Chamber and committees

Is it just a historical anomaly?

I am going to ask you a question about that, so if you leave it for the moment, that would be great.

It all sounds like a bit of déjà vu. Have we not been through all this before, over the years? I have sat on this committee now for 13 years. Every time colleges come up, the maintenance backlog comes up and someone will prioritise doing some assessment for allocating funds for the most urgent work, and all the rest of it. It sounds as if the situation is exactly the same, again.

I presume that you will take an interest in what comes out of that.

How is the college sector in relation to reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete? Do we have any knowledge of that? Has an assessment been carried out?

I will move on to something slightly different. Covid-19 restrictions are, obviously, no longer in place. Is there any evidence that colleges are pursuing non-SFC funding sources, such as generating money from commercial activities and so on? The great cry before Covid was that such sources were going to generate all this money. Has that happened?

It would just be interesting to know what is anything happening in that respect.

The other big issue, and it is one that everybody has touched on to some extent, is that there has been a real-terms reduction of 8.5 per cent in college funding between 2021-22 and 2023-24. Clearly, that will have a huge impact. You have already highlighted some of the risks that are coming down the line in terms of salaries and so on. What constraints do you think that it will put on the colleges? It is a general question.

I like to think that 8.5 per cent reduction figure was not pulled out of a hat and that there was some anticipation that colleges would be able to cope with that decrease in funding and would be able to find efficiencies or other ways of delivering that would accommodate that. Do you have information on that?

I have a last question. I find that there is a bit of an anomaly in relation to differences between funding years. The Scottish Government has a budget that works on the financial year April to March, while the colleges are funded for the academic year, which is August to July. To what extent does that cause difficulty for colleges? It seems a bit daft, in some ways.

Surely, it is not a necessary complexity; there could still be an academic year and a financial year. They do not have to coincide.