Chamber and committees

Skills Development Scotland delivers PACE on behalf of the Scottish Government in conjunction with other key partners including the Department for Work and Pensions. In addition to the National PACE Team, there are 18 local PACE teams across Scotland to ensure speedy and effective responses to redundancy situations. Other agencies also involved in PACE include HM Revenue and Customs, local authorities' employability departments, the STUC and its affiliated Trade Unions, Citizens Advice Bureaux, local training providers, colleges and universities.

Skills Development Scotland’s National PACE Team comprises two full time employees and three employees who work on PACE as part of their main job role. In the Aberdeen area, a full time Employer Support Manager (PACE), a full time Careers Adviser and a Modern Apprentice (Business and Administration framework) have recently been appointed to work solely on PACE due to the high demand for support in the North East.

Given that PACE is a framework which brings together various organisations to provide a co-ordinated approach to delivery of support for those facing redundancy, it is not possible to quantify a specific number of staff who are permanently employed in PACE activity.

Details are contained in the following table:

*April-August

Source: Skills Development Scotland

PACE offers free and impartial advice and is available to all individuals affected by redundancy, no matter the size of the business nor how many employees are involved. PACE also works with insolvency practitioners to provide support where a business has gone into administration or liquidation.

Employers do not provide financial contributions to PACE teams. However in cases of larger redundancies, employers may make a contribution of space and IT equipment for example to provide an onsite resource centre for employees to meet with PACE Advisers.

The 2016-17 Programme for Government sets out a package of measures to support a resilient and fair labour market. This includes all of the actions set out in Scotland’s Labour Market Strategy which was published on 26 August 2016, meeting the commitment to bring forward a strategy in the first 100 days of this new administration.

Significant actions set out in the Programme for Government which are already underway include:

Working with the Fair Work Convention and providing support to take forward the next phase of their work and promote their framework to employers;

Supporting workforce development through the Scottish Union Learning Fund which includes a contribution of £2.2 million this year;

increasing the number of accredited Living Wage employers, currently 598, making progress on our target of 1,000 accredited Living Wage employers by autumn 2017; and

Increasing the number of business that have made their Scottish Business Pledge, currently 289, for which we will continue to raise awareness.

In addition, we are working to create a Trade Union Modernisation Fund, a Returner’s Project to help women returners back into the workplace, and a Workplace Equality Fund alongside the other measures set out. These will be taken forward throughout the course of 2016.

Grant in Aid to Skills Development Scotland in each financial year from its beginning (2008-9)

Further information about Trade Envoys will be made available in due course. Operational costs for supporting the Global Scots network will continue to be around £200k per year. This includes plans to recruit Global Scots in 2016-17 to support activities such as securing new investment and supporting the Connected Scotland campaign.

As part of the Labour Market Strategy published on 26 August 2016 we committed to consider what labour market data we might need to improve on that presently collected. These matters will be considered by the Strategic Labour Market Group that the Strategy also committed us to establishing.

We have published extensive analysis of the Labour Market alongside our strategy and this includes aspects of work quality indicators. We have also provided support to a range of work to increase our understanding of this area, such as the Fair Work Convention, the Fair Innovative and Transformative Work project and the Oxfam report into Decent Work.

To increase this understanding, through the Strategy, we have committed to further work with the Fair Work Convention to develop employment and work quality indicators. This is in addition to the three new labour market indicators we have included in the National Performance Framework around:

(i) reducing underemployment;

(ii) reducing the proportion of employees being paid less than the living wage, and

(iii) reducing the gender pay gap

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-02704 on 28 September 2016 which is available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx