Chamber and committees

I very much welcome the instrument, and I think that it will go some way towards resolving some concerns. However, I am interested in what the process of escalation would be. You will be familiar with the current issues at the City of Glasgow College. That is what has caused me to ask the question, but I am asking it in a general sense, because I think that it applies to more colleges than just that one, particularly where colleges sit under the regional board in Glasgow or Lanarkshire.

There are still questions from unions about how they should escalate an issue if they are unable to resolve it with college management. What is the role of the college board, the regional board, the Scottish Funding Council and you in that? Will you explain how a trade union that has been unable to resolve an issue directly with management should go about escalating it? I am sure that, as MSPs, we all get lobbied by unions on a variety of issues in this regard, often with a variety of suggestions about whether the issue should go straight to the SFC, straight to you or straight to the college board—or, in some cases, the regional board. What process should be followed if there is a concern about redundancies, particularly when the correct process has not been followed?

Thanks, convener. I have two questions. I am conscious of the time and the fact that you have all touched on these issues in various ways, so feel free to be concise or simply refer me to your previous answers.

The first question is about how we disseminate best practice and embed it in the system. It has been pointed out that there is loads of best practice happening across the board but that it is happening in a very patchy way; various folk are good at various things, but nobody is doing everything in the way that we want it to be done.

I direct this question at Mike Burns in the first instance. Are we being systematic in how we collect evidence of best practice and in how we then embed that across the system? Everyone has a lot of anecdotes about it, but I am not sure that we are actually seizing best practice and embedding it wholesale.

That is concerning, but it is good to put that on the record, and the committee will be able to raise it with the Government.

I presume that you have had engagement from the Government in other spaces over the past 18 months—there has not been zero engagement. As much as it is critical that you get a response to that report, I just want to check that the Government has engaged with you in other contexts.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes, absolutely.

Is there any shift in the Scottish Government’s strategic priorities for capital spend directly from the block grant, as opposed to what goes on regarding borrowing? In other words, what would the Government consider by way of capital projects that are appropriate for borrowing, as opposed to the funding coming straight from the direct capital grant? Is that position essentially unchanged following the agreement?

I will return to the convener’s line of questioning about the changes to capital borrowing limits and apologise if you covered this in your answer to the convener and I missed it. Given the point that was made about the extent to which capital inflation has gone far beyond not only the GDP deflator but also measures of consumer inflation, was there any discussion of backdating for a year or two, in order to apply even the GDP deflator, never mind the level that capital inflation is actually at?

That is really useful to know. It is helpful for us to understand that, from the UK Government’s perspective, the negotiation was not just about the well-trodden constitutional ground of where power lies; it was also about the UK Government’s policies in relation to debt and deficit and the contributions that are made to address them.

On the point that you have just made about the impact of capital borrowing on the resource budget, neither of those budgets is particularly positive for the Scottish Government over the next couple of years. What is the practical effect of the gradual increase in the capital borrowing limit on what the Parliament should expect to see? The expectation is that the capital budget will not offer a particularly rosy picture. Does that fundamentally alter anything? It has already been discussed that the current level is nowhere near where capital inflation is at, and we are already at a point at which we cannot do everything that, a couple of years ago, we thought that we would be able to do. What should the Parliament expect the effect to be on budgets over the remainder of the parliamentary term?

What was the UK Government’s rationale for that approach to capital borrowing? I am not asking you to break any confidences, but it is useful for the committee to understand the extent to which there were competing public policy objectives and to know where the balance of power lies in the context of partisan politics.

Thanks for that. Now that—