Chamber and committees

As you know, I have a political interest in the ethical considerations relating to funding to arms dealers—I support the First Minister’s move in that regard—so I am interested in your comments about human rights checks. Further to my previous question, it is frustrating to hear about small companies being unable to get funding when BAE Systems, which made £3 billion in profits last year, and Raytheon, which is the second biggest arms company in the world, have received funding. However we feel about the morality of the decisions that such organisations make in relation to which countries they sell arms to, it seems very odd that those huge organisations are getting money from Scottish Enterprise when small growing businesses are not able to get support. Do you want to comment on that?

The two measurements that I am particularly interested in are the investment in net zero opportunities and the carbon reductions supported. You would expect those to correct themselves over time. Your ambitions there have not reduced.

My question for both agencies is on community wealth building. I see from your targets that both of you have had some success with, for example, supporting social enterprises and community development. What does community wealth building mean to you and what role do you play in that?

I turn to the South of Scotland Enterprise. Again looking at the high-level reporting on the targets, I noticed that investment in net zero and carbon accounting has reduced in the past year, if I have read that correctly. I do not know whether you have any thoughts that you want to share on that.

I understand that. However, witnesses have brought up questions such as how many businesses are co-operatives or social enterprises and how many people they employ, and we do not know that. I am not aware that we have data on it, and the evidence that we have taken suggests that it is not widely understood. Employee-owned businesses are a key pillar for community wealth building. However, that is just an example. I take the point that procurement is one of the easier pillars to implement and measure, and that some of the other five pillars are more difficult to measure, but we will want to make progress with those pillars as well.

Thank you.

I would like to ask about how we will measure the success of the bill. Section 2 says that one of the intentions behind it is to reduce inequality. I have no issue with that, but the second stated intention is to increase “economic growth”. Just about every witness who has given evidence to the committee has suggested that gross domestic product is not a good measure of the things that we are trying to achieve through the bill, such as increasing opportunity, improving crisis management and increasing connections. How would the minister measure “economic growth”? What does he mean in having it as one of the stated intentions behind the bill?

I hope that I speak for the committee when I say that we have a general concern that the process must not be a tick-box exercise or a talking shop. We want it to have impact. In order to judge what impact it has had, people will have to be able to measure or audit it in some way. That is a theme that we will come back to.

My final line of questioning is about the organisations that are on the list of relevant public bodies in section 5 and the list of specified public bodies in the schedule. What criteria were used to put those organisations on the lists? Some witnesses—including representatives of organisations that are missing from the lists—asked why there were two lists and suggested that there could be just one. Another question was whether organisations with a significant amount of land assets, for example, should be considered in a different way from those that have purchasing power. I would like to understand why those lists are the way they are and to hear an explanation of who is on them.

Would it not, therefore, be more accurate to change the reference that the bill makes to “economic growth”, which implies change to GDP, to other language, such as “economic success” or “economic prosperity”? One of our witnesses suggested that the bill could refer to increasing

“social, cultural and ecological wealth”.—[Official Report, Economy and Fair Work Committee, 18 June 2025; c 33.]

Would the minister be open to revisiting the language to make it reflect more accurately the intention that he has just set out?

That is my issue, because different people think about economic growth in different ways. In the current cultural zeitgeist, it means increasing GDP, which I think we all agree is not the sole thing that we are after here.

With regard to measures of success, ideas that have emerged from our evidence sessions are that there should be some sort of community audit and that, as community wealth building projects progress, the community should be able to evaluate how the process has been working for them. There are no such measures in the bill. The bill simply sets out the intentions without setting out ways to track or measure how successful such projects have been. Would the minister support amendments to the bill in that regard? Has any thought been given to how success might be tracked?