Seòmar agus comataidhean

This might take a bit of time, convener, but I hope that you will indulge me.

I entirely understand the stress and frustration that has been felt by the staff and others at how long this has taken and how long the situation has dragged on. I can speak for the cab sec as well and say that we have certainly been frustrated by the time that it has taken. We have had to, at various points, recognise that the role of ministers in the context of legislation and our relationship with universities is at play here, as is the need to protect the Office for National Statistics classification. The situation with the finances of the university is a complex one, and understanding how it got into that situation also took a bit of time and contributed to the delays.

As we moved through that, there has also, to be candid, been an element of everybody involved wanting to be absolutely sure of the numbers in front of them, with regard to the asks, in particular, but also the robustness of two iterations of a financial recovery plan. More recently, the university has rightly been expected by the SFC to bring forward a certain level of detail to underpin what has been placed in front of it. That, in turn, has rightly seen the court of the university take a keen interest, and that has contributed to the delays, too. The plan now goes to the SFC, and the SFC’s board is involved. That is the background to why it has taken this long.

Just to bring this more up to date, I think that people are aware that, on 28 May, the SFC received a further financial ask that had gone through the university’s processes; that has been going through the processes of the SFC and its board, which have been interrogating the nature of the ask. The Scottish Government formally received a notification of the request on 6 June, and we are working on that at pace.

This is an on-going situation within the Government; indeed, the cross-ministerial group will be meeting this afternoon—we meet regularly on this matter. I should also say that the cab sec has led a lot of the direct engagement with the trade unions, which have been an important part of all of this.

The additional ask of £22 million that has been brought forward has two elements to it. The first is to avoid the scale of disruption proposed, particularly in respect of employment, in the first iteration of the financial recovery plan. That would have been quite destructive to employment levels and nobody was in any way comfortable with that.

The second element is liquidity. It is self-evident that the institution got itself into difficulty, because it was essentially living beyond its means, and that position will not be recovered overnight. While the financial recovery plan is being implemented and taken forward, the institution will gain a degree of further support, whether from commercial sources, the Government or a combination of the two.

As I have said, those elements are being progressed at pace. We ought now—famous last words—to be capable of moving into a phase in which a greater pace will be injected into taking the issue forward. Clearly, we now have an ask that we can assist the university with in whatever form. The voluntary severance scheme has finally been launched, which will allow that element to be progressed.

I commend Sir Alan Langlands and his team for their patience and commitment. The task force is conducting specific workstreams to assist the university, and its members have had no shortage of appetite for that, for which I commend them. However, they have needed information and encouragement in order to deliver in the way that they would hope to, and they are now taking that work forward.

With regard to progressing the matter and bringing things to a head—if that is the correct term—there is the Gillies report, which is due to be published next week. Primarily, it will be for the SFC, which commissioned the report, to respond to it, but the university will also have to respond to the findings. As I understand it, at lunchtime on the day of the report’s publication, the university will hold a town hall meeting with its staff to give them an insight into what the review has found and, I would hope, any actions that the university feels that it is necessary to take in the immediate term.

As I have said previously at committee, it is also for the Government to reflect on the report’s findings. If there are any clear issues related to governance and oversight which will have repercussions and ramifications beyond the University of Dundee, the Government will consider them. As I have said before, the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill will provide a vehicle for us to consider introducing further powers for the SFC, or whatever, in legislation. We await the report.

The first thing to say is that the rebaselining exercise that was carried out with the SFC was requested by the sector. It was made very clear to colleges that, in doing that, there would be winners and losers.

I hope that this will be helpful, convener. As I mentioned to the committee a couple of weeks ago, we have already had a direct conversation with the chairs of the universities in Scotland. At this stage, we are simply encouraging them to exercise restraint in the uprating of remunerative packages in view of the challenging financial circumstances and the cost of living crisis. There has already been a conversation of sorts about exercising self-restraint and self-awareness.

You are right, convener; I will respond to the committee’s report in detail, but I will update the committee as far as I can today.

My officials have continued to explore the matter over the past two months. That work has included meetings with Universities Scotland, the SFC and the commissioner to understand the specifics of how using such a number would work in practice. My officials have also had a meeting with the Scottish Information Commissioner to garner his thoughts on that. It is fair to say that that would be extremely complex work. It would be cross cutting in nature and would involve sharing the personal, sensitive data of millions of individuals, so you will appreciate that it would need to be done properly.

I cannot go beyond that at this stage, but I hope that that gives the committee an understanding of how seriously we take the idea, as well as an assurance that we are exploring it actively.

Is that better?

Apologies. The rebaselining exercise that was carried out was requested by the sector. The SFC was clear that, in doing that, there would be winners and losers. Despite that, it was probably predictable that the two colleges that were least well served by the exercise took issue with it.

Perhaps more of a surprise was NESCOL’s reaction, because it was one of the net winners in that exercise. There was a sectoral uplift of 2.6 per cent, and NESCOL received circa 3.1 per cent in totality, including an increase in the teaching funding.

That said, I have a degree of sympathy with its argument. This is a historic, long-standing issue with the Fraserburgh campus, and NESCOL is right to say that the element of rurality that it has to deal with has not been recognised. I hope that you and NESCOL would appreciate that all the anomalies that sit within quite a complex funding system were never going to be addressed in one giant leap.

The SFC, through the tripartite group, has shown a lot of flexibility and good responsiveness to asks from the sector, and I think that that will continue to be the case. We are trying to evolve the funding model to make it more flexible and agile, better reflect the outputs from the individual institutions and align with the needs of the local and national economies.

I said this in response to a question from Mr Rennie in the chamber a few weeks ago—if it is possible for us to do this, there is a need to add an element of alignment with the needs of the local and national economy into the funding model. That may well require additional funding, which will be difficult to find in the current economic circumstance, but if we could do that and NESCOL met the criteria, I would look to address that, because I understand the point about the Fraserburgh campus.

Willie Rennie is right to talk about the need to carry out due diligence. I am not going to get into specific numbers; there is, to be blunt, a range of numbers at play here. The liquidity element of what might be asked for can, as I have alluded to, be delivered in a variety of ways; for example, I have mentioned commercial lending and how that might be unlocked.

I would separate the question into two component parts, as I did a moment ago. We have been very clear about our commitment to deliver for the future of Dundee. We will see how exactly that is done, but we are, as we have been throughout, absolutely clear about our support for the institution.

In a broad sense, it was, but there is a bit of variation in the figures, if I can put it that way. There are two ends to this, and there are two elements, as I have made clear. There is the adjustment element, which is the approach that the university has taken to protect employment levels, and there is the liquidity element, which is the bridging that it is doing while it implements the FRP and gets back to a position in which it can not only survive but thrive.

As the cabinet secretary has done, I take issue with the statistics that you are quoting. I have the numbers in front of me. Glasgow Kelvin College received a 3.15 per cent uplift. It was one of the main beneficiaries of the rebaselining. Of course, some of that was for lecturers’ pay and some was for pension funding, but there was a basic uplift of £170,000 on the college’s credit thresholds, so it received more money.

I recognise that there has been a decrease in staff over a period of time. Colleges have been evolving their offering because they need to respond to the needs of the economy.

There is an interesting element to that. Sometimes, staff numbers have gone down because the number of courses has been reduced. I can think of at least one college where the number of courses was reduced because of demand, but the number of students attending that college went up. That is about responding to need.

No one ever wants to see job losses at scale, but we are in a period of evolution in the college sector, as we are in other sectors, and I am optimistic about where colleges will end up in the future. As they evolve their offering, they are better aligning it with the needs of the local and national economy and the needs of learners.