Seòmar agus comataidhean

Those are all important questions. As we have touched on a couple of times, financing the transition will need to involve everyone in Scotland—householders, landlords, the Government and many other agencies. The independent green heat finance task force has been considering all those issues, particularly how private finance can support the transition, and we will respond to its recommendations in spring.

As I mentioned, our 2025-26 budget commits to investing more than £300 million to help households to save in the here and now. In the future, we are keen to get advice about private finance for individuals, too.

I am sorry—I did not catch that. Which changes are you referring to?

There was consensus on changing to a system of carbon budgets across most of the political spectrum—perhaps not all of it—and on the need to ensure that the targets that the Scottish Government sets are achievable and meaningful. However, that does not alter the fact that we are committed to getting the best advice on ensuring that there are green finance options for home owners and other individuals, so that we get to a position in which those budgets become possible.

I will bring in others to see whether they can add anything to that.

Yes. The Government has supported the establishment of a number of hubs. I visited one in, I think, either Musselburgh or Portobello, but I am going to have got that wrong and I will have offended people along the whole coastline of East Lothian. It was clear from the visit that the hubs are able to draw together different interests in the community, to push Government and other agencies and to activate people to think about wider environmental issues. Therefore, yes—the Scottish Government is very happy to support them in what they do.

One of the things that I often find myself talking to my UK counterparts about in constructive terms is Scotland’s urban landscape and our distinctive tenement landscape. I often find myself visiting colleges, where people who are training to become heating engineers point out to me all the different options that they feel they might have in Scotland’s tenements if the price of electricity were rebalanced with the price of gas. That has a practical impact on our urban landscape.

I would not like to pre-empt a Government response, although I appreciate the point that you are making. Just now, a lot of work is going on at official level to analyse the 1,600 responses to the consultation.

This is not to pre-empt anything that the Government will say, but some of the things that are foremost in our minds are about responding to the diverse types of housing that exist and the need to ensure that everything that we do is poverty-proofed, to make sure that it addresses fuel poverty, rather than by any inadvertent means exacerbating it. As you are aware, 31 per cent of people in Scotland are assessed as being in fuel poverty and 18 per cent are in severe fuel poverty, and those numbers are much higher in rural areas. Those issues are at the forefront of our minds.

We have had good quality responses to the consultation. I have mentioned the need for conversations with the UK Government on some issues. Without pre-empting what the Government will say in its response, I hope that that gives a flavour of the things that are important to us.

I appreciate your point about the need for certainty among industry and consumers. One of the significant things about the bill is the scale and complexity of the response to it. We have had 1,600 responses to the consultation, and they raise many complex themes. Indeed, I have already mentioned one, which is the need to ensure that everything that we do avoids putting people into poverty.

We need a diverse and flexible approach that takes into account the diverse building types across Scotland, which you will be aware of. That approach needs to engage, too, with the reality that many of the really big decisions to be made are still awaited from Westminster; one relates to the relative price of gas and electricity, which is central to the issue. That does not mean that we will not look carefully through the responses and work, as we are doing, on our next steps, but those are all relevant factors.

We are. That is an important point. We are seeking not merely to provide the proposed three areas of broad information—which I will mention—but to provide an interface that will allow a technical assessment of individual properties to avoid unintended situations in which people take measures that make their houses damper. I will bring in others who might be able to talk about that.

The three areas that the EPC would cover would be: heating system rating, which would allow consumers to compare emissions, thermal efficiency and running costs; heat retention rating, which is a new rating and is a direct measure of how well a building holds heat; and energy cost rating, which is the focus of the current EPC. I will bring in others to talk about some of the additional technical offers that are made to avoid the situation that you describe.

Again, those are important issues. I mentioned earlier that almost two thirds of social housing in Scotland is in EPC band C or better, but we appreciate the scale of the task ahead. That is why the social housing net zero consultation proposed the prohibition of polluting systems by 2045.

I understand that social landlords have made representations and I am aware of the cost burden. The Scottish Government is committed to delivering vital support through the social housing net zero heat fund and we have been using that fund for some time to support social landlords to retrofit houses.

The budget proposals offer £300 million in funding for the heat in buildings programme more generally across sectors.

I do not have detailed knowledge of that area of housing policy, but I know anecdotally that, when local authorities have had empty homes officers, they have taken a fabric-first and heating-first approach to ensure that houses are sustainably insulated and heated before they are let out. I think that that is integrated in the efforts that are made by the Government and local authorities, but I am afraid that I cannot offer much detail on it.