Chamber and committees

I have one last question on that point. This is probably well known to other members of the committee, but not to me. You mentioned Australia, but how does Scotland perform in Europe and United Kingdom comparisons, in terms of widening access?

Good morning, Professor McKendrick. I do not think we have met, but I offer no apologies for anything that I might have said at Easter Road, should you ever have had the privilege of going there.

Your comment has kind of cut the legs off the question that I was going to ask. I know you have said that you do not support crude measures, but if we look at what Glasgow Caledonian University has achieved, it might be simplistic to suggest that that model could be applied to other universities.

Glasgow Caledonian was challenged to achieve an aim. I might be being a simplistic politician, but the idea of having a target and achieving it is important in its own right for public confidence. I assume that there must be some compelling reason why this is the case, but your comment seemed to suggest that some institutions would never be able to achieve that target because of their core population. I do not want to put words in your mouth, and you will get a chance to come back to me, but is that right? If that is the case, how realistic are the targets in the first place?

I forget the exact phrase that the commissioner used earlier, but he said words to the effect that, taken over a slightly longer period of 10 years, there has been a remarkable transformation and an almost doubling of the number of people coming into further and higher education from challenging backgrounds.

On this panel, we have heard that it is a remarkable success story, unique to Scotland—Claire McPherson mentioned that

“This is a success story”;

Mr Dunphy, you said that although we are not done yet, great progress has been made. That is not the narrative that the public is hearing. It is important to me, as a politician, but for the people who are interested in thinking about widening access and in their opportunities for access—which will not be the entire population—to continually get an apocalyptic picture is detrimental. It is what they get; they will get it from the coverage that will come out today. In the same way, pretending that nothing is wrong is detrimental. Is there a danger that we will demotivate people and that they will say, “Well, actually, there’s no way I’m going to get into university, look at what’s happening just now”? Is that apocalyptic approach potentially damaging? If so, what can be done?

To be fair, I said “college and university”—I went to college before going to university, so I acknowledge your point.

I think that a parent or a child who is thinking about access should be open-eyed about the challenges around student finance and some of the things that we have heard about. However—and this was my point—should they not also be open-eyed about the stuff that we are doing that is unique to Scotland, which other parts of the UK are looking at with envy? Should there not be some cause for a bit more optimism around those people’s chances of getting into a college or university?

I am interested in anything that could be helpful in preventing the undermining of a target by the inevitable extraneous events that can affect it, for democratic accountability as much as anything else.

I have to ask the question whether the target is a worthwhile one to have, aside from the fact that you can do a lot of good in trying to achieve it. Given what you have said, do we have the right target?

I would be interested to hear about your own experience, and not only from the year that you have spent in this job. I am new to the committee and it would help me to understand the historical context and where we are in closing the attainment gap. I remember that when I went to university, very few people from my background were at university. I would like to get an idea of the historical context but also of whether it is the right target to have.

I appreciate Mr Dunphy’s point about targets being for ministers and politicians. However, we are moving into a pre-election period when politicians will start to think about throwing around targets and commitments and they will try to make them as simple as possible, for very good reasons. We have heard a lot of evidence today about the need to review or refine the current target. My issue with that is as much to do with the fact that targets like that do not allow for extraneous influences. Government should really stop proposing targets that can easily be affected by things that are outwith their control, because it makes them meaningless.

We do not hear much about this target, but I imagine that it is unlikely that it has not been affected by 14 years of austerity bearing down on revenue and, especially latterly, capital budgets, by the Liz Truss budget and consequent double-digit inflation, wage suppression, the cost of living and rising inequality. Many of those things—not all—lie outwith the Scottish Government’s control. When the Government sets a target, it should be specific about what it controls. What are the witnesses’ views on that?

A meaningful target has to be as simple as possible but there might need to be caveats in it for it to be sensible. I am maybe making a plea for presenting the electorate with more sensible targets at election time. It would be interesting to hear any suggestions on that from those with an academic background.

The deposit return scheme was an innovation that was ruled out by the UK Government.

Mr Baldock, do you have any ideas on whether innovation is being stifled, or is that not really noticeable?

I have a comment to make, which the witnesses might have views on. This is not how Brexit was meant to be, is it? We were sold the idea of fantastic free trade and all the trade deals that were going to happen.

Instead, three or four years on, there are no border controls and, as Mr Kerr and others have pointed out, we are in a very poor negotiating position for the future. I think that fishing rights will be the big thing that people will be coming after. The fact is that Brexit has not really given us the green and pleasant uplands that we were sold. I suppose that you guys have to operate within the framework that you have, but do you have any comments on how things are turning out?

I am looking at some of the figures that the committee has in relation to fish. I know that we do not have any fish experts here today, but there seems to have been a pretty dramatic reduction in the non-EU figure; it has more than halved, I think, since 2014. In fact, if you strip out inflation, the total is negligible. The picture for red meat seems to be better.

Given the discussion that we have had about border controls, which, of course, the UK Government has never bothered to have in recent years, how can they now be portrayed as smoothing out trade? I understand the rationale for UK producers feeling at a disadvantage—after all, they have to comply with the controls—but border controls are, in themselves, an added barrier to trade and an anti-free-trade measure.

However, my question is about divergence and innovation, as two sides of the same coin, and whether either the Scottish Government’s policy of alignment or the constraints of the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 might inhibit innovation. I do not know who would innovate a piece of red meat, to be honest, although I presume that production methods and so on are susceptible to innovation. Are you aware of any areas of innovation that might be being stifled, or would you not know about the absence of innovation if, for example, it was something that was just taken off the table by either the internal market act or the Scottish Government’s determination to align with the EU?

I will turn first to the person with the most puzzled look on their face. [Laughter.] Lucy Ozanne, does the internal market act or the alignment policy inhibit innovation?