Chamber and committees

I have one final question. As you pointed out, the single biggest factor affecting so many of our discussions this morning is the current rate of inflation. What discussions have you had with the Treasury about the impact of inflation on, and the potential to inflation-proof the Scottish budget?

There is a huge amount to pick up on in there. I think that you are right to highlight pay harmonisation as one of the key successes on workforce relations in the past decade. However, from my perspective, having spent most of the past six years in continuous discussion with unions and employers, the interpersonal relationships around national collective bargaining have not got better over that time. We have been in a constant cycle of negotiations breaking down and escalating to industrial action, with compromises being made as a result, followed shortly afterwards by a fresh dispute on essentially the same issue.

There is clearly a need for a reset of those relationships. Without pre-empting the lessons learned exercise, what is the best way to go about such a reset at this point? As you mention, the relationships at the local level were varied but, broadly speaking, relatively positive. How do we reset things at the national level, where the relationships have clearly broken down?

I have a couple of questions that are probably best directed first to Audrey Cumberford. I am afraid that they are a bit negative.

Acknowledging that regionalisation has had its benefits, would you characterise the fact that, in the past eight years, we have had seven years of industrial action as a failure of regionalisation? Is there a relationship between those two?

Do you believe that, if we had not gone through regionalisation, we would have been in a pretty similar situation with regard to industrial relations across the sector? I know that regionalisation and the introduction of national collective bargaining are not the same thing, but they are roughly concurrent processes that happened in the same period of reform.

That last point is important.

My final question is on the role of the multi-institution boards. I understand that the position of Edinburgh is not the same as, for example, that of Glasgow or Lanarkshire. However, putting aside the issues that are dealt with nationally around pay and conditions and so on, have the regional boards provided any additional value in terms of industrial relations and workforce representation? Are they providing a useful forum for some of the discussions about local and regional issues, or are those issues still primarily dealt with at an individual institution level or through national relations?

I understand why, given Edinburgh’s position. The question of the value that the regional boards now provide is something that I am keen for the committee to explore through this process.

I have one final question, somewhat related to that. You mentioned that economic inactivity rates have gone up in part because of the high number of young people in Scotland who are in FE and HE. The net result of that is that we have, on the whole, a highly educated population and yet one of the most perennial bits of feedback that we get from employers—I remember it from 10-plus years ago, when I was at the senior phase of high school, and it is still the case now—is not just that they cannot find the young people but that they cannot find the people with the right skills.

Leaving aside specific skills shortages such as not being able to find enough qualified plumbers, electricians or radiographers, for example, the other element is general employability skills, such as the ability to work as part of a team, good communication skills and so on.

I realise that this is a very broad question, but, when we have such a highly educated population, with such high levels of participation in not just the senior phase of high school but in FE and HE, why do we have this perennial issue of employers saying that the skills are just not there?

I am an enthusiastic supporter of the idea that education is not just about employability—people go into FE and HE for all sorts of reasons—but it still seems odd that we have this disconnect. We have huge participation in further and higher education and yet we have employers saying that the skills are still not there.

I would love to get into more detail on that, but I would be at risk of wearing my other committee—which was called the Education and Skills Committee—hat. Perhaps another time.

You referred to the “ethos” of the NPF, which relates to the feedback from the focus groups. The group that Daniel Johnson and I spoke to ended up landing on the word “implicit” when we asked about how their organisational plans and strategies align with the NPF. On the whole, the people we were speaking to, who were from a variety of public bodies, were not chief executives and senior managers. The folk we were speaking to were much closer to the level of delivery, and my interpretation of that word “implicit” was that, for them, rather than it being about rhyming off the specific outcomes and how they are contributing to them, the NPF is a set of guiding principles that shape the culture in their organisation .

When we are talking about the level of practitioners, is that approach of being guided and having your broad approach shaped by the NPF—rather than being able to list of specific outcomes—satisfactory? Is that what the Government wants to achieve, or are you trying to achieve a deeper, more specific level of understanding?

Thanks very much. As a follow-up question, in terms of availability of that data, I acknowledge that you just said that this is not one of SDS’s primary or core responsibilities, but if you were to conduct further research into that group of around 100,000 people, would sufficient data be available to you? Do you have the data that you would need to contact those people directly, or would you have to go through the UK Department of Work and Pensions for it?