Seòmar agus comataidhean

The minister will be glad to hear that I will be very brief.

Amendment 191, in the name of Lorna Slater, would simply change “may” to “must” in section 17(4). The effect is that it would require ministers to issue guidance to the council regarding the composition of the apprenticeship committee and its functions, closing off the possibility of ministers not issuing that guidance. I hope that the amendment is therefore seen as straightforward and that committee members will agree to it.

It is a tricky balance to strike. At the moment, in the region of 90 per cent of all public data in Scotland is not proactively published—it is not immediately available to the public—so we are not at the tipping point into a data dumping situation. There might be specific situations in which us cynical Opposition members feel that, for example, the Government has done a data dump on a Friday afternoon to try and mask something but, on the whole, the balance is skewed massively towards public information not being routinely published and available to the public. The aim of amendment 128 is to provide a clear steer that such publication should be happening routinely, without becoming so prescriptive about what should or should not be published that either we force the publication of something that should not be in the public domain or we get it wrong and give institutions the excuse they need simply not to publish information that they should. It is always tricky to strike a balance. My aim is to set a clear direction of travel and, ultimately, trust institutions to make a judgment about what is or is not appropriate.

I appreciate the length of time for which the minister has been in his current role, but I have raised this issue with the Government in this portfolio and across the board for a number of years.

If the Government believes that this does not need to be in legislation, why has it not just instructed every public body in Scotland, at the very least, to adopt the same open government licence that the Scottish Government itself adopted some years ago?

Will the minister give way?

I very much agree with amendment 66 in principle. It is very similar to amendments that Pam Duncan-Glancy and I have lodged to previous bills. However, I wonder about its operability and whether it is flexible enough.

I am thinking of a scenario that a number of institutions have faced recently, when they had to close entire buildings on a moment’s notice due to the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. Obviously, that had a significant impact on the ability to provide for learners, but it would not have been appropriate to require them to inform trade unions, student bodies and so on beforehand, because they had to act the moment that they became aware of the issue. Does the member think that her amendment is flexible enough to take into account such situations?

That is the point that I struggle with. I hope that the minister can correct me, but I do not see any difference between what is in his amendment 12 and the power that SDS already has and simply has not been using. It is within SDS’s powers now to effectively cap the amount that managing agents take, and it has just not done that. We are moving responsibility from one body to another, but I am not clear how Parliament can have confidence that that will result in effective caps being set and good use of public money.

If the minister is amenable to working with me further on the issue, I will not move amendment 51, but I have not yet heard a case for why Parliament should be confident that his amendment 12 will result in a change of practice. We are shifting the power from one organisation to another, but there is no substantive change in what is expected of the body. Amendment 12 is very vague, as it talks about what would be a “reasonable” charge and so on.

As I said, I am happy not to move amendment 51, if the minister is happy to work with me ahead of stage 3 to consider whether ultimate responsibility for setting a cap could sit with ministers.

I take his point that, if his amendment 12 is agreed to, the SFC would be bound by law to do something that SDS is not currently bound by law to do. However, my question is about what it will be bound by law to do. The wording of the minister’s amendment is vague, and I am not convinced that it would result in substantive change in practice.

Will the minister take another intervention?

I appreciate that, and I appreciate how long we are taking on the issue. With respect, I do not understand that answer. As I understand it, college principals in Scotland are not unionised, so it is not a matter of union engagement being required. In relation to matters such as payment of the real living wage, as John Mason pointed out and as I said earlier, we have conditioned those elsewhere.

The minister’s argument seems to be that he still needs time to consider the issue. I mean no offence by this, but has the Government come to committee today without having considered it? I appreciate that the time between the deadline for lodging amendments and the first day of stage 2 is quite narrow, but I have been raising the matter of applying the chief executive pay framework to college principals with the Scottish Government for a number of years now, so I am a bit surprised that the Government does not have a clear answer as to what its position is on the issue and the legality of it.

I sympathise with why you are keen to see a clearer definition of foundation apprenticeships. I take on board that foundation apprenticeships are almost not apprenticeships, as we have just discussed in relation to Willie Rennie’s amendments, but I wonder whether you share my concern that defining one particular apprenticeship would make it challenging in future if we were to undertake any reforms of the system. If we decide in a couple of years’ time, once the bill is enacted, that we want to make substantial changes, even if it were to do something like renaming foundation apprenticeships—I do not think that they should be called that because the term “foundation” is unhelpful and harks back to the era of standard grades—we would need to introduce more primary legislation to do so.

Do you recognise that concern? Could we perhaps include a ministerial regulation-making power that would ensure that we do not need to go through the primary legislative process again if we need to make even minor adaptations to the system at some point in the future?