Chamber and committees

Yes. I will certainly do that.

I do not have exactly such information. As I have said, we have moved towards the “no one left behind” approach over the past two or three years at a decentralised local level in order to allow local employment partnerships to come up with bespoke solutions for their areas. Many of the projects that are funded locally are for disabled people and other people who are far from the labour market. The approach is very localised.

There is, of course, a platform that brings all the “no one left behind” partnerships together to discuss common issues. I hope that, discrepancies and postcode lotteries are identified at the national level. However, I do not have any direct data that compare different areas that I can give to the committee.

There is currently just under £70 million for employability support in the draft budget that is before Parliament. The £53.06 million that was initially budgeted for and then removed was not a cut to existing services; the money was to fund additional work that we wanted to undertake. However, that work will not happen now, because the money has been removed due to budget pressures facing the Government and the cost of living crisis.

The budget will go through Parliament, so the funding will be there for the employability schemes. There were plans for additional work on tackling child poverty and on other ways in which we could play a role in employability schemes and so on, but those things will not happen to the same extent due to budget having been removed.

No—it was solely a budget decision. As I said before, additional money was going to come into the portfolio; it is now not coming, as opposed to existing budgets being cut.

I have discussions through the employability work. As for Colin Smyth’s examples, I am not aware that I have been directly contacted by any of those organisations. Of course, this is all part of the general concern that has been expressed by many organisations in the third sector in particular, which I referred to before. Of course, we are aware of the issue.

There are financial and budget decisions that I am unable to fix because that is above my pay grade in the Government.

Yes. It is a point that is made regularly—I am not denying that. Ever since I have been an MSP—going back to 1999—the third sector and others have regularly made the point that they would prefer long-term certainty through provision of three-year budgets or whatever. However, because of how the financial settlement is set up for the Scottish Parliament, it is not easy to deliver that.

As I said in my previous answer, there is a responsibility across the Government to support the fair work agenda, whether in respect of transport, childcare or education. It is the job of all those areas to support the fair work agenda.

Your question is good, but the person-centred approach must identify barriers in the local context then work with local partners to knock down those barriers. We all represent areas of Scotland; our local employment partnerships should be delivering person-centred approaches, as fair start Scotland, which is a national initiative, does. They should be identifying barriers and working with partners to knock them down. The benefit of a person-centred approach is that it identifies the individual’s barriers and works with local partners to knock them down.

That work is being led by the education and equalities ministers and we are keeping a watching brief on it. I have not had direct involvement with the bill as a minister, but the work is at quite an early stage; we are waiting for feedback from the other ministers. The bill will indirectly impact on employability issues, so we will look at that closely.

The Minister for Higher Education and Further Education, Youth Employment and Training, Jamie Hepburn, has answered questions on that in Parliament in the past few weeks. I refer the committee to his answers; he laid out how that is being addressed and is leading on it. There is a lot in his answers to Parliament about the interaction between supporting young people with disabilities and developing the young workforce and the skills agenda.

In answering that, I have to refer to the fact that many of the issues are reserved to the UK Government. The access to work scheme is probably the most obvious source of funding for employers, and it is quite substantial funding—I would have to check the figure, but I think that more than £60,000 can be made available to adapt workplaces to allow access to work for disabled people. That is a UK Government responsibility; it is not the Scottish Government’s.

That scheme has a very important role, and I understand that one of the issues with it is simply to do with raising awareness among employers that the support is available from the UK Government. Maybe the Scottish Government could play a bigger role in raising awareness. That funding is not our responsibility, so we cannot take responsibility for it per se, but your point is valid. We want employers to know that assistance is there and that it is substantial.

The answer to your question is that support is available and that it is a UK Government scheme. We have funded specific projects on working with employers, but the financial support for individual cases is through the access to work scheme.

On the culture in workplaces, your point about career progression is important. Again, that is a cultural issue for employers and it could take us into reserved areas. There are on-going debates about mandatory reporting of figures on disabled employees. I do not know whether that would include figures on managerial positions and so on, but there is a debate about mandatory reporting for employers, which is a reserved issue. UK ministers are looking at a number of issues just now. I know that a House of Commons committee in 2021 carried out a similar inquiry to this one on the disability employment gap. I do not know whether the committee has seen that.