Chamber and committees

First, I will take us back a bit and explore budget positions. You have submitted written information, so I want to keep this snappy. I am interested in getting a brief summary of what both organisations believe their current budget positions to be. It might be more appropriate for Douglas Colquhoun to comment on behalf of Scottish Enterprise. You will be looking at next year in the light of a very uncertain trading environment for everybody. I am particularly interested in the forward-looking aspect, the mitigations that you are anticipating and your confidence in them, given the uncertainty about Scottish Government funding.

That is very helpful. Thank you.

I want to bring in Jane Morrison-Ross and Carroll Buxton. Nick Kenton used a term “golden threads”. One of my golden threads to obtain diversity in our economic output is ensuring that women-led businesses are adequately represented. There has been a lot of chat. We know that women have been disproportionately affected, and I suspect that women-led businesses have been disproportionately affected. I would like Jane Morrison-Ross’s and Carroll Buxton’s observations on that.

I will start with a question for the two directors of finance—Anthony Daye and Nick Kenton. You may have seen that, in the previous panel session, I wanted to explore the extent to which people are confident about their projections for next year’s budget, given the considerable uncertainty, what had been looked at in scenario planning, and their confidence level around that. Please keep your answers brief. I do not need to go through every single budget line; I simply want to get a sense of where you are at with that.

Yes, it does—thank you.

I appreciate that Malcolm Roughead, given his role, might want to take it up a level. Please give me a sense of your current budget position, your future projections and your confidence level.

If you do not get what your projections are, do you have mitigations in place?

Okay. You have given a lot of very clear data—thank you for that. I want to establish what your confidence level is for your future projections in the light of an uncertain settlement. How confident are you that you have got all your bases covered?

I appreciate that it is very complex for you.

I am conscious of time, so I will move on. My next questions are for both organisations, although I suggest that Adrian Gillespie might want to come in for Scottish Enterprise. We had quite alarming stats presented to us from Women’s Enterprise Scotland, and I have a couple of questions off the back of that. The first one is incidental and a result of my also sitting on the Finance and Public Administration Committee. I was quite shocked to hear that only 1 per cent of private equity investment goes on women-led businesses, meaning that, obviously, 99 per cent goes on male-led businesses.

Adrian Gillespie and Malcolm Roughead, do you routinely disaggregate your data by gender, and do you therefore interrogate that data to map out what your territory looks like in business support or business investment?

On the back of that, we have had commentary that the ability of women-owned businesses to access enterprise agency support has been harder because they tend to operate in areas—the beauty sector, for example—that are not necessarily the focus for growth. I would like a bit of commentary on that.

Do you routinely disaggregate data? If so, do you then interrogate it? Adrian Gillespie, perhaps you would like to go first.

Can I just follow up on that? It almost sounds as if our failure to recognise such businesses is embedding systemic issues in our economy. Through my questioning, it has become abundantly clear to me—I might previously have said that it was clear, but I am now quite shocked by it—how systemic the issues are, no matter how unintended they arguably always are. It has also become clear how important it is to understand the issues if we are to understand the role of women in business and enterprise creation.

I will move on. I posited a question to the earlier panel on the back of what all of today’s witnesses were asked to submit to the committee, and I will ask it of all three of you. If you were to revisit your submission and say how the Scottish Government budget should address the impact of the pandemic on women-led businesses—if the question were narrowed down to that—how would you answer?

I will keep asking the question. Just to finish off on that theme, I will give a simple example. I have been enjoying reading the document by Benny Higgins titled “Financing Scotland’s Recovery”. Just as a follow-up, I thought that I would do a wee search in it on references to women and gender, but there is not one mention of those in what I regard as a very good document. That omission is utterly systemic in terms of lending and access to finance and it is an even greater issue than the figures that Susan Murray quoted for venture capital.

I will move on to a related issue. In our conversation, we have touched on focusing on outcomes, and a number of good points have been made about how the fiscal framework perhaps affects outcomes because we need to run a balanced budget rather than focus on a consequentialist ethical approach, if you like. Susan, you commented in your written submission on aligning the national performance framework with the United Nations sustainable development goals. I know that some work is being done on that. It is perhaps about having, as we have discussed, a human rights and diversity focus. Would that alignment go some way to starting to give us more outcome focus in what we are trying to do? Perhaps my question is: how do we get that outcome focus by using the UN SDGs and so on?

Thank you. Mindful of the Finance and Public Administration Committee’s reputation for being the most exciting committee, I am going to take it up a level. This is a question for all three witnesses. One of the questions that everyone has been asked to submit on is how the Scottish Government budget should address the different impacts of the pandemic across a number of categories, including age and income. I wonder whether you might answer that question again, but with regard to the impact on women, given the concerns that have been highlighted about key workers and so on. I suspect that Linda Somerville will want to come in first here, but I am certainly interested in hearing other people’s thoughts on how the Scottish budget can address concerns with regard to women.