To ask the Minister for the Economy for an update on her Department's progress in implementing the Energy Management Strategy and Action Plan for the Central Government Estate to 2030.

My Department sponsors an Energy Management Unit in the Strategic Investment Board to manage the delivery of the Energy Management Strategy & Action Plan to 2030. Delivering on this strategy and action plan is a collective responsibility across central government and the role of the unit is to facilitate Departments and Arms Length Bodies to deliver on potential energy-savings opportunities

The Energy Management Strategy and Action Plan sets out a pathway for central government to establish effective energy management processes that unlock value and includes an objective of lowering net energy consumption by 30% by 2030 from a 2016/17 baseline year.

Over the last three years, and in alignment with the strategy action plan, an extensive energy consumption data collection process has been undertaken to ensure a robust, validated and verified dataset is in place allowing for a more accurate representation of the baseline year. This process will be further supported by the inception of a centrally procured framework delivering a service to provide automatic meter reading systems across the central government estate, progress here is ongoing.

As part of this development phase of the strategy the Energy Management Unit continue to undertake a number of bilateral discussions with Centres of Procurement Excellence across central government. The discussions have focused not only on procurement but have taken into account other key enablers such as piloting behavioural change and building on a recently commissioned exemplar buildings study. Collaboration and engagement across central government to drive awareness and influence decision making has been the emphasis of discussions to date.

Since its launch in May 2019 the strategy commits the Energy Management Unit co-sponsored by my department to report progress against the aforementioned baseline annually, the first annual report is publically available at www.sibni.org, the second annual report covering the period 1st April 2020 – 31 March 2021 will be published later this year.