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Does the additional burden that is caused by prisoner numbers have a direct impact on your financial performance?

Amanda Croft, I listened to your comment about the progress that has been made on the 51 recommendations. When colleagues were asking questions, I was able to take a look at your escalation update report, which was given to the board only a month ago. It says that five of the recommendations have been completed, but you said that many of them have been completed. It also says that 14 recommendations have been moved into an assurance and improvement plan but that 32 are still outstanding. Would you mind clarifying what the actual position is for the committee?

Okay. Who reviews that performance in order to be assured that the picture is genuine? Who does that verification?

That is the fundamental, bottom-line question for me. Consumers do not control the price of electricity or gas, nor does the Scottish Government. We rely on co-operation from our partners in Government. Electricity prices in the UK are among the highest in the world, and that is the bottom line here. If we tell people that they should make the transition to help with progress towards net zero, they will reply, “How much is it going to cost me?” In my view, some work needs to be done to reduce the cost of electricity.

People to whom I talk ask why, when we are producing more than 100 per cent of our electricity needs in Scotland from renewable sources, it is still costing them a fortune to use that electricity. Why is that? Energy companies are still generating and creating profits from that, but the public arenae getting the benefit. For me, doing something about the price is the key to getting the transition rolling faster. All the rest of the factors are important, but they willnae chip away at the 1.8 million houses wi gas central heating boilers if people think that the cost to replace them is going to be excessively high.

Thank you very much. I hope to come back in later on as colleagues develop their questions.

I am the deputy convener of the committee and a constituency MSP for Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley.

According to the evidence in front of us, there are at the minute more than 100,000 empty houses in Scotland. Empty houses come in a variety of tenures: second homes, abandoned, unoccupied and long-term voids—that sort of mixture. What more should we do to assist people with homelessness problems to get out of that situation? Is it about providing more houses? Is that the only solution, or do we need to think about a wider range of support to solve that issue?

That would be brilliant. Thanks very much.

I have another brief question about housing quality. Are we trying to do too much? We want houses to be green and to be digitally enabled, and we also want to retrofit them. Chris Birt has wondered whether we are trying to do too much at once and whether we might have to prioritise. What are the witnesses’ views on that? Are we trying to do too much at the same time? Do we need to prioritise?

I will go back briefly to the homelessness service issue, although the committee has no remit on homelessness. That is one of the curious things about the Parliament—a sister committee has that responsibility. However, the topic comes up with us very often, as it has this morning. I will ask about the wider support—the homelessness services that we should provide. The regulator made some fairly pointed comments about systemic failures in the delivery of those services by some councils.

We have said that the issue is not just about the numbers of houses—build more houses and we will solve homelessness—but goes wider than that. Ronnie Macrae commented that we need to look beyond housing numbers only and that there is a wider package of services to help people get through that particular situation. I want to touch with colleagues on what wider support services we should deploy and ask our councils to lead on to get us through that issue. I invite Ronnie to say something, because he mentioned it at the outset.

Emma Jackson mentioned various factors. Can you briefly highlight any evidence or statistics that show quite clearly the direct correlation between people’s experiences of such factors and their becoming homeless?