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I do not—

But it was never designed to do that. I want to be clear: the bill is quite a narrow bill that will enable us to kick off the process of tackling those issues. That is what it will do.

Not at all.

I agree with them about the need for agility, and I do not think that the current system is nearly agile enough. The member must have missed what I said in my opening remarks, because I am aware that James Withers called for a colleges-first approach, but that is not our starting point.

We believe that the best interests of the learner and the employer would be better served by a mixed economy of private and public training providers. I made it clear that I had reached that conclusion when I spoke at the annual conference of the Scottish Training Federation last year.

I was a little surprised to hear that some private training providers are still of the view that we will take a colleges-first approach, but I reinforced our position with the chief executive officer and chair of the Training Federation just last week, and I am meeting a group of its members shortly to tease out some of their concerns about the delivery of apprenticeships.

I have spent a lot of time looking at that point, because the Withers review recommended that we go with a colleges-first model, but the fact is that, in some instances, private training providers have a better offering and better kit, and they are able to bring everything together.

If you go to the Construction Industry Training Board’s national construction college at Inchinnan, you will see its offering. The Arnold Clark motor trade training facility’s offering is stronger than that of many of our colleges. There is a balance to be struck between the colleges’ strengths in delivery and those of the private training providers. That is the road that we are going down.

The role of colleges remains important. There are opportunities—I do not want to go into too much detail, because conversations are taking place—for colleges to come together to create centres of excellence in particular disciplines, and there is an appetite for that. They could come together to take on the role of managing agents, perhaps. That is another opportunity that arises from this move, so that the moneys that the committee has heard about remain much more within the public sector. All those conversations are well under way, and—as I keep going back to—we are open to making that change. The bill allows us to deal with the issues that have been brought to us by James Withers and others.

I absolutely take on board that point, if it has that concern. One of the good pieces of work that was done by SAAB, which was led by Natalie Buxton, was a review of gender issues across the landscape, and I am pleased that Natalie has agreed to continue to work with us, because we want to weave that into all the reform work—not to have it as a separate workstream, but to weave it in. I will absolutely take away that concern about women in business organisations, and I commit to meeting Women’s Enterprise Scotland to hear directly the specific concerns that it has raised.

It is only the starting point. As I have said to the committee, it sits as a key enabler in a much wider, huge, piece of reform work. To be honest, I have made that more challenging because every time that we have lifted a rock—

Whenever we have lifted a rock and found something we have not put the rock back. We want to take the opportunity to get this right.

I saw some talk in the evidence about this being a 10-year project, which it is in some regards, because it will take five or 10 years to get everything in place. However, there are provisions within the bill that we could enact sooner and we will look to do so. There are things that we can do in the meantime. There is a piece of work under way that I can share with the committee because it should be finalised in the next few weeks. It looks at how all this will come together and what the timeframe will be and it may give you a better picture of what I am describing. We are clear about our direction of travel and where we will get to, but, to your point: although the bill is critical it is only a small part of the reform. It is the starting point that will allow all the work to flourish.

No, because that information is not shared with us.

The UK Government shared it with us up to a certain point, a number of years ago, but then it decided to take an approach in which it said, “We’re just going to include a relevant amount in the block grant.” I cannot tell you what that amount is, but that is the situation that we are in—that is how things operate at a UK level. There are some plans to change the English system, but we await the details. Greater clarity might emerge, but, as things stand—as has been the case for a number of years—that information is not shared with us.