― According to the latest figures, 26.5% (or around 649,000) of Scottish households live in fuel poverty while 7.5% of households (183,000) live in extreme fuel poverty. This is unacceptable in contemporary Scotland.

― The Scottish Government should abandon its staged approach to housing energy efficiency improves as it creates ongoing (rather than one-time) upheaval for construction companies and adds to the problem of retrofitting existing buildings to the most efficient standards.

―  We have identified no examples of low-carbon heating being taken up on a large scale without government assistance.

― The primary barrier to the roll-out of low carbon heat is financial. Efficient schemes like renewably powered district heating will have to be government financed.

― Without significant government planning, individual households are likely to decarbonise their heat using heat pumps which, while an improvement over fossil fuels, have significant downsides – not least, their collective impact on the electrical grid.

Fuel poverty is not only worse in rural Scotland than in urban Scotland, it also has different characteristics. For example, in urban areas 92% of those classified as income-poor are not classified as fuel-poor while in rural areas only 8% of those classified as income poor are not also fuel poor – fuel poverty plays a much larger role in rural poverty than in urban poverty.