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Businesses’ number 1 issue was the cumulative impact of regulation that, at times, felt as though it was all coming at the same time. So, what have we done? We have established a regulatory review group. We now have a built-in process that looks at the potential regulation coming down the line and ensures that there is a means of understanding, internally in Government, the cumulative impact of policy and regulatory decisions on businesses. That is why there was positive commentary about the programme for government and the budget in terms of there being no additional regulations at a time when, as one business told us, there was a list of different regulations that businesses were trying to comply with all at the same time.

Generally, businesses are not anti-regulation. However, when there is a cumulative impact on top of the cost of living crisis and dealing with the aftermath of Covid, it is challenging. That is one example of how ministers can scrutinise the cross-portfolio regulatory landscape.

I invite Judith Young to come in.

I think that Judith Young wants to comment on that.

I say very clearly, because I am in receipt of the same emails that I imagine Jamie Halcro Johnston is in receipt of, that it is entirely Highland Council’s choice as to whether to introduce a tourism levy or not. I have stressed that and emphasised it. There was extensive consultation when the enabling legislation went through the Scottish Parliament, but Highland Council is now running its own consultation. It is critical that the voice of business is taken into account, because we all know that the value of any such levy is the additionality for the experience of tourists.

My impression, which is based on the engagement that I have had with a number of businesses on a constituency level, is that most of them do not have an in-principle objection to the concept but they want their views to be taken into account in relation to how the council manages it. The City of Edinburgh Council is at a more advanced stage.

Absolutely. Here is an example: doubling the resource in the energy consents unit was not necessarily—unless my colleagues are going to correct me—considered to be a top priority for the new deal for business, but it has emerged as one of the top requests by developers in a sector that is forecast to deliver high growth to the Scottish economy.

The point of the new deal for business was not to capture all the policy asks in one place and then track whether we could deliver on them. The point of the new deal was to deliver systemic change in the processes and the tests for all policy development.

Being able to double the resource in the energy consents unit and target a sub 12-month turnaround time for planning applications is an example of how that has been achieved by an area of Government that would not necessarily see itself as being in the business of economic development but would see itself in the business of planning, regulation and so on. That is what I meant.

The test of the new deal for business will be whether that culture change continues. I personally think that—perhaps I will just claim credit for this—in the past six months, the approach has been embedded dramatically in a number of different organisations. For example, on the investment stuff that I am doing, for the first time, we have a pipeline of all the private sector-led and public sector-led opportunities for growth and requirements for investment. We have not had that before.

You look like you are about to come in with a second question.

It is about more than that. At any point, we are grappling economically with different challenges. Some of those are unexpected, and some of them are expected but are happening more quickly than anticipated. Let us take the same example. The national strategy for economic transformation, which was published a couple of years ago, explicitly said that targeting new emerging markets was a big opportunity for the Government, and it explicitly talked about the energy transition. We then had ScotWind, in which the leasing round massively exceeded our original target. The Government agreed to that massive increase because it was such a huge opportunity. Government and its agencies, therefore, have to respond to what we were anticipating but at a much higher volume, and that is where doubling the resource and so on comes in.

Again, you look like you are about to come in with another question. I do not want to cut across you.

Yes. Do you want details of that?

The point that you are making is close to my heart. How do we ensure that any of the systemic and cultural changes that have happened in Government do not remain in Government? All the various public sector arms also need to appreciate and recognise what we have tried to achieve through the new deal for business. There needs to be an understanding that all parts of the public sector are also in the business of economic development.

When I came back into government last summer, I realised something. I will take energy transition as an example—it is a completely different sector, but it is, I know, an area that is close to Mr Stewart’s heart. A lot of public bodies do not see themselves as part of the energy transition, but they could make or break it. Marine Scotland, the Crown Estate, the various local authorities that have responsibility over planning, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, NatureScot and so on are all key.

This could also be applied to your pharmacy point, Mr Stewart, but organisations and public sector bodies have a duty to protect data according to the law, and to protect citizens and patients. At the same time, we have to ensure that organisations and bodies can operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. Pharmacies are a good example, because they are semi-autonomous and, in many cases, independent. If you were to introduce regulation and bureaucracy that led to them all shutting down, that would be providing the patient with a poor service at the end of the day. It is about finding that fine line in implementing laudable policy in a way that does not completely inhibit an autonomous, independent organisation such as a pharmacy from working.

That is where we are trying to create the culture change. Often, the issue is with the implementation rather than the core policy itself. We all know the various regulations and legislation that underpin data sharing, but there is a lot of freedom there, too, to put the patient at the heart of systems and to create systems that operate around the patient and enable greater data sharing.

Separate work is going on in Government. Neil Gray and I have co-chaired a number of groups involving economy and health to try to lead to some of that culture change, but I will not pretend that it is not a work in progress.

Yes, but, fundamentally, we deceive ourselves if we do not say that certain policies that are implemented for particular outcomes will not be popular in certain sectors. I do not think that any of us is saying that we expect every policy to be universally welcomed by every citizen in Scotland. That just cannot be the case.

The aim of the new deal for business is to bring business in at the beginning, to ensure that implementation is as streamlined and as straightforward as possible. That is very different from saying that every policy will be universally welcomed, especially when we are trying to achieve multiple different aims, as we are through MUP. MUP aims to reduce alcohol dependency, poor health outcomes from alcohol misuse and so on. I think that businesses are largely on board with those policy objectives, but we need to make sure that the implementation has their input.

I am sure that Dr Malik will have some thoughts to add, but I absolutely agree with that point about mainstreaming those models rather than their being an add-on. I was not here when the membership of the new deal was determined or invited, so I am not sure what the thinking was at that point as to who to involve and who not to involve. My colleagues may have thoughts on that. However, I agree with the point about mainstreaming.

As I have reiterated a few times this morning, we also need to reject the notion that the business community is homogenous and has the same views on everything. That is not the case. Business owners and workers of different kinds are citizens with lots of views on the various policies that the Government is engaged with, and we engage with them as citizens and take their views into account irrespective of their roles in business. Business is not a homogenous whole. We need to have the means to allow feedback, input and consultation and we then need to come to a conclusion that weighs all of that up, including the input from those alternative business models.

Dr Malik, do you have any thoughts on that?

It is on my agenda, because skills are very high on my agenda. We take a different approach to the apprenticeship levy here, and I would argue that businesses do see the benefit of it. They may not see the input/output equation in the same way as businesses might see it in an English context, but the funding is clearly reinvested in apprenticeships of different types—foundation apprenticeships and graduate apprenticeships—and in different skills.

Right now, we have a huge opportunity to look at the whole skills landscape and understand how it is meeting our growth objectives. We have a really good problem at the moment because we have high growth in particular sectors. We have massive potential growth in aerospace, in renewables and in other sectors. If I am engaging with a developer right now, they are saying that the scale of potential construction across Scotland makes them question whether they will be able to access the skills that they need. In other words, there is a lot of growth happening.

Graeme Dey is very involved in the conversations that we are having, and we have done specific things on the side, such as allocating £3.5 million for offshore wind. I have been working with advanced manufacturing, and we are contributing specific funding for a skills effort there. So, there are things that we are doing on the side of the general skills landscape.

Graeme Dey is keeping all of this under review, and I know that a different approach is being taken to the apprenticeship levy here, but I would argue that the benefit is still there; it is just that a business cannot see output leading to input individually.