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The volume of casework that MSPs get regarding social care issues is probably symptomatic of those current and on-going issues, so I look forward to that work.

Another of the topics that I am covering in my four areas is social security and tackling poverty. As that is closely linked to social care, I will just move straight on to that. I was quite struck that you said in your opening comments that, in addition to the very large chunk of money that the Government has to spend on healthcare, particularly primary healthcare, devolved social security and benefits are fast creeping up to be the second-largest cost to Government. That is because a number of benefits are now devolved that were not hitherto. Will you elaborate a little bit more about any thoughts or concerns that you have, and on what work you might do off the back of that?

Thank you, convener.

I have four quite meaty areas to cover and not a lot of time to do that, which is unfortunate, but I will do my best. The first is justice, which you mentioned in your opening comments. I appreciate that there is some on-going work on prisons, prison populations and remand numbers, which we have delved into a lot, and that you are looking at court case backlogs and other live issues. I get the impression that you will be keep a watching brief on those things, but I am interested in what additional audit work you will be doing on the justice sector. There was mention of community justice and legal aid. What will those pieces of work look like?

On child poverty, is it your opinion that you will do work to assess whether that is the right type of benefit, and whether it is the level of money that is paid or whether it is how the benefit, when paid, is used that improves outcomes? It is very difficult to quantify whether you get a positive outcome from simply increasing the amount of benefit, for example.

Okay. Will you do any comparative analysis between the demographic situation in Scotland and the other four nations of the United Kingdom? For example, if we in Scotland are sitting with relatively low levels of unemployment but there is a baseline of people who rely on social security, will you look at how that compares with other parts of the UK and if the cost to Government to deliver a baseline of social security in Scotland is disproportionate?

That is all very helpful. I will park social security—we could spend all morning talking about that.

You have already mentioned public sector reform, which was built into quite a lot of the lines of questioning, but I want to pick up one last point about it. I go back to a piece of work that you did on Scotland’s workforce, which is very relevant to public sector reform. Obviously, a lot of working adults in Scotland are directly employed in the public sector, through either devolved public sector functions or a mixture of devolved and reserved public sector functions. The number of such staff is around 500,000-plus. I know that that number has been increasing in recent years. That is quite a substantial chunk of the workforce, which clearly comes at a cost to public agencies.

I was interested to see that around 80 per cent of all public sector workers work in the NHS or in local government, and that the other public bodies mop up the rest of those jobs. Does you see that percentage increasing? Does that raise any flags for you in terms of doing some audit work? What work will you be doing around public sector workforce reform?

You mentioned legal aid. That is clearly an area of dispute between the sector and the Government. The sector has warned that it is on its knees and that we are looking down the barrel at a big black hole in legal representation, which is a worrying perspective from a democratic point of view. There is a discussion about fees, for example. Are you just looking at the monetary value that the Government gives the sector or are you looking at wider issues, such as workforce issues, that may come down the line? We hear anecdotally that the workforce is ageing and there are fewer entrants. What level of detail will you go into when you look at legal aid?

The resource budgets tend to reflect that because many of those bodies have received inflationary pay rises, which has perhaps eaten into some of the resource budget—unexpectedly so, given events of the past few years. However, in relation to other improvements such as digitisation, reforming public services and access to public services, my impression from reading numerous reports in my eight years here is that we seem to be quite slow on the uptake with regard to many of those, and the reason largely given for that is that that usually involves, to a great degree, putting capital investments up front.

Of course, as we know, that is a bone of contention at the moment and many of the spend-to-save projects that may have been mooted in public sector bodies have been put on hold or cancelled altogether. There are numerous examples of that. Does that pose a risk down the line? If we are not spending on capital now to make those necessary digital technological improvements and to improve access to public services, we are simply carrying down the same road of doing things as they are and will end up in five years’ time with very slow, old-fashioned mechanisms and infrastructure.

In the interests of time, I will stop there.

Let us look at those points individually. The Government has an ambition and Parliament has mandated it to achieve that. Public funds will be allocated to try to deliver it, and the Government will go as far as it can within the realms of public finance. I understand that. However, 2 million individual households are operating on mains gas, and many of them are in the sorts of properties that you have spoken about—antiquated and poorly insulated properties. I think that the last estimate was that around 35 per cent of those households are in fuel poverty. What is in it for those people? Is the Government taking a carrot-and-stick approach or is it coming along with the stick only and saying, “We’ve changed the law and you must now convert to a different type of energy.”? Why on earth would people do that, or why should they?

Would you not argue that that should be the case anyway? Even if we had no green energy targets and no net zero ambitions, we should be making our homes better insulated, warmer and cheaper to run anyway.