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I want the team to come in on that, because the reasons for the answer are very technical.

Numerically, it would not. In my experience—I have undertaken a lot of engagement—some of the best training provision comes from very small private training providers. I have seen some excellent apprenticeship delivery—real high-end stuff. That is what I mean about the need for a mixed economy.

I think that we currently have one vacancy on the council, and we have four coming up. For the understanding of members, I should explain that the council is the board—we have different terminology. Therefore, in essence, five appointments will be made, and there will be a new chair. We have been in dialogue with the SFC about the range of skills that it would be advantageous for it to have at its disposal. As you are aware, the bill seeks to remove a provision for existing serving people in the college and university sector. I am more than happy to defend that. Some issues arise with people having to recuse themselves from the decision-making process because of a conflict of interest.

I do not want to set hares running, but we are in a very fortunate position in that, through the retirement process, we have a number of very experienced and highly talented former principals of universities and colleges, so I do not think that there will be any lack of that kind of valuable input to the future work of the SFC’s board. It goes without saying that, if the SFC takes on additional responsibilities, the board’s structure needs to reflect that breadth of knowledge and understanding. Clearly, that needs to be worked through, but I would like there to be some employer representation on the board.

There is an argument for something in the training space, too, although that is perhaps an argument for another day. During your evidence taking, there was a suggestion about having some expertise in financial sustainability. There is a range of needs and opportunities to support what will, in essence, be a new organisation, with, I hope, new dynamism and a new purpose and with expertise brought on to the Apprenticeship Advisory Board.

I absolutely concur with you about the make-up of the SFC’s board, and I would be very interested to read any thoughts from the committee, in its stage 1 report, on what that might look like.

Is that in relation to SAAB?

I am at a slight disadvantage, as I have not seen all of that evidence—I am not sure whether the committee is aware, but there is some considerable delay in the Official Reports of all committees being published.

There is a shock.

We will interrogate that issue through the committee process, presuming that the committee recommends the bill’s progression. Those are important issues to debate.

Greater self-awareness is needed out there. At a time when public finances are constrained, some degree of self-restraint must be exercised. For example, if staff receive a 3 per cent pay increase, which is still a substantial amount of money and makes for a very good salary if accepted, there needs to be a bit of awareness about what pay increases senior management might get. If the member intends to bring forward amendments for us to consider, assuming the bill progresses, that process will clearly unfold.

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.