Chamber and committees

The policy will apply to the full global footprint of a defence company and all associated activities. If the specific Scottish part of the company has no links to an identified country, but another part of the company elsewhere in the world does, the Scottish part of the company becomes ineligible for the grants and investments.

To an extent. Obviously, the broader conversations all come back to what we have set out as our core objectives.

One of the three main objectives that I have on the attracting investment work is the energy transition. The issue that investors raise with me more than anything else is whether I can ensure that they will have the workforce. Therefore, skills underpin all the investment work. The investment work is exciting and I can talk about the statistics, but ultimately it becomes a reality only if we have the skills. Therefore the energy skills hub is an obvious, logical place to make the investment because it is so critical to all the other work that we are trying to do.

Every few months, I chair the Cabinet sub-group on investment in the economy—we had a meeting yesterday—so the matter is obviously of Cabinet-level importance. It is a brilliant place where we talk through all the big investment opportunities and what the implications are for every portfolio. Gillian Martin was there yesterday morning talking about the overlap between the investment approach and the climate change, energy transition and net zero approach that she takes. Fiona Hyslop was there talking about transport. Ben Macpherson is one of the members and he talks about skills. That brings it all together.

We are doing that by taking a very streamlined approach to attracting developments and investments. An obvious example of that is the work that we have done through the investment pipeline, where we have provided a tangible prospectus on where investors can invest in Scotland, and data centres are one obvious such area.

We see evidence that that approach is working. There are some challenges along the way. The high price of energy represents a risk, but all the reasons that you identified—such as the fact that we have a cooler climate and will have access to a surplus of green energy—are of interest as well. Those factors are all driving quite high levels of interest in data centres in Scotland.

We have talked about that issue before, and I think what sets Manchester out is strong leadership and a cohesive approach to delivering results. That is perfectly possible in Scotland, and I see evidence of that in different parts of Scotland. There is one example that stands out most starkly. Forgive me—I obviously have an element of prejudice in this regard, but I have never seen people in the Highlands and Islands working together as cohesively as they do now, or with such strong leadership. That is largely born of the fact that Highlands and Islands Enterprise is a little bit independent and can show that strong leadership. There are brilliantly strong leaders right now in all the key public bodies. There is a sense among industry that something exciting is happening, and those leaders are working collaboratively together. None of the most recent investments happened accidentally; they were pursued quite intelligently. That is what stands out.

The Manchester example is fascinating, but it is not a model for rural areas. I would argue that the Highlands and Islands is showing what kind of approach could work in a rural area, which is exciting.

The report then goes through what those high productivity sectors are. I talked about the big beasts and the high productivity sectors in energy and finance. We have world-leading universities, so the skills element is good, but, as the University of Glasgow’s report says,

“The business ecosystem in Scotland lacks a critical mass of large scale-ups.”

Cue Techscaler. The report mentions good progress on export performance and, going further, support for business start-ups. That is a little insight into really solid strengths in some areas. It goes back to Lorna Slater’s point, which is that if you just take the high-level data, the regional or the industry variation underneath is masked.

Not to go back to my pet subject of the Highlands and Islands, but Graeme Roy did an interesting report on the Highland economy over the past 60 years, looking largely at the progress since the time of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, when the generally accepted wisdom was that the Highlands was such a basket case that the only thing that could be done to improve the region was to encourage people to leave rather than to encourage investment in it. I think that the economist Professor Sir Donald MacKay made that point. Graeme Roy’s point is that productivity growth in the Highlands and Islands has often exceeded what was happening Scotland-wide, and that the region was able to weather some economic storms better because of its resilience.

There is a lot to learn not only by looking outward but perhaps by looking inward at particular regions of Scotland in which there has been significant growth over the past 60 years.

July—that is what I was thinking. Perhaps I can come back in early autumn.

I think that the way to identify the answer to that question is probably to consult the community about ideas on where it would like to see progress. On language policy, it is always fascinating that politicians generally crave targets, outcomes and outputs, and rightly so, but that often misses the wealth of heritage, history, community and culture, which are harder to squeeze into obvious outcomes. We see that with other languages as well.

I wonder whether there is a question to pose to the community, both from the committee’s perspective when you think about your recommendations and in relation to the Government’s decisions on which actions to prioritise.

There are two specific routes for monitoring. First, there is our own progress report, which is produced halfway through the lifespan of the plan. We will work with the implementation advisory group on the national plan to ensure that that reflects the experiences of BSL users. The progress report will set that out in black and white. That will be available for the committee to scrutinise so that it can be clear about what progress has or has not been made.

The other form of monitoring relates to the engagement that takes place across all the listed authorities for the sharing of best practice. As I said earlier, we fund BDA Scotland to support those listed authorities as they develop and implement their plans. It is an on-going iterative process.

From listening to the committee, I get the strong impression that it is keen for us to explore a third alternative to those two forms of monitoring. I am certainly open to doing that, because we want to understand how to ensure that best practice is followed across all the different listed authorities. We are also aware of the ALLIANCE’s recent report on local plans. We engage regularly with it as part of the implementation advisory group.

I am very open to anything that the committee believes that we can do to improve monitoring, while stressing the point that monitoring can sometimes morph into direction. There are reasons why, in this particular subject area, direction from the centre is not always the most effective way of progressing matters, especially when national targets are created that may distort what a local area wants to prioritise.

On the points from the BDA around accountability, implementation, and inconsistency, the point about inconsistency reflects—fairly, I think—my comments at the outset in relation to the convener’s first question. In some areas there is high-quality, excellent provision—there is a very positive response to that—and in other areas, they say, “We want what they’ve got”. The point is about having that consistency across the country, so I take on board the criticism about the inconsistency.

In terms of accountability and tracking the spend, we invest considerably in organisations that work with and represent deaf BSL users and deafblind people in Scotland; we have referenced some of them already—BDA Scotland, the Scottish Ethnic Minority Deaf Charity and Deafblind Scotland—and then separately we are investing funding in improving services. I do not know whether the committee has been sighted on some of the work that we have done through the Scottish Government CivTech programme on improving accessibility to BSL interpreters. That can all be closely monitored and evaluated.

There is a difference between Gaelic and BSL—and this may not be a difference that the committee is willing to tolerate and the feedback might be, “No, we want to see you change this”. There is a difference because of the responsibility on listed authorities. For example, having specialist BSL social workers is a responsibility of local authorities, so it is for local authorities to monitor. Tracking the spend becomes more challenging when there are areas of responsibility on local authorities. I would say that the difference with Gaelic is that it is managed on a more national level rather than on a more local level.

There may be points to consider there around whether the Scottish Government should take responsibility for more funding from the centre that then becomes specialist funding, which would be different from how things have been approached so far, which is about more mainstreaming; local authorities get their pot of funding and then they determine how that is spent. That is a difference and perhaps leads to the challenge around tracking the money because it is happening at a local and national level.

The one point of challenge I would make is that sometimes the temptation is to say, “Bring it back to the centre,” so we bring it back and then we get into the difficulty I referenced earlier where you then have the Scottish Government determining that every part of Scotland should get an allocated pot for this service and that service, which may mean that some local authority areas find themselves focusing on a particular priority that may not be the top priority.

For example, in the Highland Council area, their argument would be that even though they have the training provision for BSL, their big challenge is recruitment. Another area may have exhausted the funding for training and need more funding for the training because there is an ample supply of people who are interested. None of those issues are insurmountable—we can overcome them all—and the committee’s challenge is helpful in that regard.

Kevin, do you have anything to add on the point around accountability and tracking spend?