Seòmar agus comataidhean

Lots of bits of that need to be joined up. You will have heard from witnesses in some of your previous sessions that this is a moving target. It is notoriously difficult to predict skills shortages years in advance. We need closer alignment between the skills system and businesses.

The approach must be about having the right mix of practical skills that we know will be required and ensuring that young people go right through their whole careers with the ability to reskill and to understand the opportunities that are available and the support that they can get. As I said, we are spending more than £1 billion to support the skills system and an extra £500 million on top of that over the course of the session of Parliament to focus on that issue. I talk to businesses every day and skills is the number 1 issue, notwithstanding everything else that is going on.

We are hugely seized of the need to focus on that. As I said, it is about ensuring that the skills system is increasingly aligned with the needs of business. We have those clear routes of communication so that we can ensure that there is an understanding of what is required, but as I said, the system also needs to be very agile, because it is aiming at a moving target.

As you will be aware, there are international rules around this stuff, such as the WTO’s bidding rules in the GPA. We cannot just make things up. We have done as much as we can within those rules to move things forward. We made a huge commitment with the supply chain development statements to ensure that the bidders that came forward made it very clear how they would use supply chains, and, as I have said and as I am sure Colin Smyth is aware, we have pushed the scoring criteria to the limit with regard to what we are able to do within international rules.

We can put in place requirements as best we can within the rules that sustainability, net zero and carbon footprint aspects are factored in, and we look to do so where possible. Increasingly, that is an area of focus, because it encourages local production and innovation. The construction sector is a prime example of that. The Construction Scotland Innovation Centre had worked on putting forward innovative solutions to the net zero-carbon challenges, and we want to use the levers of public sector procurement to facilitate such solutions as best we can.

Absolutely. That will happen as soon as we can do it. There are two partners involved. We have been keen to make progress on that for more than a year—we are not the ones who are taking time to get our ducks in a row. We are waiting for our partner to finalise the things that they need to finalise internally. As you will understand, they are slightly distracted by other matters at the moment.

It is on-going. There are dozens of aspects to that across the education system. Some of that, such as doing more computer science teaching is schools, is obviously going to take time because of the resource in terms of teachers that are able to deliver those courses. As Mark Logan raised in his report, that is a challenge in itself—we need to deal with that and then roll out the courses across the school curriculum. It is hugely important. Coming from a science, technology, engineering and maths background, I know how critical that is.

Other aspects of the report’s recommendations, such as the roll-out of the tech scalers, are on-going. There are different timescales for the different recommendations and action points in the report. To his credit, Mark Logan has kept up the pressure. We are asking the Government and the system to do things differently. I am keen for the Government to be more agile, responsive and able to execute initiatives such as those that are proposed in the work that has been undertaken by Mark Logan. We continue to push that along as fast as possible. We are on the right track.

The strategy for economic transformation will come out shortly and that builds on the work of the Logan report, extending it to other sectors and parts of the economy. It broadens the approach to tech scalers and supporting those growth businesses, as well as focusing on the skills aspect and ensuring that people in the early stages of their career and mid-career are able to retrain in tech, coding skills and digital skills of all shapes and sizes in order to meet the broader requirements of the new industries that we are developing in Scotland.

Absolutely. We are already seeing that. There are examples—I will not go into the details for reasons of commercial confidentiality—in which our legal teams have had to have a good look to understand whether we are able to move forward. They take, as they often do, a very safe view on what is and is not allowed. In the absence of the pre-authorisation process that existed previously, there is an inclination to operate on the side of safety, which means that we have to take a different view on things that we might have done in the past. That is obviously concerning.

We have made that point repeatedly at every opportunity, as I said earlier. There have already been situations relating to support for investment in which there has not been the clarity that there has been previously. The view of lawyers is to be safe rather than to move things forward, so we have had to have discussions in that context, which is concerning because it leads to delays in the processes. As you said, it has a chilling effect and slows things up. In some cases, it might prevent things from happening that otherwise would have happened, because we do not have clarity in advance on what is and is not permissible. Taking a safety-first approach could lead to advice being given that we should not go ahead with something, which is a concern.

As I said, that issue and many others, including the issue relating to the bank, have been raised repeatedly with the UK Government at official level and at ministerial level.

It has had consultations at a general level but I am not aware if it will do consultation on the guidelines—Hilary Pearce might know that. You are right to say that we are waiting to see what it will come forward with. The streamlined area is an example of one where the secretary of state has powers that the devolved ministers do not have. That is concerning because, if there was any debate about what the streamlined powers allow or do not allow or how they operate and when they would operate, the decision would be up to the secretary of state and, even if the issue involved a devolved matter in Scotland, we would not have any ability to act in the same way.

It is possible to identify more disadvantaged areas, outline what those disadvantages are and have scope to deploy support in a different way to those areas. Such a process has been in place previously through EU processes; it has different categorisations of regions.

As I have said, from a regional economic development point of view, we are focused on supporting all regions and communities in Scotland to maximise their potential. That might require support to encourage investment or other activity. We want to be able to take those steps in a different way, depending on the specific needs of different parts of the country. It is important that we have that ability and that there is clarity around that, but there is no provision for that in the bill. It is interesting how that works against the UK Government’s stated aim of levelling up. That is another area in which there is a lack of clarity as to exactly how the measures will operate.

That is one of the areas in bill in which it is important to have guidelines. We have talked about the Scottish National Investment Bank. Much of what it would do would fit in that space. More detail and clarity in the guidelines as to how that aspect will be looked upon in the regime would be helpful.