Chamber and committees

You have gone through the statistics, convener, so I will not repeat them, but the pathways review happened in the first place because of those concerning statistics. The other statistic that I would use is that 2p of every £1 of investment goes to female founders. That, in itself, is quite stark and also means that the statistics that you have outlined come as no surprise given the state of investment in businesses with female founders.

I remain extremely committed to implementing the recommendations of the pathways report. The pathways fund opened on 19 July this year, making up to £1.1 million of funding available to widen access for entrepreneurs. The fund was very successful: by the time that it closed on 30 August, it had received 130 applications and officials are now working to confirm grant awards.

A lot comes back to the issue of data. We have taken on board the need to improve data collection, which is a work in progress. We are working with delivery agencies and academic partners to improve our understanding, monitoring and reporting of data relating to participation in entrepreneurship. I am sure that the committee will be interested if and when we can give an update on what we have done as a result of that work.

He is a civil servant.

I am delighted to return to an area on which we had an exchange in the past and to repeat why I do not believe that it is appropriate to associate a single line of budget to the NSET programme. I very much respect the fact that Colin Smyth has a different view on that, and I very much respect the comments that Audit Scotland has made, but I am afraid that I am just not going to change my mind on the suggestion that we have one budget line associated with NSET, because that would completely undermine my view of NSET, which is that it should be for all Government to deliver.

I have just given an example about the work that is being done on innovation in the health service, and it is self-evident that that would not be included in a single budget line on NSET. The minute that we resort to the siloed approach on budgets, we will have completely eliminated the core purpose of NSET, which is to try to deliver economic prosperity across the Government.

In June, we published our second annual progress report, which lists all the actions that have been delivered and sets out what stage we are at in the NSET programme. However, I assume that you are talking about the Audit Scotland report.

We have had a debate about the best way to monitor spend. We have taken the recommendations on board and have delivered quite a number of them. We might just have a difference of opinion on how to do some of them, such as the finance recommendation, as effectively as possible. If you want to put any others to me directly, I can respond to them.

Thank you very much—that is a brilliant question. When the NSET was published, I made the comment that, with a 10-year strategy, there were elements of risk, because none of us knew what the next year would hold. When we reflect on the past two years, we can see that there has been quite a lot of turbulence and change. There is an element of risk attached to anything that you put down in the NSET as fact. That is why it was so important, in this year’s programme for government, to refocus on what we will do in the coming year that is in the spirit of NSET.

I will ask whether any of my officials want to come in on the green industrial strategy. By the time that I came into office, the strategy was drafted and ready to go. My main changes to it were about focusing as much as possible on action. That meant taking what the green industrial strategy contained and asking, “So what?” and “What does that mean?”

My understanding of the green industrial strategy was very much that it was a prospectus approach, so its audience is those who are interested in or open to doing business in Scotland and considering making investments. It needs to sit alongside other documents. I see the NSET document as being owned by everyone, whoever you are—whether you are a local councillor, the First Minister or somebody who employs people in Scotland. It is a national document that gives us a northern light for the next 10 years.

Within that approach, we then publish more focused documents or strategies. The green industrial strategy was punchy and pointed. It was written for a potential investor audience rather than for all our other audiences, and it must sit alongside other documents.

I wonder whether somebody else wants to speak to the process or how the strategy evolved, because I was not involved.

My portfolio—perhaps uniquely in Government—is one of the few that can generate revenue. I agree that investing through the enterprise agencies and the Scottish National Investment Bank is a means of, first, generating more medium-term immediate returns and, secondly, supporting a growing and prosperous economy more generally.

I agree with the premise that there is a difference between supporting the enterprise agencies in their current form and giving them the capital for them to be able to invest in other organisations. In recent years, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Scottish National Investment Bank have made a number of extremely good investments that have delivered returns for them. Those returns are immediate but, more generally, they are a means of delivering overall prosperity.

I strongly believe in listening to stakeholders but also in basing policy decisions on evidence. The First Minister has said, and I repeat, that we cannot continually raise tax.

You have raised the issue of the differential, which is key in a devolved context. I point to the evidence. We know from the HMRC figures that there has been net immigration to Scotland of, on average, more than 4,000 every year since tax was devolved. The member will say that the figures do not cover this year, and he will be absolutely right—although, to be fair, he has been saying that the differential will have an impact for all the years for which we have evidence. The evidence matters.

I also point to the data that was released just yesterday on Scotland’s population: it is a matter of great encouragement that it rose faster in the year up to mid-2023 than at any time since the 1940s. National Records of Scotland said that the main driver of population growth over the period was people moving to Scotland from other parts of the UK and abroad, which, again, illustrates the fact that we have net inward migration.

We must balance all the many reasons why someone would choose to live in Scotland. Although tax clearly plays a role, people take much broader decisions in the round about the general cost of living, the resilience of our public services, the support from Government and other parts of the public sector, and the economic activity that is happening here. All those are reasons to celebrate the fact that people are choosing to move to the country.

Michelle Thomson is absolutely right to say that the wider UK environment is a big determinant of what happens in Scotland. We know that there are challenges with productivity, which are linked to private reinvestment and investment in innovation. We want to encourage as much of that investment as possible. That is a UK-wide challenge and a UK-wide trend. How we are perceived internationally has a massive bearing on that.

I know of a number of major corporations that have previously been active in the UK but which left a couple of years ago for various reasons. When we have engaged with those corporations, they have said that they are sympathetic to what the Scottish Government is trying to do, but, at the end of the day, we sit within the wider United Kingdom, which will have a bearing on what they can and cannot do.

What Rachel Reeves does with the budget in October will matter massively in terms of incentivising the reinvestment piece. How she will use the tax system to incentivise reinvestment and how she will ensure that the UK as a whole is considered to be open for business will matter. That will work either in favour of or against what we are trying to achieve.

The other big issue is labour shortages. Today, RBS said that hiring activity has surged and that job creation has reached its highest level since May 2023. That is positive if the workforce is there, but if there are constraints on the labour market, which we know there are, employers will continue to face staff shortages. In September, 24.7 per cent of firms reported experiencing a shortage of workers, although that is lower than the average rate over 2023, which was 33 per cent.

Those macro trends and issues clearly have an impact. There has been a lot of speculation about how Rachel Reeves might adjust debt and accounting rules to allow greater capital and infrastructure investment. I would welcome such a change and the flexibility that it would bring.

Financial transactions grew considerably under the previous Conservative Government. They were a very helpful resource for us in housing, as your neighbour on the committee, Willie Coffey, will know, and they were a means for us to significantly capitalise the Scottish National Investment Bank rapidly.

Financial transactions are a loan mechanism, as you say, so they are not capital; they must be returned to the Treasury at the right point, but they allowed us to extend the reach of our capital. Last year, they were cut—if memory serves—by over 60 per cent, which was a huge hit in one year. Taking on board that hit in one year was a mammoth task for all the housing programmes and the Scottish National Investment Bank programmes that were explicitly reliant on financial transactions. That required us to redivert capital from elsewhere to continue to support those programmes.

We do not know what Labour will do with financial transactions, and we do not know how it feels about financial transactions. It is clear that there will be more consequentials if the UK Government increases what it is doing on housing. At the end of the day, in order to capitalise the Scottish National Investment Bank we want to use capital, but there is a concern about rediverting capital from new schools, hospitals and roads to the Scottish National Investment Bank, so we will have to weigh that up.