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That is all very helpful. I will park social security—we could spend all morning talking about that.

You have already mentioned public sector reform, which was built into quite a lot of the lines of questioning, but I want to pick up one last point about it. I go back to a piece of work that you did on Scotland’s workforce, which is very relevant to public sector reform. Obviously, a lot of working adults in Scotland are directly employed in the public sector, through either devolved public sector functions or a mixture of devolved and reserved public sector functions. The number of such staff is around 500,000-plus. I know that that number has been increasing in recent years. That is quite a substantial chunk of the workforce, which clearly comes at a cost to public agencies.

I was interested to see that around 80 per cent of all public sector workers work in the NHS or in local government, and that the other public bodies mop up the rest of those jobs. Does you see that percentage increasing? Does that raise any flags for you in terms of doing some audit work? What work will you be doing around public sector workforce reform?

You mentioned legal aid. That is clearly an area of dispute between the sector and the Government. The sector has warned that it is on its knees and that we are looking down the barrel at a big black hole in legal representation, which is a worrying perspective from a democratic point of view. There is a discussion about fees, for example. Are you just looking at the monetary value that the Government gives the sector or are you looking at wider issues, such as workforce issues, that may come down the line? We hear anecdotally that the workforce is ageing and there are fewer entrants. What level of detail will you go into when you look at legal aid?

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?”