Environmental Standards Scotland Strategy 2026-2031

The RSE welcomes this opportunity to respond to Environmental Standards Scotland’s (ESS) draft strategy for 2026-2031. Following Scotland’s departure from the European Union, ESS has emerged as a vital mechanism to ensure continued and independent scrutiny of public sector environmental performance and the RSE has been firmly supportive of its aims since its inception. While this scrutiny function remains critically important, we believe ESS’ proactive work is equally important and should be expanded. By reinforcing this horizon scanning role, ESS can raise greater awareness of emerging environmental threats so that Scotland is well placed to respond early and effectively. We would also encourage ESS to consider broadening its scrutiny framework beyond environmental legislation to include other policies and strategies that influence environmental outcomes but for which no formal enforcement mechanism currently exists. As another evidence-based and independent body, the RSE would be pleased to advise ESS on the continued development and delivery of this Strategy as appropriate.

Download the RSE Environmental Standards Scotland Strategy (459KB, PDF)

Executive summary

The RSE welcomes this opportunity to respond to Environmental Standards Scotland’s (ESS) draft strategy for 2026-2031. Following Scotland’s departure from the European Union, ESS has emerged as a vital mechanism to ensure continued and independent scrutiny of public sector environmental performance and the RSE has been firmly supportive of its aims since its inception. While this scrutiny function remains critically important, we believe ESS’ proactive work is equally important and should be expanded.

Vision

The RSE is broadly supportive of the vision as currently articulated. However, it would be useful for the vision to move beyond a purely legislative measure of compliance. There exist many government policies, strategies, and frameworks that influence the delivery of environmental outcomes and the implementation of environmental law. Public bodies should be assessed against this broader context to ensure they are truly meeting their environmental obligations.

Principles

The RSE broadly agrees that the principles are the right ones for ESS to be working towards.

On the principle of being trusted, it would also be beneficial to include some explanatory text that outlines how ESS’s own monitoring efforts are evaluated and how any external expert input is commissioned and applied in a way that safeguards ESS’s independence.

On the principle of being evidence-driven, it would be reassuring to see a brief overview of how ESS would reconcile instances of scientific uncertainty or competing interests when investigating representations or in undertaking its proactive work.

Achieving the principles of being open and transparent and of engaging widely will likely require ESS to raise its public profile.

It would also be useful to know how ESS balances the proactive and reactive strands of its work, and the justification for prioritising one over the other in practice, if this does in fact occur. This is particularly significant in light of the changes introduced by the Natural Environment Bill, including a broad range of legally binding targets for nature restoration. The Bill appoints ESS as the body to lead on assessing Ministers’ performance against the targets.

Priorities

The priorities themselves are largely appropriate. However, the number of topics that could fall under the priority of “resources” is potentially very extensive and so it could be necessary to briefly delineate the boundaries of this category to avoid confusion; for example, “water” is arguably a resource, but it is also listed as a separate priority.

We welcome acknowledgement in the draft Strategy that ESS “may also choose to scrutinise thematic or cross-cutting issues that span more than one priority” and that ESS will continue to monitor past areas of focus (for example, soils and air quality), which will help to build on the current evidence base.

Although the consultation mentions that ESS will consider all concerns raised by members of the public and that the priorities are principally to guide their proactive work, it would be helpful to know how the representations themselves are triaged (for example, by topic area, by potential severity of infraction, by the number of representations centred on the same incident or public body, by number of repeated infractions, etc.).

Strategic objectives

The RSE fundamentally agrees with all five of the objectives. Overall, they are well-expressed and the approaches to delivering them seem appropriate. However, the issue of resourcing remains pertinent to this discussion. If ESS is to realise these objectives, it must have access to the appropriate funding, which, in a time of increasingly constrained public finances, could prove challenging. This becomes more pressing with the prospect of ESS taking on additional responsibilities as set out in the provisions of the Natural Environment Bill.

Proposed approach to measuring performance

Accurately measuring performance and setting targets for improvement will be the most important determinant of the Strategy’s success, and the overall approach to monitoring (employing the theory of change to evaluate impact, tracking longer-term impact through triennial case studies, etc.) is encouraging and contains many elements of best practice. It might have been beneficial to include (or at least signpost to) a few illustrative KPIs and PMIs to better understand the kinds of outcomes that will be assessed.

When it comes to monitoring environmental performance, it would be useful to understand whether it is always the agency under scrutiny who supplies the performance data, and, if so, whether ESS can independently verify these data in certain cases. While it is unlikely that an agency would have any incentive to provide misleading data, their monitoring systems may be inadequate and so it is nevertheless good practice to build in additional checkpoints to ensure reliability, applicability, accuracy, and public trust.

Download the report

Download the RSE Environmental Standards Scotland Strategy (459KB, PDF)