Chamber and committees

I will give an example of something that we have tried to do. You will be familiar with CodeClan, which provides intensive retraining or reskilling for employees in digital skills. We intentionally supported it to open a facility in the Highlands that was specifically geared towards rural businesses. It was different from the CodeClan that is based in Edinburgh and was specifically geared towards rural businesses.

There are examples of things that we have done. However, it needs to go both ways. There must also be an appetite to embrace that. Whether it is the middle of Edinburgh or Skye, the same challenges exist around skills in a very competitive environment. If you think that there might be some ways in which we could adapt the digital boost scheme or digital grants to make them particularly relevant to rural areas, I am open to suggestions and ideas. However, it is a challenge across Scotland.

The way in which it is being approached at the moment creates a massive risk of that. To add to the criticisms that you have identified, there has also been criticism that the commitment has been watered down and that it is now a commitment to providing nationwide gigabit coverage by 2030, with the aim being to reach 99 per cent of properties. Based on the UK Government’s approach and the arbitrary cost cap of £7,000 per premises, we know that that means that connections will be secured only to the easiest-to-reach and most commercially valuable properties.

If the UK Government simply takes the approach of connecting the easiest-to-reach properties, it is inevitable that properties in hard-to-reach constituencies such as mine and Alexander Burnett’s, and other members’ rural constituencies, will lose out. We can see in the UK Government minister’s response that if the focus is on the hardest-to-reach properties, it will be at the expense of easy-to-reach properties in England. The whole point is to reduce digital exclusion and create a level playing field, rather than exacerbate the divide.

Fundamentally, we need a change. It is not necessarily a question of providing additional funding because £5 billion is available. It is not a case of providing more money, but of believing that we must connect our islands, the most rural peninsulas, and the houses that are down the beaten track that cannot be connected for anything less than £7,000.

Such is my concern about the issue that I raise it with UK Government ministers, whoever they are, whenever I meet them. Whenever we end up on a visit together or whatever, I raise the issue. I have raised it with the minister for levelling up and, obviously, the digital minister, and I will keep hammering home my point.

For me, the situation is binary. If the cost cap remains as low as it is, the UK Government will, in effect, be excluding the properties that have the most to gain from superfast broadband. With R100, we have taken the approach of starting with the hardest to reach and working backwards. We are willing to invest the funding, but if we want to finish the job, ultimately, the UK Government will have to take a more flexible approach. I do not think that it is appropriate to say that connecting an island comes at the expense of connecting a town in England. It is fundamentally different.

If you would like to hear about the official discussions, I am sure that Robbie Drummond could come in, but I certainly raise the issue whenever an unsuspecting UK Government minister and I end up at an event together.

Thinking is definitely happening around those issues. I will draw your attention to the internet of things, because that is part of our digital strategy. There are already examples of how we are using the internet of things to gather reliable data about the world that can inform decision making and improve services. At the moment, that is being used to monitor river levels for flooding, prevent damp in social housing and so on—I have had the privilege of using some of the social housing that is using the internet of things, and it is remarkable. There are examples of it being used around the health and wellbeing of livestock, such as cattle, and to understand the performance of industrial machinery.

In the 2017-18 programme for government and the subsequent 2017 digital strategy, we committed to ensuring that Scotland had that underlying infrastructure to support widespread networks. We will continue to implement that approach. That is a good example of where we want 5G to get to. It all boils down to data, how you use the data and, of course, how you ensure that you have an ethical approach to the use of data.

You and Colin Smyth are right to say that the infrastructure is insufficient. Once that is in place, it is great.

I will give an example. The digital boost development grant used to be about a couple of million pounds a year but is now up to £25 million. The other thing that we have done differently is that private funding needs to be leveraged in as part of that. It is not just a case of receiving a grant, spending it and then forgetting about it. The grant needs to be matched by private sector investment. That means that, almost immediately, we double the amount of public and private funding to invest in digital connectivity. In relation to the economic strategy, one of the most effective ways of improving productivity that was identified related to private sector investment and capabilities.

On outcomes, the committee knows that we have a commitment to improve productivity significantly, in line with productivity in comparator countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. If you want metrics of success, that is a big metric of success. The steps along the way involve ensuring that every penny of public sector spend on digital is doubled by the private sector. That is an example of aspiration, in relation to where we want to get to on productivity, and reality, because that is already happening through the digital funding that is being spent on improving capabilities and skills.

I have already cited an example in which I used the past tense, because those things have already worked. If you ask Barclays and other banks why they have located their tech hubs in Scotland, they will say that the reason is, in part, that they think that Scotland is an attractive place to establish them because of that combination. That is creating, and is set to create, a considerable number of jobs. Barclays is not the first bank to have done that, and it will not be the last. Those tangible outputs are the results of investment that has been made.

I am happy to agree to do that. As I said to Colin Smyth, we are keen to be adaptable. If the committee has ideas about how to make the digital boost scheme more accessible, I would be keen to work with the committee on that.

The chief executive of Openreach, Clive Selley, has described the process of recruiting workers in the European Union post-Brexit as “torturous”. He stated that the Home Office’s points-based process is

“constraining the rate of fibre build in the UK”.

Robbie McGhee set out many of the protections that we put in place but you need only to listen to organisations such as Openreach on that. The challenge of recruiting workers has featured in probably every meeting that I have had with Openreach for the past year and a half or so. That is over and above the issues that some of the more local suppliers have identified with struggling to source equipment such as fibre, fixed wireless or fixed mobile hardware due to the global supply chain issues and some stockists capping the amount that can be ordered.

We have stepped in and offered greater flexibility to the delivery timescales for the voucher scheme-led solutions if the supplier can demonstrate that they are experiencing such issues. However, it is clear that they are all grappling with those macroeconomic frustrations, some of which are fixable right now. They could be fixed with, for example, visas that are specific to particular industries or particular skill sets.

It cannot determine how money from project gigabit is spent. Therefore, there is a limit to its role, but it has an important role and an objective on equality. However, its role is limited in the sense that it cannot determine how Government funding is spent. For example, it determined criteria for services that were delivered under the UK Government’s broadband universal service obligation. Therefore, it has a role in that regard, but that role is limited with regard to how UK Government funding is spent.

Yes.

That is an excellent question. Again, I will not sit here and say that the outlook is anything but challenging. I have been open and honest that there is a challenging outlook across the board. The only way to achieve our objectives on social prescribing, on preventative spend, on protecting culture and so on, is to ensure that we are not working at cross purposes in the public sector landscape. We need to be as good as possible at joined-up thinking.

You will know that the local government budget lines that we have published are at level 2, which means that you do not see all the transfers that go from the Scottish Government to local government. Some of those are very substantial, including those for education and social care. However, a host of other lines across portfolios are transferred, which I know sometimes frustrates the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. We are working with COSLA to look at how we can remove ring fencing from more of those lines. The challenge then will be that certain funding will not necessarily deliver the aims that we intend. There is a fine line between the Scottish Government determining funding for purposes including culture, leisure and so on, and giving maximum freedom and flexibility to local government.

Angus Robertson can speak more about how things join up from a policy perspective; my job is to ensure that thinking is joined up from a financial perspective. There is more that we need to do; the resource spending review provides us with a framework for doing that, because it does two things. First, it boils things down to our core objectives and asks us to ensure that we are actually achieving the objectives, and it asks the wider public sector to get better and more flexible at working together to achieve aims. That applies across public culture bodies, but it also applies across Scottish Government and local government. We must ask where we can be more joined up, rather than working at cross purposes.