiding which policy options are developed and presented to Ministers.

36. The NZA pilot aimed to inform key policy development documents, to both senior decision-makers and Ministers. This was to capture the impact of policy proposals in relation the challenging legislative national emissions targets and the Climate Change Plan pathway, ensuring that no policy causes undue increases in emissions.

37. Through the pilot, it was proposed that emissions estimates should accompany relevant submissions on key decisions. To trial the implementation of the NZA a modification of the Ministerial submission template was designed to ensure that all submissions would have to note the policy’s NZA status and results.

38. The overarching approach in other countries is for policy teams to lead their assessments with a central team reviewing the outputs – this “mainstreaming” approach is a similar process settled on for the Scottish NZA pilot. The assessments were the responsibility of lead policy teams, who needed to commission their own analytical work. Assessments were reviewed by a review panel which provided guidance and support.

39. Where possible the assessment stages drew on existing impact assessments to avoid duplication of work. Assessments were able to be carried over between the different processes depending on which was done first. Where there were differing standards between processes then some additional work was required to ensure consistency of approach within each assessment.

40. The governance process aimed to ensure that the analysis undertaken was of a sufficient standard. Any results that were included in the pilot were first validated by a central analytical function designed to ensure assessment standards were met.

41. The resource requirements of the approach, both for policy teams and for the central coordinating and reviewing team, were assessed as part of the pilot.