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I will ask one last question, which is a fundamental one, and I will leave my questions there. If growth deals did not exist, would you reinvent them? Are we creating something because we do not have a regional tier of government, whether that is old-school regions or combined authorities, as we have in other parts of the UK?

I see that Catherine Young wants to come in. I will add one more point first.

Is Audit Scotland aware of whether the UK Government or the Scottish Government are looking at this area? Given that it involves Government money, I am interested in whether they, as well as Audit Scotland, are looking at that. What are your thoughts on that?

I will push you a little bit on that. All of us round this table are familiar with how advocacy works; indeed, we undertake it day in and day out. I would find it quite difficult to do that job if I did not hold surgeries with my constituents to understand what they needed. In a functional sense, how can you understand what to advocate for on consumers’ behalf if you are not doing that sort of thing directly? In conducting broad research, as it were, is there a danger that everyone ends up as a statistic rather than a person, and that you miss some of the more fundamental issues that you would have picked up if you had that direct contact?

I understand. There are lots of different ways in which one can understand the consumer experience.

That brings me to my final question. Part of my reason for asking this is that I completely recognise that Citizens Advice Scotland does a great job, but its funding is under severe pressure. Because of those funding pressures, it is not the organisation that it might once have been or might hope to be.

Just reflecting on my constituency casework, I note that I am getting an increasing number of people approaching me because they are struggling to get good consumer advice to understand what their contractual obligations are with providers of goods or services, when procuring things or buying products directly from shops or online and, in particular, with the building trade. My view is that the availability of direct consumer advice is much weaker than it was perhaps a decade or two ago. What is your view of that and of your role in helping to rebuild the advice ecosystem or landscape?

We have all been looking at Grangemouth in a renewed level of detail. It occurs to me that some quite broad-brush assumptions are made, not all of which are correct. We think, “The oil comes out of the North Sea, it all goes to Grangemouth and we get our petrol—job done.” I read that, although the Forties pipeline terminates at Grangemouth, only 40 per cent of your feedstock comes from the North Sea. Our briefing notes also indicate that you are the main supplier of aviation fuel to Scottish airports and that you supply some 70 per cent of Scotland’s petrol stations.

Will you provide a bit of detail as to what proportion of your feedstock is coming from the North Sea? Critically, as refining stops, will that introduce additional costs to customers who are downstream? In other words, will aviation fuel cost more or less than previously? Will there be any consequences for consumers at the fuel pumps in Scotland as refining at Grangemouth ceases?

No. I like to make sure that my questions are energy dense.

Thank you for that very warm welcome. I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, where I declare that I am a director of a company with retail interests in Edinburgh.

This is possibly a similarly energy-dense question. One thing that I am always struck by when we talk about refining and oil is that the products are not all energy. I understand that, globally, around 30 per cent of every barrel of oil is used for non-energy products such as pharmaceuticals, dyes, plastics and so on. I understand that, for North Sea oil, that percentage is higher, although I stand to be corrected. Given that position, we will have an on-going need for hydrocarbons, which is presumably where biorefining comes in. That is what project willow seeks to address.

We are at the nascent, early stages, but what is the potential size of the requirement for that global biorefining capacity? What share of that market could and should Scotland and the wider UK be seeking to target?

Let me ask what is, I hope, a simpler question, albeit that it is still about a complicated issue. I recognise your point in relation to the nascent opportunities. It is the state’s role to de-risk and to look at the macro-level risks, particularly around energy security, but there are also much lower-level policy decisions that enable those things. Refining is not just about the pure investment or the product input and output. There is also the supporting infrastructure of roads, electricity networks and so on. We are talking about developing complex supply chains in and out of a biorefinery.

What policy areas need to be looked at to, at the very least, make that possible? In particular, what should we be looking at and thinking about in the Scottish Parliament, in devolved areas, so that we at least make biorefining opportunities possible, if not seek to drive towards them?

Yes—and what policy decisions could we make now, either proactively or unwittingly, that might make biorefining easier or harder, whether they are about refuse collection, road infrastructure or other supporting policies?