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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.

I know that others will want to come in, and we have lots of questions for you today. First, however, I will say that I spent two years on the Scottish Parliament’s Criminal Justice Committee and I know that, although the majority of stakeholders in the courts and in the prisons whom the committee met when we visited those places in person spoke very highly of the individuals who work in your organisation—it is important to put that on the record—they had very few positive comments to make about the company in general.

To go back to my first question, GEOAmey is an experienced organisation in the public sector, with large contracts in other jurisdictions, so why on earth did you go into a contract that was so tight that it did not allow you the flexibility to change the contract terms or operating model as the environment that you worked in changed? Clearly, it has changed substantially—in your view, it has changed more than it should have, according to the contract that you went into. You must employ some pretty decent solicitors to help with the contract wording and commercial negotiations, so why does the contract not allow for those substantial changes in the environment that you work in?

Well, business class—£5,000 to fly to Boston is quite a lot of money, I would say. However, that is by the by. My wider point is that there is a clear inherent conflict of interest between the work that people are doing on the ground and them forgetting that the cards that they are using are using public money. That is where some conflicts have to be resolved.

Having listened to the evidence, I have a wider issue. I read the commission’s annual report—all 75 pages of it—and, on page 30, it states, in black and white, that

“There have been no governance issues identified during the year that are significant in relation to our overall governance framework.”

If that was the case, why did the Auditor General say:

“The Commission demonstrated poor governance over the approval of expenditure, including insufficient engagement with its Scottish Government sponsor division”?

As we have heard, there was a wide-ranging Pandora’s box of failures in governance.

My problem is that the report says that there were no issues with your internal audit processes, and indeed, your external audit processes—bearing in mind that you pay quite a lot of money to Grant Thornton UK LLP to do some of that work, which begs the question of what role it had in all this—but Audit Scotland and the Auditor General stepped in to say, “Hold on, something smells wrong.” What went so catastrophically wrong for the board to have missed all those governance issues?

But that is one of the four key accountability metrics that you as a board have to sign off. You signed off all four of them. Value for money is one, but there are others, including effective and robust internal controls and high standards of propriety in behaviour—there is a whole list of things that you have to sign off in the annual report. You signed them off and it is there in black and white. It says:

“There have been no governance issues identified”.

If there were no issues, why did the Auditor General produce a section 22 report that said that there were issues? What did you—

You held 10 meetings in the year that I referred to—five formal and five informal. Are you saying that no issues of culture around senior directors and the chief executive arose in those meetings?

It sounds as if you have work to do on your internal audit, though. If the issue was picked up only by the external audit, surely you need to have a conversation with your internal auditors.

I appreciate that time is against us, and I have a specific question. A lot of the conversation today has been about the former chief executive who resigned. It is easy to make a scapegoat of individuals, when there are wider systemic issues, especially if they are not here to defend themselves. Given the issues, he clearly did not resign with a heap of glory, but did he receive any financial settlement on his resignation? If so, how much?

Mr Brannen, I have one final question, which is about a real cause of concern to me. What we have heard today has uncovered quite serious issues in a public body. You said that you are responsible for 28 other public bodies within your directorate. You talked about a new and very welcome process of red, amber and green ratings to identify bodies that may not be fulfilling their obligations. Would you be willing to publish that, in the interests of transparency, so that the public can see where any areas of concern are?

Do you personally have concerns about any of the other agencies that are under your control? There may be similar issues that we have not discovered because Audit Scotland does not have enough time, or a big enough team, to do a root and branch review of every public body, but I would hate to think that what we have seen at WICS might be happening elsewhere and that we would not know about that.