Chamber and committees

The resource budgets tend to reflect that because many of those bodies have received inflationary pay rises, which has perhaps eaten into some of the resource budget—unexpectedly so, given events of the past few years. However, in relation to other improvements such as digitisation, reforming public services and access to public services, my impression from reading numerous reports in my eight years here is that we seem to be quite slow on the uptake with regard to many of those, and the reason largely given for that is that that usually involves, to a great degree, putting capital investments up front.

Of course, as we know, that is a bone of contention at the moment and many of the spend-to-save projects that may have been mooted in public sector bodies have been put on hold or cancelled altogether. There are numerous examples of that. Does that pose a risk down the line? If we are not spending on capital now to make those necessary digital technological improvements and to improve access to public services, we are simply carrying down the same road of doing things as they are and will end up in five years’ time with very slow, old-fashioned mechanisms and infrastructure.

In the interests of time, I will stop there.

Let us look at those points individually. The Government has an ambition and Parliament has mandated it to achieve that. Public funds will be allocated to try to deliver it, and the Government will go as far as it can within the realms of public finance. I understand that. However, 2 million individual households are operating on mains gas, and many of them are in the sorts of properties that you have spoken about—antiquated and poorly insulated properties. I think that the last estimate was that around 35 per cent of those households are in fuel poverty. What is in it for those people? Is the Government taking a carrot-and-stick approach or is it coming along with the stick only and saying, “We’ve changed the law and you must now convert to a different type of energy.”? Why on earth would people do that, or why should they?

Would you not argue that that should be the case anyway? Even if we had no green energy targets and no net zero ambitions, we should be making our homes better insulated, warmer and cheaper to run anyway.

Surely the Government could have been doing that over the past 15 years.

That sounds helpful. I am not entirely convinced that there is good public awareness of the support that is currently available. As I have said, from chatting to my neighbours, I do not think that any of them would know where to go for support for insulation, for example, so there is a massive exercise to be undertaken there. However, the big, fundamental issue is that two million homes are still gas mains supplied. What are we asking them to do? Are we asking them switch off that gas supply? I am sure that the energy companies would have something to say about losing a million customers.

I have the cold, but I will try to struggle through this.

I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The Scottish Government estimates that it will cost £33 billion to deliver its heat in buildings strategy. We know from the Auditor General for Scotland’s report that around £1.8 billion of public funding has been committed, but I understand that £600 million of that is as yet unallocated and that around £0.5 billion of it is dedicated to supporting people who are in fuel poverty. That does not leave much for physical intervention. I guess that less than £1 billion of public money is going into physical intervention to move homes towards the strategy. My overarching question is: where will the other £32 billion come from?

Absolutely. The 2.5 million occupied homes account for 15 per cent of Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions, using that phraseology. That is not the lion’s share of our emissions as a country, and it sounds to me that we are asking those with the least to do the most in this scenario and that legislation will force them to do so.

Let me give you a practical example because, out there in the real world, people want to know what all of this means for their household. My flat in Greenock is in a Victorian tenement with six flats, most of which are poorly insulated. None of them is double-glazed, and all of them run on gas boilers—to various extents of success, I should add. In that scenario, when the Government says, “Right, we’ve changed the law and you’re all going to have to move to some new green energy system, although we don’t know what it is yet,” the first question that all my neighbours will ask me is, “How much is that going to cost me, because I don’t have any money right now?”

The average price of a property in the streets that I am talking about is about £35,000. You will crash the property market in that area if you suddenly require people to put in five £10,000 heating systems.

Let us look at some of that in the context of the fact that GEOAmey has received £4 million of financial penalties due to its performance issues. Since 2021, it has been served with five improvement notices on specific issues. That is the backdrop that we are working against here.

You have just responded by saying that there are two reasons for that. One is the one that you are leading on, by selectively quoting from the Auditor General’s report, which is the changing operating environment that you work in. I do not underestimate how challenging that is for you. However, for me, the main driver seems to be staffing issues, which we will come on to later in more detail. Surely, as a company that operates in the service industry, working with public sector organisations, you also operate in other jurisdictions. It sounds to me a little bit as though you have gone into the contract here in Scotland with your eyes wide shut. Surely the challenging changes of scenario in contract terms that you operate in would have been known to you at the time of entering into the contract. It sounds to me as though you are saying that the failures are everyone else’s fault but your own.