Chamber and committees

In your letter to the committee, you highlighted that the three devolved Governments—the Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish Governments—wrote a joint letter to the UK Government that called for the establishment of a joint task force on labour market shortages. How is that progressing? Have UK Government ministers engaged on that subject?

I want to pick up on Paul Sheerin’s earlier point about the loss of free movement, because I am keen to understand its impact on each of your sectors.

My background is that, before I was elected, I was in public transport. A large proportion of drivers were European Union nationals, but clearly that situation has changed, because a lot of them went back home after Brexit or during the pandemic. I am keen to understand roughly the proportion of EU nationals in each of your sectors and how that proportion has changed in recent years.

Would you support the introduction of a devolved immigration system, as has happened in other countries, so that we can plug the gaps? As Paul Sheerin has said, if we do not have a workforce, we cannot fulfil the order book. How do we close that circle? We are at full employment in Scotland. When I studied economics many years ago, and unemployment rate of 4 per cent was considered to be full employment, and we are at 3.3 per cent. Can you therefore say a wee bit about EU nationals?

What is the level of vacancies for joiners and bricklayers in your sector just now?

There was a suggestion that, in the summer just past, there was a large increase in the number of staycations; so, people might have been spending less, but there were more of them. That was partially due to the weak pound making foreign holidays more expensive, travel disruption and so on. What impact did staycationers have on businesses, and did Scotland get a share of the estimated £26 million from staycationers?

How is the industry planning going forward? Does it imagine that the constraints on consumer spending will be on-going for a long time, or is it hoping that the situation will change in a shorter time? What impact will that situation have on the industry?

I want to ask you about the impact of the cost of living and what the outlook is. Leon Thompson, you touched on the fact that hospitality is a very broad area that covers pubs, restaurants, cafes, travel and tourism businesses as well as entertainment venues. The cost of living crisis is reducing the amount of leisure spend that people have. Is it having the same impact across all the different areas in the hospitality sector or are some benefiting?

Good morning. I want to ask about grant funding. Carolyn, you carried out some research into the pandemic funding and you have highlighted that women-led businesses formed 16 per cent of recipients of funding from the hospitality hardship fund and 10 per cent of recipients of funding from the resilience fund. For clarity, do you have the percentages for those two funds that relate to businesses that are equally led by men and women?

Do the percentages for the pandemic funding that you have highlighted reflect the wider grant funding that is available for women-led businesses? I am thinking of the self-employed income support scheme and indeed the grants that are issued by Scottish Enterprise.

Was part of the problem the lack of targeting of sectors where women have substantial numbers of businesses? Looking at the UK numbers, we can see that a lot of female-led businesses are in health, education and hospitality. Was there enough targeting of funding to those areas or is it the case that, as you have highlighted, a lot of women were just not aware that the funding was available?

I have a side question that relates to Jamie Halcro Johnston’s questions about rurality. I was looking through the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report for Scotland and it highlights that, in the Highlands and Islands, the number of female start-ups was higher than the number of male start-ups. Is that because, as you said, there is no alternative, or is something else happening in the Highlands and Islands that we need to reflect on?