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The convener is looking at me because of time.

I will clarify something. You started by talking about private training providers. However, we are talking about managing agents, not private training providers, and they do not deliver the training, but subcontract it. We should be clear about that, because there are many fine private training providers out there.

I have been clear today about my long-standing concerns about the role of managing agents. I need to be very careful and say that some managing agents carry out some really welcome and necessary activities. I commend the committee for getting out of them the information that it did when it took evidence last week, because we found it more challenging, over a period of time, to get that information out of all the relevant bodies.

I absolutely share the concern that you are telling me that the committee has about it. I totally share it.

The reality here, from my perspective, is quite concerning. I will give the committee a couple of examples, because the evidence that you received certainly caught the interest of the college sector. I talked to a couple of colleges about this, and the numbers are really quite stark.

One college, for example, gets 48 per cent of the £8,700 that was referred to to the committee. However, it then draws down, over a three-year period, £16,000 of credits in order to deliver the training. Plumbing is a particularly intensive course; it can sometimes be one to three or even one to one, as it goes through.

Another college that I know of gets 46 per cent of the £9,500 that it is pulling down. In this instance, circa £5,000 of the money is retained, and college credits are utilised to deliver the training. I am really uncomfortable about that as a use of public money.

The managing agents will tell you that they do lots of good stuff, and CITB is doing some really good collaborative work with us. I do not have a black-and-white view of it. The English system is quite black and white—for example, it caps the amount of money that managing agents can retain.

As I said, to be blunt, the landscape is very fragmented, with every component part of the system pushing its significance, relevance and importance. That issue has come out in the evidence. I recognise that, in the current economic climate, it is inevitable that people will say that there are immediate problems that need to be confronted. I contend that we are confronting some of them, particularly in relation to the economy—we might come to that later in the session. What the bill delivers was deemed to be necessary by James Withers. That has not changed—we need to make fundamental structural changes to the offering, regardless of the immediate circumstances in which we find ourselves.

I stress that there are two separate things. There is the immediate work that we are doing in response to some of the challenges, but the bill is about creating a coherent post-16 landscape, which is widely recognised as being necessary.

Our ambition is certainly to give it to you as quickly as possible, but I anticipate that we would be able to do so before the stage 1 debate.

I will take Glasgow as an example. It has three colleges that are specific to the city. Two of those might be described as doing the typical community work that you would expect of colleges. That is their strength. The other is quite unique. It is something between a university and a college, and it is unique in having substantial commercial income. It attracts international students in a way that the other two colleges do not.

Given the principals who are in place at the moment, I am confident that, through the appointment process for chairs, we will manage to ensure that we attract the kind of strong individual who I want to chair our colleges—the kind of individual who will hold principals to account but will also see the bigger picture. Having heard yesterday in Glasgow about the skills planning work that is going on, I think that there is a coherent vision not just for Glasgow, but for Lanarkshire and the area that is covered by West College Scotland.

It was sent after last week’s evidence session. To be honest and absolutely candid with you, I was not aware that there had been any drop-off in engagement. I was quite surprised to hear that. I have provided an explanation for it, but it came off the back of the evidence, which we reacted to.

As you have acknowledged, the SFC has written to the committee in greater detail. I will not comment on the evidence that was given at the time, but I do recall Paul Grice, I think, expressing considerable confidence to the committee about the capabilities of the organisation under its new leadership. I would reinforce that.

It most definitely will, because, apart from anything else, there will be clear ministerial direction about the importance of apprenticeships.

It did not, but one might also argue that the university court did not really spot the problem coming either. As I have said to the committee before, I am committed to a process whereby we look at what comes out of Pamela Gillies’s report, as the committee will. We are engaging with the sector more widely to look at whether we can, through stage 2 amendments, do anything to improve the governance arrangements in relation to not only the SFC’s oversight but the court’s local oversight.

I will offer an example of one of the things that we have been looking at. We have looked at the possibility of getting ahead of the game by monitoring the cash reserves of the universities on a bi-monthly basis. It would, potentially, give an earlier signal of any emerging issue if their cash reserves were going down—although it is not straightforward, as a number of universities operate revolving credit facilities.

A number of conversations are going on around what better governance would look like to support both the individual courts and the SFC, if that is necessary. Perhaps more powers are needed to compel the provision of information, but we need to wait and see what comes out of Pamela Gillies’s report on Dundee.

I met the chairs of the court a couple of months ago. They are doing a piece of work, not just in Scotland but across the UK, on improved governance opportunities and things that we could do better, and they are going to come back to us with recommendations. We are absolutely committed to that work.

I do not accept that the blame for what happened in Dundee lies at the door of the SFC, but let us see what Pamela Gillies says.