Chamber and committees

I am sure that the committee would be interested in any information that you can share with us.

So, it is not just a question of how expensive it is to do something—it is just that we do not do those things any more.

Is the problem that the domestic market is not big enough to support those industries?

We are talking hypothetically about how to grow the domestic supply chain and substitute the products that are already in it with our own. However, you are saying that, for a long time now, there has been no will to do that. Do you see any change in attitude or any indication that there is such willingness?

Does that ecosystem not exist now?

As I said to Keith Ridgway, for as long as I can remember, I have been hearing that the UK should take niche markets and tie-in products and all the rest of it, because we cannot compete on mass manufacturing. I am not aware that there has been tremendous success in that. We seem to be talking about it again in connection with supply chains. So far, everything seems to have been talk.

Nick Shields emphasised the need for economies of scale a great deal more than the other two witnesses did. In other words, we have to build manufacturing business that not only meets Scottish supply chain needs but must, at least in part, be part of a chain outwith Scotland.

I want to take that a step further. The report states that the NRS

“appraisal concluded that any options to deliver the census in 2021 would represent a significant risk to data quality”.

What options were considered? Were all the options decided against only because of the anticipated “drop in response rate”? Does the reference to

“potential bias in the data”

refer to the distortion that would be caused by a drop in the response rate?

Okay. I will move on to a couple of final questions. England went ahead with its census, and part of the justification for that appears to be that, in England and Wales, administrative data from other public bodies was used to supplement data gaps. However, the report says that such information

“was not available for Scotland”.

Was NRS unable to access the data? Does it not have the necessary data for Scotland? What was the reasoning behind that?

I would like to explore the management of the census programme. We have had section 22 reports about NRS in the past. A lot of the issues were caused by ICT problems; a lot were about management. Given that we are talking about one of the Scottish Government’s biggest ICT programmes and given our memory of what has happened previously, have any steps been taken to provide additional support? A lot of the section 22 reports that we have seen have been for similar organisations. Some departments seem to be too remote from any control. This is one of the biggest ICT projects. What was done to provide extra support?