Chamber and committees

It is interesting that you talked about the various incarnations of the work in this area. Following the days when solar panels on roofs were the big thing, people were told, “We’ll come and insulate your home. There are some grants available for that, and you can top it up yourself.” We are now talking about a root-and-branch approach, which involves people taking out their current heating system and replacing it with new technologies, yet most people probably do not understand what those technologies are. Does that open up any risk of increased exposure to rogue companies, scams, fake grant scenarios, misleading advice being given to consumers and so on? Should the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets pay attention to that?

What are the key take aways, so that a member of the public who is watching this meeting can have confidence in what is happening?

It would be great to have any additional updates that you can provide.

It is interesting that much has been mentioned about workforce issues, and we have talked in great detail about the importance of executive leadership. The other key finding from the external review of corporate governance is about the

“root cause of many of the significant challenges”

that you face as a health board. The review states that one root cause is

“the failure to agree an appropriate business model for the delivery of integrated health and social care services”.

We have not spent a lot of time on that aspect this morning. Have things improved?

Appendix 2 of the report is on the delivery schemes. It seems to be a complicated and complex subsidy environment. There are a number of schemes. We have warmer homes Scotland, which is delivered by Warmworks. We have area-based schemes, which are delivered by local councils. We have Home Energy Scotland grants, which are delivered by the Energy Savings Trust, and so on. The number of households that are getting proper conversion of heating systems out of that is in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions.

It seems to be quite a complex landscape, as other members have mentioned. Could it be simplified? The risk is that if you leave things to the market alone and people’s only exposure to accessing improvements is via the private sector advertising those schemes with a view to making profit in their own way, it becomes quite a dangerous environment for the consumer.

That is based on the assumption that we will have the people to do the work. As you said, there is a huge number of people out there who can install new gas boilers, but there will need to be a marked shift to installing new technologies and maintaining them on an on-going basis.

There has been a fair amount of pushback from the industry about what is on offer to incentivise it to retrain and reskill staff if the market does not exist. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, of course. Do you think that the Government is acutely aware of that? Do you think that the plans that it has produced to ensure that we have the people to carry out the transition are robust?

We know what some of the risks are, as they are well documented and are talked about often. However, quantifying those risks will be difficult until we see what people start doing with their money. Let us take, for example, the scenario of a person who earns £50,000. Such a person would pay 20 per cent more tax in Scotland than they would do elsewhere in the UK, which is a substantial difference. The number of people who are affected in that way must be easy to find out, but it might be more difficult to forecast what they might do. I guess that that is part of the problem. One presumes that, if there is a huge shift in behaviour, that will affect future budgets and how much money is available to the Government. Is that fair to say? Is that a risk in how we forecast budgets?

Thank you, convener, and good morning, colleagues. I have no relevant interests to declare.

Thank you. I, too, look forward to it.

I will perhaps come on to that volatility. Your opening comments—repeated in the opening paragraphs of your report—gave quite a broad-brush overview in using phrases such as “continuing economic uncertainty”, “tax policy divergence”, “weaker economic performance”, and so on. Those are quite generic terms. What specific work has Audit Scotland done on the root causes of why that figure of £390 million was so vast?

I have been thrown in at the deep end. Thank you, convener, and good morning to our panel.

Before I move on to my line of questioning, I might just conclude the previous one. We have had a bit of discussion about the variance in outturns versus forecasts. That flags a concern to me with the 2022-23 estimation from HMRC of £14.9 billion and what variance we might see in that outturn. Surely there can only be one data set at the core of all this. No matter who you speak to—the Fiscal Commission, analysts, policy makers or HMRC—I presume that they are not using different data sources, so a robust set of data that can help to produce the forecasts must sit at their core. Given the huge variance in outturns this year, can we be confident that the data set and the analysis of it are sufficiently robust for policy makers and analysts to produce the forecasts that affect decisions about tax rates, for example?