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As you can imagine, ministers have been looking closely at that issue, and more support has been brought forward to help low-income households to deal with their energy bills and tackle fuel poverty through implementing home energy efficiency measures. We are extremely concerned about the impact of rising energy prices on fuel poverty and on widening inequalities in the country. I am happy to ensure that the committee gets some follow-up information on that, as a lot of work has been taking place on the issue.

As I said before, the just transition will have failed if, in a few years’ time, we find ourselves living in an energy-rich country in which people cannot afford to pay their fuel bills and might die because of fuel poverty. You could not make it up. It is a horrendous situation, and it shows that our energy policy has failed—of course, the energy market and energy regulation are issues that are reserved to the UK Government. As an energy-rich country, we should not be in a position in which people are facing fuel poverty. We have to get this issue right, and I imagine that the refreshed energy strategy that the Government will publish shortly will address some of those issues.

The UK Government is about to take a decision on the role that hydrogen will play. I cannot remember the exact timescale for that; it might be in the next year or so. That will have to guide us in Scotland because it will relate to the regulation. That will have a big influence on where hydrogen could be used in the economy. We are waiting for that because it is to do with the regulatory side.

As I mentioned, in the private sector, SGN is doing an exercise on what hydrogen will mean for the gas networks and what potential there could be for domestic use. That is a potential route for the use of hydrogen.

We can also see the hydrogen buses that are being deployed and creating jobs in Aberdeen. Therefore, transport has a big role to play. There is also an exercise going on in Scotland to do with how we can use hydrogen in heavy goods vehicles and other trucks.

That was in a statement that was issued on the potential of hydrogen. We can send that to the committee. It was published a while back.

I am sorry—could you ask that question again?

That depends on how you deliver the just transition. I know where you are trying to go with this, in pointing out that I am the MSP for Moray and the minister. The just transition is different things to different people, and what matters is the outcomes. If we have more equality, good jobs and prosperity—those are the outcomes that we want. As the just transition minister, I cannot say to a community: “This is what the just transition means to you.” That is why we co-design. Whether it is about roads in one part of Scotland or another, we must listen to communities about what the just transition means to them. It might mean a new road or it might not mean a new road—it might mean something else. We have to listen to communities. That is the whole purpose of co-design.

If there was one subject that kept me awake at night—other than the impact of climate change if we do not deal with it—it would be our plans in Scotland for people and skills. Why is that a concern for me? In Scotland, we are in the strange position of having low unemployment but significant labour shortages, particularly in some sectors.

We have enormous economic opportunities. If we get the energy transition right, we will be able to make Scotland one of the most successful economic countries in the world, but we need the people and the skills for that to happen. A lot of people ask where we will get the skills from, but you are right to ask where we will get the people from. It is not just a question of whether people have the skills; it is about where we will get the people from. We have certain demographic trends in Scotland, we have no power over immigration policy, and we have had Brexit. That has tightened things up and has made the situation quite challenging.

You said that every company mentions the issue to you, and I speak to companies about it all the time. Some companies are confident that, if they get the go-ahead for X or Y project, they have the people to deliver it, but other companies say that they have vacancies. Scottish Power and other companies have said that they have hundreds of vacancies in certain areas that would help with the transition to net zero. They say that they could employ people tomorrow in those roles if they had the people to fill them. There is therefore quite a varied picture.

I am sorry to dwell on the CCS Acorn project, but the position in which we have ended up with it is so frustrating. One of my key concerns is that, if we are not the first mover, skilled people leave. The feedback from the CCS sector in Scotland and the rest of the UK is that, because the UK Government is taking so long with things, a lot of the skilled people are going to work in America or other European countries that are racing ahead of Scotland and the rest of the UK on CCS. We cannot afford to lose those people. We must be first movers and get going, otherwise we will lose thousands of skilled people who will say, “I’ll just go and work over there, because there’s no job for me here.”

There is a lot of work going on in that area, which is important. The big picture is that, as I said, we have really good companies that have perhaps grown out of the oil and gas sector or other sectors in Scotland and are now looking to the future and gearing up for the green energy revolution, for instance. They are all gearing up for that, but they need the projects to happen. Some of the orders are beginning to come to fruition.

