Chamber and committees

Thank you. I will leave it there, convener.

The briefing suggests that some areas are already being squeezed. One area that you flag is English for speakers of other languages. There is a big push for people to be able to speak English if they decide to live here, and there is high demand for that. People who, for whatever reason, have come here want to learn English as a second language so that they can contribute more fully to our society.

How severe is the situation in that regard? There is high demand for ESOL courses, which clearly help people to contribute to our economy, but some people are not able to access those courses.

There has been an 8 per cent reduction in staff, and I think that it has been suggested that that figure might have to be higher if some of the other pressures continue. You mentioned at the start that the experience of students is still positive. Will that continue, or will the staff reductions have other, longer-term implications? All staff reductions, whether on the teaching or the non-teaching side, have an impact on the student experience and course availability. You have said that teaching time has already gone down. What will the long-term implications be if colleges continue to go down this route?

You mentioned in your opening remarks, and it is also mentioned on page 9 of the briefing, that there was a shift from a deficit in colleges’ funding of £14.5 million in 2022-23 to a surplus of £0.4 million in 2023-24. That represented a 2 per cent shift. The briefing goes on to mention that much of that was achieved through voluntary severance.

One argument that was made as to why colleges had to go through that painful process was that it was required in order to make their institutions sustainable for the longer term. However, it does not feel as though that has happened. Obviously, with voluntary redundancy, the biggest cost is the cost of the package, but on-going savings should be made.

I am trying to understand why a process that was predicted to help the college sector to become more sustainable, which will have caused a lot of pain to be felt by staff who were at the sharp end of it, does not appear to have resulted in a more sustainable system.

Do we need to consider a different way of funding those courses, or do you think that the Scottish Funding Council can wrestle with that?

I will go back to the start. Dundee was one of the areas where ADP was rolled out first. The perception of my constituents who were in the PIP system was that the purpose of the folk who were doing the assessments was to stop them getting benefit, whether they were entitled to it or not. Whether that is true or not, they felt that those folk had quotas and that it was a success for those who were doing the assessments if they stopped someone getting a benefit. Contrary to that, when Social Security Scotland was set up, the aim of this Parliament was for 100 per cent of the people who are entitled to these benefits to get them. That was the decision of the Parliament, which I think was unanimous; I do not remember anybody saying, “No, we need to try to drive take-up down. We need to prevent people who are entitled to adult disability benefit from getting it.” The aim was that everyone who is entitled to ADP should be able to receive it.

Helen Fogarty said that we do not yet know what percentage of people who should be getting the benefit are actually getting it. That concerns me, because it means that a percentage of people who have disabilities—people who we, as a Parliament, decided should be receiving it—are not receiving it. What is your understanding of that?

Thank you.

That is what I want to move on to. This is probably more for Miriam Craven. The people who are accessing ADP—and those who are not but who should be—are also accessing a number of other benefits and interventions. The Auditor General suggests that maybe the system is fragmented and that we have not managed to embed ADP within the wider system. There is no connection to housing, health and employment. It is good to hear how we are doing that.

Miriam mentioned the “Disability Equality Plan”, but I do not think that that includes ADP. I might be wrong about that, but if it does not, when will we bring those things together? We cannot look at all these things in isolation, because people do not access just one part of the system; they have lives that are more rounded. How are we pulling all that together?

Sue Webber’s point about the eye operation was pertinent, but I am not aware that such advice is in statute. My question is this: why do we need to put something into statute, via this particular bill, when it happens routinely in other areas without being in statute? The issue is what should be in statute, what should be in regulations and what should be part of training, and those are different things. Putting everything into statute is not necessarily the best idea, particularly given that techniques change and things advance. Is there any suggestion that such a process is in statute for anything else?

Yes. Thank you for taking an intervention. We have seen examples from other parts of the world where individual choice is effectively removed. My concern is that we are joining dots and assuming that a set of circumstances will come about if we do not have an institutional opt-out. I just feel as though there are dots being joined ahead—