Chamber and committees

A little.

Okay. I will ask you one quick question, to which I hope to get a quick answer before I bring in Willie Coffey.

What is the current position?

Okay, but we are in 2024, and the Scottish Government declared a climate emergency back in 2019. I understand why you mentioned the need to be careful and the need for extensive consultation, but why, in 2024, five years after a climate emergency was declared, are your plans still out to consultation? Why are we still talking about the need to take people with us? Why is it taking so long?

Let me turn to another aspect of this, which is drawn out in paragraph 47 of the report, which tells us that the heat and building strategy progress report shows

“a spend of £170 million”.

Have you undertaken an assessment of the effectiveness of that spend?

Thank you very much indeed for that evidence session. It has been very useful. There might be some issues on which we need to follow up, but I think that you have furnished us with comprehensive answers to the questions that we have put to you. I thank Sue Kearns, Catherine Williams, Kersti Berge and the director general, Roy Brannen, for their time this morning.

I will suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.

Welcome back. The second public evidence session this morning is on the Auditor General’s section 22 report “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”, one dimension of which is consideration of the operation of the contract that is run by GEOAmey. I am pleased to welcome our witnesses, who are from GEOAmey. We are joined by David Jones, the managing director; James Huntley, the commercial and finance director; and Gavin Redmond, the account director for the Scottish court custody and prison escorting service. You are all very welcome.

We have some questions to put to you but, before we get to those, I invite Mr Jones to make a short opening statement.

We will move things along. I invite Colin Beattie to put some questions to you. Mr Huntley, I do not know whether you were preparing to answer one of those questions, but perhaps you could respond to Mr Beattie’s questions.

You appear to concede that there may be a human rights-based case, but your position is that, as a company, GEOAmey has no liability. Is that correct?

Is it up to individual crews to phone ahead to the court and say, “We’re going to be eight hours”, “We’re going to be two hours delayed” or “We’re not going to make it today at all”, or do you have some kind of central operational hub from which you make those calls?