Chamber and committees

I wonder whether I can ask a specific question about one of the budget lines in the blue book—I hope that your colleagues have it with them this morning. It is on page 92 and it is the budget provision for energy efficiency and decarbonisation. The budget line shows that the proposal is to allocate £326.5 million in the coming year, but, compared to the autumn budget revision figure, it is only a 1.6 per cent increase. That suggests a real-terms cut for that particular budget line. Cabinet secretary, could you or one of your colleagues clarify that and explain whether that is the case, please?

Of course, if we compare it to the outturn in the previous year, which is the figure to the left on that page, we see a 10 per cent increase, but that is the outturn figure. I suppose that I am saying that it depends on what we want to compare it with, but it looks initially as though there has been a wee cut in provision compared to the autumn budget review figure. I suppose that we, or those who are here in the next parliamentary session, will see the outturn figures for that particular budget line. If you are confident that it is sufficient to provide the funding that we need for this theme, that is quite encouraging.

Okay. In terms of support for our colleagues in the private sector, do you think that the budget will provide sufficient funds to enable private landlords to meet their obligations in relation to minimum energy efficiency standards and so on?

Dougie, do you feel the same? Do workers play an active role in shaping and developing policy, or do you just respond to it?

Is there time to ask Claire Greer for her view on that?

My question is a follow-up to what Sarah Boyack was asking about earlier. It is about your view on whether workers and the trade unions are playing a strategic partnership role in this journey that we are on. I am beginning to get the answer, I think, from your comments. Do you feel that you are being carried along in the slipstream of this and abandoned along the way, or do you feel that you are a key partner in shaping and developing public policy on this journey? Could you offer any examples from Europe or elsewhere? Ryan, you mentioned a few places, such as Ireland, Germany, Belgium and so on, where perhaps workers play a more central role in the development of public policy on this whole journey.

Cabinet secretary, I want to talk about numbers, volume and so on for a wee minute, in order to illustrate the scale of the challenge that lies ahead of us.

The UK Climate Change Committee tells us that we need 35,000 heat pump installations by 2030, which is a challenge in itself; I think that Scotland is installing about 6,000 or 7,000 per year on average. However, there are about 2.7 million homes in Scotland, and 300,000-odd council houses, so it does not take a magician or a mathematician to work out that that is a huge challenge in the years beyond 2030, up to 2045. It requires roughly—or more than—100,000 installations per year from where we currently are, at about 6,000 per year.

How on earth are we to meet that challenge, given the constraints that you have told us about? Principal among those constraints is the price of electricity, as you said. However, in my view—and in the view of members of the public who talk to me—another barrier is the installation cost for heat pumps, which can be as high as £14,000. I know that we have grants to assist with that, but we do not provide grants of £14,000.

The scale of the challenge is enormous, as we have been saying in this committee in recent years. Is the Government aware of the scale? How can we possibly scale up to deliver on that kind of target within the timescale?

I cannot claim credit for the idea. Believe it or not, it came from the House of Lords; it suggested that local authorities throughout the UK could play a decisive role, given that the scale of the transition is an absolutely fundamental issue and would, at the moment, appear to be beyond us. After all, the supplier network is nowhere near able to deliver 100,000 installations a year. Therefore, not only the price of the electricity but something else needs to shift: the cost of the equipment and the trust factor that a lot of constituents have mentioned.

Finally, cabinet secretary, you said in your remarks that it is difficult to make projections and to put timescales and targets into the draft plan when there is so much that we do not know and are depending on others to help us with. Will the Government try to put some kind of assessment in the plan to show us how we will reach the target, even if that is dependent on decisions being made elsewhere? Can we look ahead and see what the targets beyond 2030 will be, or is the Government not going to do that until it is more certain of support from other areas?

Thank you very much for that.

My question is about the scale of the challenge that faces us, and you were leading us in that direction a wee bit, cabinet secretary, when you spoke about electricity prices.

In our evidence sessions, our council colleagues have told us that they do not yet have the resources to scale up delivery of their local heat and energy efficiency strategies. That is tied in with issues around how we develop and grow our housing-related green workforce, whether we do that through apprenticeships, colleges or otherwise. Could you say a little bit about that difficult area, which, I am sure you will agree, is key for us if we are to make any progress down this road?