Offshore Energies UK, which is the trade body, is mapping out the supply chain at the moment. That is a really good exercise, and I think that it will share the results with us shortly. The committee might wish to speak to that body, because the supply chain is a crucial aspect, as so many jobs are in supply chains. If we want to get the just transition jobs and new jobs in new industries, we need new supply chains. That trade body is mapping out all that in the private sector.

The Scottish Government is working on the local content agreements and the commitments on the £1.4 billion-worth of business that is expected to come from each ScotWind bid, of which there are 20. That could be a lot of money for supply chains and the Scottish economy, if we get a big chunk of that. I am sure that we will not get it all, but we will get a big chunk of it. There is £1.4 billion from each project that could come to Scotland if we get that right.

Finally, there is the collaboration space that the Scottish Government is pushing in order to bring the supply chains in Scotland together with the offshore wind developers. The aim is to ensure that they are collaborating and forging a close relationship before we get to the later stages, so that we capture more of the business. That collaborative area is important.

Yes. It will be a place-based plan. It will be published in the spring alongside the other plans that I mentioned. It will be an outline at that stage, because we then want to undertake a co-design exercise. As you will be aware, Grangemouth is responsible for a lot of emissions, but there is a lot of potential for the role of the complex there to evolve with hydrogen and biotechnology, for example. Of course, in industrial emissions alone, Grangemouth has an important role to play.

I thank Fiona Hyslop for raising that question; it is pertinent to today’s report from the Climate Change Committee, in that it reminds us that many of the steps to get to our net zero targets lie with the UK Government taking the right decisions and not just the Scottish Government, because we do not hold the powers over all the issues.

It is also worth saying that the Acorn project is not just a project for the north-east of Scotland; it is also relevant to Grangemouth, for instance, which we discussed recently. It is a crucial project and, as Sir Ian Wood said, if I remember correctly, not giving the go-ahead for track 1 status for the Acorn project for Scotland is like a football team leaving its best player on the bench. Portugal did that last night and got quite a good score despite it. However, the principle is valid because the project is vital for not only Scotland, as Fiona Hyslop says, but the rest of the UK to achieve its net zero ambitions.

I was at a meeting of the North Sea transition forum in London a few days ago. That forum is chaired by the UK minister and I attended on behalf of the Scottish Government. Of course, everyone travelled down from Aberdeen but, unfortunately, the UK minister had to go and answer an urgent question and was not at the meeting, so we had an Aberdeen gathering in London. That is one of the things that we have to deal with.

Someone said at that meeting that we are in danger of making the same mistakes as we made before. We have a massive opportunity to do the right thing and create jobs and new industries, but we are taking too long to make the decisions, so we might lose out. We might not be first mover and other countries will get ahead of us.

The UK Government has to treat the matter with a lot more urgency. The Acorn project must be given the go-ahead. It is critical. The Scottish Government has put £80 million on the table to help meet some of the project’s demands and work with the UK Government to get the go-ahead for it. There is constant communication and correspondence between Michael Matheson, the Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero, Energy and Transport—as well as, I think, the Deputy First Minister—and the UK Government on Acorn, so I hope that we will soon get the green light for it.

I have a photo on my phone—I will not show it to the committee—of me, after a recent visit to the St Fergus gas terminal, standing next to the pipeline that is ready to take about 30 per cent, if I recall correctly, of Scotland’s emissions to the Goldeneye field and store it in an empty reservoir, recycling part of the oil and gas industry’s infrastructure. However, we just cannot get the go-ahead. We have the infrastructure in Scotland that is ready to use. We are ahead of the rest of the UK in that regard. We also have the academic expertise based in Scotland. Therefore, it is vital to go ahead.

The final point that I will make concerns jobs, which is the just transition part of the issue. We were told that, from 2022 onwards, we could create up to 15,000 jobs, going up to about 20,000 jobs by 2013. That is a lot of jobs. For instance, it is a big percentage of the jobs in the oil and gas industry in the north-east of Scotland just now.

This is about jobs and achieving our net zero targets.

Good morning to the committee. I am delighted to have my first opportunity to come along and speak to you in my role as the just transition minister with responsibility for employment and fair work, as well. I look forward to this morning’s engagement. I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a few opening remarks, to set the scene from the Government’s perspective.

