Chamber and committees

I will go back to publication of the plan for the current period, 2018 to 2023. An implementation plan was supposed to be published with it, but that has not happened, although your corporate plan resembles an implementation plan in some respects. Has the lack of an implementation plan stymied your ability to fulfil all the ambitions of the current national plan?

What struck me, in particular, from the latter part of Jim Whannel’s answer was the importance of the local authorities’ GLPs to the success of your ambitions. I presume that there is no synchronisation there, however—local authorities are setting them at different times in the cycle. How does that impact on what you are doing? You have a relatively standardised five-year rolling plan to develop. How does the fact that 32 local authorities are setting plans for different periods of time at different points in time impact on your ability to set a five-year national plan?

I am interested in the capital costs. There is a wee bit of a muddle. When I use that word, I do not mean to project any negative connotations on to the situation, but I am trying to get a little bit of clarity about how the capital costs worked out. Audit Scotland’s report points out that some local authorities ended up receiving less than what they had estimated the capital costs would be. That is not surprising, because it happens across a range of areas in which local authorities are funded by Government for a specific project. However, in other cases, local authorities ended up getting more than what they estimated the cost would be. Did the Government or the Scottish Futures Trust look into why there was such a disconnect between the local authority estimates and allocations?

Again, that would be interesting because, as much as I accept absolutely the difficulty in trying to disaggregate that data, we can all agree that there is probably going to be some additional cost in expansion to any additional group.

The absence of any additional capital allocation in that financial memorandum therefore raises a point of process that the committee is interested in when it comes to the effectiveness of such memorandums. Putting aside the actual numbers, has there been any review of the process to consider whether it was correct or whether it would have been more appropriate to allocate some additional capital funding in the second memorandum?

When it came to the eventual actual cost, which set of numbers ended up being more accurate: the allocations or the local authority estimates?

Thanks. That information would be interesting for the committee, if you can provide it.

The supplementary financial memorandum did not include any additional capital costs for the expansion to include eligible two-year-olds. Has there been any effort to look back by disaggregating the costs in order to allocate an estimated cost for the capital impact of the expansion to include two-year-olds?

It is not quite afternoon yet, and I promise that it will not be the afternoon by the time I finish these questions.

I am interested in continuing with Willie Rennie’s line of questioning and his reflection at the start about the difference in tone between how you are talking about your relationships with college management and what we heard last week from the trade unions. It is fair to say that the trade unions made it very clear in their evidence that there is a fundamental lack of trust between them and college management.

We have not heard from management yet, but it would be fair to say that that goes both ways. There seems to be more trust between you and management. I would be interested in any reflections that you have on that, but the first question that I have is about your relationship with the unions. You have said a lot about the ways in which you engage with college management. Do you have much regular contact with the lecturers union and with the support staff unions? Is that part of your week-to-week activities as student associations, or does that all sit quite separate from the work that you do?

It seems like there is an appetite for more engagement with unions. Has the barrier to that so far been one of capacity, because there are many demands on your times as student association officers, or is it the case that neither side has yet reached out to the other to make that a more structured and on-going relationship, which it perhaps could be? If it is the latter, it seems like an easy enough issue to solve. However, if the biggest barrier to your engaging with staff unions is a lack of capacity on one side or another, there is a bigger structural issue that we need to unpack there before we can fix that.

Thanks. That is all from me, convener.

If I could continue Willie Rennie’s theme of being provocative—I stress that I mean no offence by this—do you think that the fact that the student associations’ relationship with management also involves the funding that you receive from colleges has any bearing on the difference between the student associations’ and the unions’ relationships with management? Unions do not receive funding from college management; they receive membership dues. Do you ever feel that the financial relationship compromises your ability to be a bit tougher in that relationship and a bit more combative?