Chamber and committees

Good morning, James. I want to go back to apprenticeships, which Murdo Fraser touched on. Two of the 12 essential pillars for success for post-school learning relate to employers, which is great. However, I noticed from your comments this morning that you want to take skills planning from SDS and put it in the Scottish Government. There is the apprenticeship approvals group, which is made up of employers and is responsible for approving all Scottish apprenticeships, and there is the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board, which your report says does

“excellent work in influencing the shape of apprenticeships”.

How can we retain that employer expertise within the system if we are going to devolve it down to city regions?

Okay. I have a final point to ask you about. You mentioned in your report that apprentices

“struggled to have their voices and opinions listened to within the system.”

Unless I missed it, I did not see how you think we should be able to address that.

This is my final question, and then I will pass back to the convener. I have noticed that, although pharmaceutical exports were up by 9 per cent, the value of exports to the rest of the UK was down from £155 million to £50 million. Was there a reason for that?

I was going to pass back to the convener, but I have just thought of another question. In January, Deloitte produced a report that said that the

“average expected return on investment for research and development fell from 6.8 per cent ... to ... 1.2 per cent in 2022.”

That was the lowest return on investment on record. Is that making it more difficult to attract the funding that you are talking about?

In your report, chart 3 is entitled “Top Universities for Life Sciences Spinouts”. What is that chart trying to tell us? What does it say? The figures for the Scottish universities are in red: the University of Edinburgh has 18 spin-outs, and two that have been exiled. Is that to the golden triangle that you talked about?

Before Sir Michael comes in, I am trying to understand this table a wee bit better.

I accept that it contains only a proportion of the universities, because the University of Dundee is not included. If I read across the various universities that are listed, there were 51 spin-outs, of which four in Scotland have exited. In the UK, there were 248 spin-outs, which suggests that the number of spin-offs in Scotland is higher relative to population size; 48 exited south of the border, which, again, is a higher proportion of the total number that you have presented.

I am trying to understand the point about our creating spin-outs but not retaining them. Your figures do not highlight that we are not retaining them.

I have lifted the numbers off your graph; that is all.

Sir Michael, you have a case study and you mention two companies: Amphista Therapeutics and Exscientia, if I pronounced those correctly. Amphista started in 2017 and Exscientia in 2012, if I have got that right. Amphista’s latest accounts suggest that it made a substantial loss in 2020 and 2021. Its total number of employees is 20 and it has a net worth of minus £5 million.

On your case study, which you mentioned earlier, you said that there is a need for a public-private fund that backs life sciences and innovation ideas. Can you say more about that?

How do we ensure that, once we get out of the research and development phase, manufacturing jobs are retained in Scotland? Until fairly recently, my son worked in life sciences. An American investor was involved in that company, but despite the fact that all the R and D was done in Scotland, the manufacturing plant of that American investor was in Europe.

No—there are a number of factors.