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Teresa, you touched on the impact of staff shortages. Has that situation improved at all?

First, I want to thank each of the public agencies, for all the work that they have done, and all the staff, who have stepped up to the mark in these unprecedented times. The range of work that you have done to keep Scotland’s communities safe is commendable.

My questions are focused on the prison service. I want to ask Teresa Medhurst and Tom Fox about the purposeful activity in rehabilitation programmes that, as your submissions outline, was suspended during Covid. Will you outline the plans for rolling out work in key areas of that purposeful activity? Have any lessons been learned in how we go forward? Do you have any transformational ideas about how we can do things differently to ensure that, as is key, and in accordance with human rights, the prison service is delivering purposeful activity in education, as well as delivering programmes for rehabilitation?

I will focus my questions on the forthcoming COP26. Professor Skea touched on the just transition. Internationally, everyone is looking at Scotland in relation to transition, so I would like to tap into that and ask whether you can go into more detail. You talked about the just transition principles and how the international climate change negotiations have played out to date. Are the principles properly understood? Have they been accepted internationally or is there an expectation gap?

Does Dave Moxham want to comment?

I am delighted to be at the committee, albeit on a temporary basis.

The only relevant interest that I will declare is that I am currently a councillor for South Lanarkshire Council.

Jim Skea touched on local pension funds. I should declare an interest as I was previously the chair of Strathclyde Pension Fund. We had a fiduciary duty to ensure that we were maximising the members’ pension pots, but arguably there was also an ethical investment element. I know that Strathclyde Pension Fund is probably about the 12th biggest pension fund in the UK. How do we balance that going forward? Is that something that you have looked into to see how we can transition to making those pension pots more ethical?

We can also talk about the principles, which are central to the forthcoming negotiations in Glasgow. Should we and the UK be ensuring that the principles feature in the agreement and the negotiations for the future? I suppose that the focus is on the UK because we have left the European Union, and our role in delivering a just transition has taken on a different aspect now that we are outwith the EU. Sorry—I am going all round the question here.

My other question is controversial. Should there be more of a four-nations approach, rather than a UK-led approach, when we come to that platform?

I will focus on the amount of time that a prisoner spends in the prison estate, particularly on rehabilitation programmes. You have mentioned transformational change. Obviously, that will be part of the programme for government that is still to be announced, but key to that is the reduction of offending and accessibility to such programmes within prisons, particularly in the light of how we are tackling Covid and the impact that that has on the reduction in offending.

How effective are those programmes? It seems to be a lottery when it comes to who gets on to them. The question taps not only into prisons but into community safety. It is about the accessibility and effectiveness of those programmes.

On that issue, we visited HMP Edinburgh last week, and one of the conversations stood out for me. It is more of an observation than a question, but I hope that you will take it on board. In HMP Shotts, in particular, because of Covid, visiting has been restricted, so contact has been facilitated online. Something that stood out for me was that one prisoner said that they had never seen their house before. That was taken on board. They were blown away by it, and it was great for them to see where their kids and their wife stayed. That is a positive thing, which we could look at going forward, because, for some, that might be the trigger to their saying, “I’m going to make sure that I get on my programme and get out of here,” which is part of their not offending again. Most of the people there were high-tariff prisoners, so they had been there for a long time.

I thank our witnesses for their contributions. On Friday, I had the pleasure of visiting the TÜV SÜD facility in my constituency in East Kilbride. The facility has done the first ever transition from a gas domestic meter to a hydrogen one—staff there were calibrating it. It was impressive to see TÜV SÜD’s work, and it was great to see something tangible in place. From a consumer’s point of view, when will we start to see the roll-out of hydrogen meters and at what speed will it be carried out? Believe it or not, a householder recently raised that question at the citizens assembly. With the climate emergency, it is key for folk to see changes take effect.