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You make a great point that we had to develop new skills and expertise pretty rapidly as a consequence of the situation we found ourselves in. Do you feel that, rather than it being a one-off followed by a return to normal, you will be retaining, enhancing and embracing all those skills and that expertise as best you can? I imagine that it will inevitably lead to changes in how you and your staff want to work and that you will be embedding those practices, skills and experience?

Thank you for those responses and thank you to the staff who have done such a magnificent job for us.

In making that journey, why would you not have first arrived at the position of having concerns about the framework and governance and so on, rather than jumping to things such as votes of confidence in the chief executive? It seems to me that that was the wrong way around. Did you raise the concerns with the Government? Did you say to it, “Your legislation isnae fit for purpose?” If not, why not?

Are the remaining recommendations that you continue to work on the most difficult and challenging?

Good morning. I listened carefully to Colin Beattie’s line of questioning in which he asked where the problems arose. In his opening remarks, Malcolm Mathieson said that many of them arose from unusual legislation. I will go back to that for a moment in order to allow him to elaborate on that for the record, and to make it clear to the committee and everyone else whether he is saying that the problems in the Crofting Commission arose from dysfunctional legislation, management failures or a bit of both.

Is the crofting community itself seeing the benefit of achievement of the recommendations or is it to early to tell? Are the changes and recommendations mostly structural and internal? When will people see the benefits of achievement of what is in the improvement plan?

I recognise that point about travel—I am one of those people who no longer need to run up the M77 and the M8 every day to come to Parliament, which is a huge advantage for me.

Thank you for those interesting and helpful answers.

Good morning. I want to broaden the discussion to consider the wider issue of public awareness and public engagement. Where are we with that?

We have a target to get a million houses to zero emissions over the next 10 years; that is more than 100,000 houses a year. I turn to Bruce Cuthbertson first. What is your perspective on the public’s awareness of the whole agenda that we are embarking on? Are the public aware of and signed up to it? Do they expect that target to be met? Do they anticipate needing help and assistance to get there? What do we need to do to raise public awareness of the agenda?

Do Bryan Leask and Derek Logie have any comments on how we could improve on wider public engagement?