Public understanding of a just transition is, I hope, increasing. Nonetheless, I think that we all accept that there is still a long way to go. For me, a just transition is about the benefits to the Scottish economy, to jobs and skills, and to affordability—particularly, in this day and age, for those who are least able to afford the changes that we will require in the years and decades ahead. It is also about tangible benefits for Scotland’s communities and people and ensuring that we achieve the fairest possible transition between now and our net zero targets for 2045.

A just transition to net zero will be challenging, as is all change. In Scotland, we have seen damage caused by rapid structural changes in the past. As the committee is aware, many of our former coal mining communities are still feeling the impacts of what was inflicted on them 40 years ago.

We have a fantastic opportunity to harness Scotland’s resources, and there is no doubt that the opportunities that we face are vast. To give a couple of examples, we have the potential to produce 5GW of hydrogen in Scotland by 2030 and 25GW by 2045. To put that into context, 5GW of hydrogen is approximately 15 per cent of current energy use in Scotland. Establishing Scotland as a leading producer and exporter of green hydrogen could also support up to 300,000 jobs and contribute up to £25 billion to Scotland’s gross value added by 2045. Across the United Kingdom, 31,000 jobs have already been created in offshore wind, 30 per cent of which have been created in Scotland. Those are some signs of the progress that can be made, and which is being made.

At the heart of the just transition is a commitment to a planned and managed transition to net zero, as was stressed by the first Just Transition Commission in its report. Having accepted the recommendations of the first JTC, we are now developing just transition plans for key sectors in Scotland.

The energy strategy and just transition plan for energy will be published soon. We will set out a road map for delivering on our energy ambitions for 2030 and will lay out our vision for Scotland’s future net zero energy system. We will also develop a place-based plan for the Grangemouth energy cluster, working with important partners including the Grangemouth future industry board.

We are beginning to develop sectoral just transition plans for land and agriculture, transport, and buildings and construction. I confirm today that we will publish outline plans for those three sectors next spring in order to support a period of intensive co-design of the policy detail for each of them. Those outline plans will include draft outcomes for each sector and initial policy suggestions to work towards those outcomes, and they will set out some of the key issues that co-design will have to address. They will also set out an evidence base to underpin each of those plans. They will help to deliver net zero in a way that is fair for all and ensure that the cost of the transition will not disproportionately burden those who are least able to pay. We have already expanded programmes such as our Home Energy Scotland service to support those who are most impacted by the cost crisis.

Good planning can provide the certainty that communities, businesses and workers need during this period of change, and our approach to just transition puts co-design at the core of planning and policy. Over the summer, we engaged with almost 1,500 people to develop our draft energy strategy and just transition plan. That included face-to-face workshops, surveys, digital dialogues and community events. As I mentioned, we will also have a huge period of engagement and co-design next year to support the development of all the other just transition plans that I mentioned are coming. It is really important that people are able to shape those plans, because, without societal buy-in, it will be impossible for us to reach net zero in a fair way.

We know that some parts of Scotland are already transitioning to emerging industries. That is most pronounced in the energy transition, especially the transition of our oil and gas industry. The industry has provided economic opportunity and high-value, high-quality employment for more 50 years, especially in the north-east. It has become a vital cultural touchstone for many communities, which is not dissimilar to the role that coal mining played in many places across Scotland in the past.

However, it is a declining resource, and we have a profound and urgent responsibility to accelerate to the fastest possible just transition in order to protect opportunities for workers and to bolster regional and national economies.

That is one of the reasons why we launched the £500 million just transition fund for the north-east and Moray, with the first £50 million committed in September. That fund includes finance for large-scale transformational projects, community-level action and, crucially, the testing of concepts and technologies that may be rolled out in other parts of the country. It helps to finance organisations, businesses, communities and individuals to transition, creating jobs in low-carbon industries and supporting the provision of skills.

In conclusion, just transition is a big, broad agenda. Working on how to deliver a just transition in Scotland is a learning experience—we are learning as we go. It is not always easy to shift from concept to delivery, but it is clear that we are making lots of good progress. I am focused on maintaining the pace and ambition of this agenda as we head into 2023, which will be a crucial year of delivery for the just transition to net zero.

I hope that my opening remarks help to put into context the challenges that we face and the opportunities that we have, and I look forward to your comments and questions.