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In the interests of time, I will stop there.

Yes. Progress in negotiations is always subjective.

What work will you be doing on community justice? Your predecessor produced an initial report on the establishment of Community Justice Scotland by the Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016, and the Government published a national strategy for community justice in 2022. Will you respond directly to progress against that strategy?

That is helpful. One of the main issues is the importance of following the money. There are so many stakeholders involved in delivery and they have both statutory and non-statutory duties in delivering community justice. It is difficult to find out where the bigger budget goes except where it is directly attributed to a single agency such as Community Justice Scotland. Our committees have struggled with that for many years in looking at outputs.

As you are aware, we have done a lot of work on the input or use of the private sector in justice. I will not go into that today because there will be other opportunities to look at the use of companies such as Serco and GEOAmey. In the interest of time, I will park the other justice questions for now. As I said, my questions are quite meaty, unfortunately.

You will be pleased to hear that the next area is the national care service. Its establishment has been a matter of controversy both politically and among stakeholders but, moving on from that, I am keen to hear what work Audit Scotland will do in auditing the preparations and, potentially, the implementation, particularly from a financial point of view. That is particularly relevant given that the Finance and Public Administration Committee had grave reservations about the financial memorandum for the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. The matter is of cross-party interest, so I hope that it will feature in your work.

This might be a general worry but, when there is organisational change of this type, and particularly when there is consolidation, we cannot afford to wait a couple of years to see whether things have bedded in and are working. We talked about Police Scotland and the centralisation. You might need to wait five or 10 years to do that piece of work, but care has more immediacy to it because it is a matter of life and death, if you like. There may be a public opinion that we cannot afford to wait four or five years for that analysis.

The volume of casework that ���˿��� get regarding social care issues is probably symptomatic of those current and on-going issues, so I look forward to that work.

Another of the topics that I am covering in my four areas is social security and tackling poverty. As that is closely linked to social care, I will just move straight on to that. I was quite struck that you said in your opening comments that, in addition to the very large chunk of money that the Government has to spend on healthcare, particularly primary healthcare, devolved social security and benefits are fast creeping up to be the second-largest cost to Government. That is because a number of benefits are now devolved that were not hitherto. Will you elaborate a little bit more about any thoughts or concerns that you have, and on what work you might do off the back of that?

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.

Can you say what the Government will do to support people in the scenario that I have outlined? I do not know the answer to that question.