Chamber and committees

Ronnie, do you see a role for SDS here?

Would you agree, however, that, at present, many of the policies are focused on younger people and new entrants as opposed to more mature workers who need upskilling?

Dominic, do you have anything that you want to add to that?

I will explore a couple of areas a wee bit. One of them is skills—you would think that we had done skills to death, but there is a particular element of skills policy that I want to ask about.

In previous inquiries, over a period of time, the committee has noted that many of the skills policies are geared towards younger workers and new entrants. That leaves a bit of a gap, perhaps. What do we need to do to support other workers who need upskilling or reskilling?

I will bring in Ronnie Palin; he has not had much of a say so far, so maybe he can comment on that.

Would you like to comment, Gordon? I realise that it is a big question.

Cliff, you were very eloquent in chatting about how upskilling and so on are happening at Grangemouth, but do you agree that, as has been said, many of the policies are geared towards younger people rather than towards the existing workforce or more mature workers?

Mention was made of headroom, which I interpret as keeping a margin so that, if there are fluctuations in funding and so on, we can remain within our balanced budget—which, as a Government, we have to do. To what extent is that headroom or margin impacted by sustainability issues in relation to allocations of funding from the UK Government? In other words, are we saying, “We have this budget, but we’ll have to keep 5 per cent of it in case there’s a change during the year”? Is it only at the end of the year that we can allocate the funding, because we know that we will have to keep it until then? Are we in that situation?

Now we can look at one or two of the issues around sustainability. You published a briefing paper on the Scottish Government’s financial sustainability for 2022-23. In light of that, how is sustainability being managed? How has that developed? How has that moved on to be better managed than it has been in the past? I recognise that there are all sorts of issues to consider, including the Scottish rate of income tax. Sometimes, the estimates of how much we would get from that have been fairly dramatically incorrect. How are you managing the sustainability position, going forward?

You talked about risk and the fact that the Government accepts and manages risk when setting the budget. Clearly, there is a risk that you might overspend because you might get reductions in funding in year and so on. Is there a risk matrix as such? Who makes the decision on whether the risk is acceptable?

Typically, what percentage of the Scottish budget would be held back or would fall under the term “headroom”? What percentage would you keep there as a margin?