Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good morning, Deputy First Minister, and thank you for joining us. I want to pick up on a couple of points that we have touched on and to expand on them a bit.

In response to questions from Fiona Hyslop on tourism, you talked about digital connectivity and its importance for organisations in shifting marketing strategy. More broadly, digital connectivity is clearly important for local and regional economies and because of the shift in working practices as more people work from home. Entrepreneurs often start off at home and therefore require digital connectivity.

In the budget, we see a reduction of more than 6 per cent in digital funding, which is significant in cash terms compared to last year. The Government has noted that that relates to new spend profiles over the life of the programme. Can you give us a bit more detail on that? Importantly, what are the impacts on people who have been waiting for connectivity? How will that materially affect their ability to be connected?

I am sure that you are not suggesting that charitable enterprises should be “away in the corner”. I think that many of them would argue with that.

Thank you.

I am interested in exploring a couple of issues. You have spoken before about what the economy is for. In various documents, you have said clearly that the economy is there to serve people and planet effectively, now and into the future.

The wellbeing economy is at the heart of the strategy. One challenge is that the economic strategy links into many elements of governmental work. I am interested in knowing how we could improve alignment across all the different strategies. What are the challenges for policy coherence? We could argue that things that we do in one area might run counter to or jeopardise ambitions in other areas of governmental work.

I want to go a bit further on that before I move on. You talked earlier about house building, and there will obviously be negative impacts from construction, be they environmental impacts or others, although they can be mitigated and balanced out with other mechanisms. I suppose that it is your assertion that we have the right balancing mechanisms and that they are effective. However, what on-going monitoring is being done to make sure that those issues are covered so that we can ensure not only that there is policy coherence, but that we have the correct assessment of that coherence?

We are verging on a discussion of the national strategy for economic transformation, so I will hand back to the convener.

My final question is about community wellbeing and social enterprises. Alternative economic models are crucial to the resilient, sustainable and prosperous economy that you have spoken about. What are you doing to explore giving social enterprises an enhanced role in our economy, given the local and regional benefits that they might have over and above other enterprise models?

Thanks for that helpful response. The geographical areas that are the most disconnected, in a wide variety of ways, have yet to see some of that connectivity. It is imperative that we get that right.

I will shift to another issue, which follows on from Fiona Hyslop’s question about financing the just transition. We have spoken about skills and the importance of getting that element right. If we think about the Scottish economy and break it down into regional and local economies, we find an issue around ensuring that we sustain local supply chains. What do you see as the major challenges, other than the total sum of the budget, in the financial and investment decisions that regional economy boards and forums are or are not making around securing sustainable local supply chains?

Thank you for your comments so far and for joining us. I hear what you say about support in response to Colin Beattie’s question. We should all support entrepreneurialism and it should be politically neutral. However, some of the consequences of how we do that are clearly not politically neutral.

I am interested in some of what you said in response to Colin Beattie and Gordon MacDonald about scale, geography and the distinction between entrepreneurialism and innovation and, as part of that, the expectations on growth. I do not disagree that having a start-up grow and selling it off is a measure of success but not all entrepreneurs necessarily want to do that. In some cases, the company evolves in a way that it can carry on being innovative at a certain size and not continue to grow. I am interested in how we ensure that we get a spread of types of company. Do we think of growth just in financial terms or in innovation terms as well?

Given what you say about the need for that ecosystem and to have the expertise—the skills, knowledge and know-how—in a place, how do we ensure that people can be entrepreneurs all over Scotland, not just in the central belt where lots of people gather anyway?

I will put a similar question to Jon O’Sullivan on Scotland’s supply chain and the range of renewables that we are speaking about.

What are the important things for us to focus on to ensure that we have the right material and infrastructure in the right place for 10, 20 and 30-year sustainability?