Chamber and committees

Are there any other comments? On the timeframe, it is 12 years since the Christie report was published. What I am trying to get to is whether there is a character to our politics, our public services and the way in which we do things in Scotland that is stopping change.

We will do a little bit of shuffling, so that John can take the chair.

In the paper that you produced in 2020, you stated:

“what differentiates Scotland is the acute level of policy focus upon constitutional matters … leading to ‘policy distraction’”.

Can you unpack that a little for us? Is that just bandwidth, or is it something more structural?

You get what I am trying to push at, though, about the structural issues.

Professor Connolly is nodding at that point.

I pay tribute to my constituent Caroline Gordon, who joins us in the public gallery, for lodging the petition, which is now supported by many thousands of people, and for her continued determination to seek answers on this area from the Scottish Government. I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today.

For more than 600 years, our universities have educated some of Scotland’s best and brightest, from scientists and inventors to philosophers, authors and poets—the great people of Scotland who have lent so much to our history and progress as a nation. However, for many of our young people in Scotland today, the basic promise of a Scottish education has been broken. You work hard, you get the grades, you get in: that is the way that it should be for every Scot.

At First Minister’s question time on 12 January, I raised my constituent’s case, which is about a young man with outstanding grades to whom the doors of the University of Edinburgh were firmly shut. There were no grades that he could have achieved from five As to 50 As that could have prised those doors open. The policy of the Scottish Government has locked him out. Since then, my office has been inundated with emails and phone calls from parents and young people across the country sharing similar testimony, so I am clear that this is not a case of one university or one subject area. The sense of injustice is palpable.

My constituent and I are the strongest supporters of widening access to university in Scotland. The Parliament has seen marked progress in that area in recent years, but we have come from a very low base, whereby young Scottish people from the poorest backgrounds were far less likely to reach university than those from any other part of the UK. We should be clear that we are still well behind the rest of the UK in that, and that much progress still requires to be made.

The real issue of concern that is raised in the petition is the dysfunction of the business model that the Scottish Government imposes on our universities, which includes the cap on Scottish university students. It is combined with 14 years of no increase in the amount of money that is paid per student to our universities. The alternative route that is being taken by many young Scots is to seek a place at a university in England. Many will make a life outside Scotland, will marry and will flourish, and my constituent and many other families will be hundreds of miles from their grandchildren, which is a human element of the issue that we must consider. We can all identify with that.

More broadly, for our economy and the betterment of our society in Scotland, these are losses that Scotland can ill afford. At best, this is a case of the unintended consequences of policy, which I recognise. The issue deserves better scrutiny in Parliament in terms of what might be happening as a result of policy and that is not the Government’s stated intent. The committee could seek further information on that.

Perhaps I could be so bold as to suggest a couple of areas that might be of use to the committee in that regard. You might want to seek evidence from Universities Scotland and individual universities to ascertain the scale of the issue and find out whether certain universities or courses are particularly affected. That would perhaps allow the committee to develop a better understanding of the impact of the current policy on the number of young Scottish people who are being forced to leave Scotland to access higher education elsewhere and of the impact that that has on the country. Perhaps the committee might ask the Scottish Government what analysis it has undertaken of the consequences of the current policy for Scottish applicants in general. Importantly, I would hope that it would give an opportunity for the people who are impacted to have their voices heard in the Parliament.

Thank you for your time, convener, and for the consideration of the committee.

Deputy First Minister, you said that there are lessons to be learned in this area. Rather than speaking more about the specifics, will you say how you go about learning lessons? What have you changed or done differently, or what would you do differently, given the experience that you have just recounted in response to Michelle Thompson?

That is a useful recounting, but we regularly hear from Government ministers that lessons will be learned. For example, on the ferries scandal, Kate Forbes said on 29 March 2022:

“We recognise where things have gone wrong and we are learning lessons for the future.”—[Official Report, 29 March 2022; c 4.]

The First Minister at the time said:

“Lessons have been, are being, and will be learned.”—[Official Report, 31 March 2022; c 11.]

On the Audit Scotland report about the £5 billion lack of transparency in the Covid business arrangements, Kate Forbes said that any lessons that were highlighted by the report would be learned.

This is about decision making. We are told that lessons are being learned, but I am keen to understand what those lessons are.

Other examples include the ferries scandal, which I have mentioned and which has involved huge public expenditure, and the shambolic approach to the census. On 1 June 2022, Nicola Sturgeon said:

“Of course we will review the experience and ensure that any lessons that require to be learned are learned.”—[Official Report, 1 June 2022; c 25.]

What lessons have we learned about how those pretty poor decisions by the Government were made?

So, for instance, will we not do what we did with the census again? Will we carry out the census at the same time as the rest of the United Kingdom? Has that lesson been learned?