Net Zero Assessment: Pilot report

6. Policy areas considered by the pilot

42. The NZA should be carried out during early policy design and planning stage. To test this principle, the pilot sought new and developing policies which had yet to have their funding agreed. The aim of this was to allow the full NZA process – from initial assessment through to submission of the policy proposal to Ministers – to be tested. An initial selection of 30 policies nominated from across SG Portfolios in spring 2024 was considered for the pilot.

43. The focus of the pilot was on individual policies. Some policies which were initially volunteered for consideration for the pilot were subsequently identified as actually being programmes (i.e. groups of policies rather than individual policies), or business cases, or sometimes programmes or policies being operated by local authorities rather than central government – these were ruled out of scope for the pilot.

44. Another key challenge identified in the pilot was that a significant number of policies initially volunteered had already had their funding approved and were not, therefore, at a very early stage where they could test all the steps of the pilot process.

45. The remaining policies which were taken forward were then subject to the three-stage pilot process. However, in the event, few of the policies taken forward to the three-stage process exceeded the de minimis threshold on emissions impact (0.1 MtCO2e in any one year or a cumulative 1 MtCO2e impact over 10 years) and only one policy from the original sample required the full in-depth Stage 3 assessment.

46. To ensure a sufficiently large sample to rigorously test the approach, there followed a search for more substantial areas of policy to include in the pilot which resulted in the pilot significantly expanded its scope by considering over 170 commitments from Programme for Government 2024-25, published in September 2024.

47. Consideration was also given to the Infrastructure and Investment Plan Pipeline Reset as a potential candidate for the pilot given the importance of the capital programme to climate change delivery. However, the Pipeline is comprised of business cases so fell outside the scope of the pilot which was focussed on policies. We will continue to consider how best to increase the scope of NZA as the rollout across government proceeds.

48. The number of policies considered by the pilot is set out in the table below:

*Stage 3 Assessments included policies from: Heat in Buildings Policy (included in both original scope and PfG sample), and Regulation; and Carbon Capture Utilisation and Industrial Decarbonisation.

49. An overview of the areas of policy considered by the pilot is at ANNEX C.