Chamber and committees

Is that question in the context of the industrial relations in the sector?

You will recognise that it has taken some time to secure responses from all the interested parties in order to allow us to come to a view. All of us around the table would recognise that industrial relations in the college sector are not good and have not been good for a very long time. I cannot impose anything when it comes to the bargaining structures, but I absolutely recognise that we cannot go on as we have been for years.

We have an industrial dispute going on, and we need to get over that. I think that there is an appetite and a recognition that this cannot continue in the way that it has. Sitting alongside all the reform work that we are doing, if the sector can find a way through the current industrial action, we can draw breath and then consider how we can do this differently. I have views on that but, as I say, I cannot impose them on the relevant parties.

As I said, I do not want to mislead you. I think that we have had all the responses quite recently—that is my recollection. If I am wrong, I will write to you and correct the record. That being the case, and as I have just alluded to, we need the various parties to get over their current difficulty, and then we can take a look at what we could do differently, but delivering that will require buy-in from all the parties.

As you know, we have faced considerable financial challenges. Until the end of the year, it had remained my hope that we would be able to provide funding for that purpose. Ultimately, that did not prove possible.

I recognise the difficulty that that presents for employers, colleges and the Open University, which utilised that fund. We have been unable to restore it in the draft budget for the coming year—certainly, not in that form. I cannot and will not hide from that. It is one of the very difficult decisions that has had to be taken.

On whether I recognise that, ideally, we would want some form of funding of that type to be part of the offering, in the context of the reform agenda, as we go forward—

Colleges are preparing for the reforms—they absolutely are. The detailed conversations that we are having about a colleges-first model are an illustration of that. Colleges are planning for the opportunities that they see, notwithstanding the financial challenges.

However, it is not as simple as identifying duplication and thinking that, when something comes to an end, money will be freed up. In many instances, we need to take a phased approach. That is why I said that there is not a magic wand to make changes happen overnight, but we are actively looking at where there is avoidable duplicated spend.

We have our priorities. I need to invest in and beef up the careers service if we are to help our young people to make informed choices, and we need to support colleges to make the transition that they will have to make. Everybody has an ask. One of the biggest challenges with all reform is how we get the momentum that is needed to deliver it, given the financial difficulties.

I did not quite pick that up, convener. I hope that I did not make a bold statement. I hope that I was very clear in what I said, which was that we anticipate that, in the draft budget, the money that colleges will have for their core budget at the start of the new financial year will be broadly in line with what they will have finished up with—in fact, we think that it will be slightly better than that—except in relation to the in-year changes that were made.

There are external factors that mean that I cannot sit here and say that what happened absolutely will not happen again, but we are working very hard to avoid that. The UK Government will have a budget at the beginning of March. If, as has been flagged—this might be right; it might be wrong—that budget focuses on tax cuts, that will have a negative impact on our budget. Therefore, I cannot sit here and guarantee that what happened will not happen again, but we are trying to be as open as we can be with colleges and others at the outset and to proceed on that basis.

That is a difficult question to answer because we do not know what a fully fledged SEEP would look like. The level of applications to the fund was not particularly high. I accept that a lot of that was down to timing and its pilot nature. It is difficult to gauge what the level of interest would be if we get it up and running and therefore what the associated cost would be. That is very much work in progress. However, I stress that it is joint work in progress.

As part of the exercise, I am speaking to a lot of employers and sectors. Some sectors will make progress for themselves, as they understand their skills shortages—financial services is a case in point. That is helpful, because we know what we need to do in that space. However, you are right to say that there is both current need and future need, and we need to future proof what we are doing.

For example, we are told that we are short of 600 or 700 planners at the moment. That is important, because planning is the building block of construction and of the economic development that needs to flow from it. My question is: what is the planning degree of the future and is it the same as the one that we had five years ago? From my perspective, as a layman, we now have far more need for expertise in marine planning, aquaculture and so on.

That is an illustration of the exercise that we are going through now, in which we are considering what the planning degree of the future will be and what we anticipate providing that it will require. We are also considering whether our universities that are involved in providing that education can immediately deliver that. If not, we need to know how we equip them to do so. Then there is the question of critical mass. If we now have a need for 600 or 700 planners, what is in the pipeline? Universities need to know that. They also need to know what is in it for them to provide those courses in whatever locality they need to provide them in. That is part of what we are considering.

We should acknowledge that some of those relationships already exist. Some colleges are embedded in their communities and have great relationships with them. For example, West Lothian College already has relationships with employers, and those can be developed further.

I cannot say today that we have a vision for how that will work in practice, but the regional skills planning model should provide the opportunity for employers, the chambers of commerce, colleges and universities to have that direct dialogue. That is where we have to strike a balance between national planning for workforce skills and regional need, because very often that dialogue will be at a regional and local level.