Seòmar agus comataidhean

The evidence that you heard earlier suggests that the two go hand in hand. The work that is being done to ensure that the airport is a going concern and is becoming a strong asset means that the long-term strategy is working.

The management team has taken strong day-to-day operational decisions and it continues operating in a way that will return the business to being a strategic economic asset for this country.

The First Minister set tackling child poverty as one of his areas of priority for Government in his prospectus. Earlier in the summer, he held a round-table session on tackling child poverty with representatives from all parties. He has tasked us, as cabinet secretaries and ministers, to go away and hold our own tackling child poverty round-table meetings with our stakeholder networks. I had a session with employers and others in my portfolio responsibility to consider areas that we could work together on—areas in which the Government could do more or in which our stakeholders could do more, with our support—with a view to taking that back to a follow-up session that the First Minister will lead.

We want to ensure that we have coherence across Government, and that tackling child poverty is a driving priority for all of us, whether it is a direct responsibility, as it is for Shirley-Anne Somerville, or we have additional responsibilities in our portfolios that are linked to ensuring that we tackle child poverty.

I wish colleagues a good morning. It is good to be back at my former committee—I recognise some of the faces round the table.

Katy Clark is absolutely right that a key target of employability programmes is parental employability, and we work with our partners to ensure that that remains the case in their work. Aidan Grisewood will provide a bit more detail on this in a second, but I can tell you that, so far, the programmes have been doing relatively well. We know that a quarter of all those involved go on to work and a further quarter go on to a further positive destination, including further education or training.

We are pleased with that. Obviously, there is more work to do to contextualise that data, but this is certainly a key priority for us in addressing the child poverty issues on which the committee has been focused. We must continue to ensure that we offer all the support that we possibly can within the resources that we and local government have and support parents who have often—at least in the programmes that we have put in place—been furthest from the employment market.

Aidan, do you want to supplement any of that?

I appreciate your question and, again, I will bring in Aidan Grisewood to supplement the information that I am able to impart.

I go back to the importance of interacting with the UK Government. Given that many of the people who interact with the Scottish Government’s employability schemes are signposted to them through the jobcentre network, it is important that we have good interaction and a good relationship at that level. Having a supportive environment and system at UK level that ensures that people feel able to interact with the jobcentre network is critical, too.

As for our tracking and monitoring, we look at things at every three-month, six-month and 12-month juncture so that we understand where people are on their journey. Indeed, that is where the information and statistics that I have given come from, but we are always looking at what more we can do, working with our local government partners that deliver many of these programmes, as well as with community and voluntary sector colleagues, to ensure that we get as much information as possible and that, as Roz McCall has suggested, we are monitoring and evaluating those investments to find out whether they are being as effective as possible.

I do not know whether Aidan Grisewood wants to add anything that I might have missed.

Finally, I highlight to Mr Dornan that the programme for government committed us to piloting a four-day working week in the public sector. It is not necessarily a policy commitment—it is not about whether that is the right or wrong area to pursue, but it is important that we pilot that and get information as to how supportive or otherwise that is for people and how it works practically. We will come forward in due course with more detail on how that will operate.

I think that that question is for me. We have a challenge in that because, as I said previously, employment law is a reserved area of responsibility. We welcome the fact that the UK Government came forward with the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023, which helps to ensure greater consistency in working conditions. Before the legislation, the Scottish Government had been pushing for that for some time through conditionality in our contracts, whereby we were looking for people to offer fair work and flexible working from day 1 of employment. That is now a requestable right under the act.

However, we want that to go further, and we continue to impress on the UK Government the need to do that, not least because of the change in working practices that has accelerated since Covid. For example, Mr Dornan is able to join us remotely, which is really good, because we are able to hear from him when, in other circumstances, we might not have been able to. It is the same for other people who have challenging personal situations that mean that they might not be able to attend work in person but are able to contribute remotely. For instance, they might have childcare or other caring responsibilities that mean that they need or would like to work compressed or more flexible hours.

Therefore, we very much understand the need for greater flexibility in working arrangements. Since I came into post, and through the summer, as was the case under previous ministers, we have been working with employers on how we can do more to encourage that flexibility. However, ultimately, the responsibility to legislate on that lies with the UK Government and not us. We are very committed to ensuring that we have as flexible a working environment as possible across Scotland.

We have already brought forward conditionality in public procurement; I spoke in response to Katy Clark about some of the practical aspects of that, such as paying the real living wage and offering workers a greater voice. We keep our conditionality regime under review to ensure that we are being as proportionate as possible while driving the strongest possible outcomes.

We have provided significant funding to the likes of Flexibility Works and others to help to ensure that businesses are aware of not only the benefits of providing flexible workplaces but the practical things that they can do to support their employees in that process. I am happy to bring in Aidan Grisewood to add anything further or anything that I have missed.

My only comment is on Mr Doris’s question about where the funding has gone. It has been redeployed to ensure that the First Minister’s commitment to not just double but treble the fuel insecurity fund can be realised this year. That is where some of this year’s budget allocation went.

It is an important commitment. Shirley-Anne Somerville touched on the heavy lifting that has already been done on the social security side, and through various measures that we have taken across Government, to reduce child poverty. We are pleased that 90,000 children in Scotland have been taken out of poverty. That has been done in large part through the Scottish child payment, but it has also been done through other measures, including our work on employability and our work to drive up fair work practices. We constantly evaluate our employability programmes to ensure that they are tailored as effectively as possible, and the transition from the previous to the new is about ensuring that we can respond to local need.

With regard to the 12,000 target, the SPICe briefing sets out the number of people who have already been taken through and supported; I think that approaching 11,000 people have been supported across the two programmes and, as I have already said, a quarter are moving into employment, with a further quarter moving to positive destinations, including further education or training.

That said, how we tailor our approach for those with long-term health conditions and disabilities and, indeed, parents is an important consideration for us. After all, they are target groups for reaching our child poverty targets, so we want to ensure that our approach is as effective as possible. We are also ensuring that the data that we collect is as wide ranging as possible so that we can monitor the programmes’ effectiveness.

All of that demonstrates that addressing child poverty is not just a matter for the social security system alone and that we must look at wider interventions, which is why we have come forward with these programmes. It also shows how incumbent it is on us to scrutinise other drivers of poverty that come from outwith Scotland and decisions that are taken on our behalf at UK Government level. We have already heard about the incredible impact on families across Scotland of the social security cap and the two-child limit, and we are trying to mitigate the difficulties that are posed by those measures. It would be much better for us to have responsibility at source for such decisions and changes so that we could meet our targets.

Yes, we are working with parents to ensure that they get access to further skills or training that will take them further into the labour market, but Katy Clark is right to point to our other policies for bringing up people’s incomes. Compared with everywhere else in the UK, we in Scotland have the highest percentage of workers being paid at least the real living wage—the figure is currently 91 per cent—but we are not resting on those laurels. We are working with the living wage campaign, the Poverty Alliance and others to ensure that that continues to ramp up, and we are also working with our public sector partners to ensure that, as we did on 1 July, we introduce conditionality to our public sector procurement funding so that the real living wage is paid and there is access to greater worker voice.

Alongside our employability programmes, we are taking other actions to ensure that, where we can under the devolved settlement—because, obviously, we do not have full responsibility for or powers over employment law—we drive up people’s pay.