Chamber and committees

The distribution of funding to individual colleges is an operational matter for the Scottish Funding Council. I have therefore asked the Chief Executive to respond.

In light of the findings of the Audit Scotland report, the SFC is currently working with the sector to establish the up-to-date maintenance requirements of the colleges' estate.

This is a matter for individual colleges.

Our trade and investment strategy published in March this year set out a comprehensive action plan to boost Scotland’s export activity and to make it clear that Scotland is open for business, including with the rest of the UK. Scottish Development International currently has sufficient resource within the UK to deliver that. The opening of an innovation and investment hub in London will play a crucial role in promoting Scottish goods and services to existing and new customers and markets in London and beyond.

The Office of National Statistics estimate that in 2015 there were 11,500 companies in Scotland exporting goods or services.

Scotland’s Global Connections Survey and other survey and administrative sources provide the Scottish Government with information on companies in Scotland that export goods or services. However, specific company details and any data where it may be possible to identify an individual company is not published.

Our enterprise agency Scottish Development International (SDI) is continually working with Scottish companies to help them achieve their international growth ambitions. SDI has a network of 29 global offices and over 200 professionals on hand to help facilitate business opportunities for our companies in overseas markets.

The Strategic Forum fosters a culture of collaboration between our economic development and skills agencies. Economic strengths since the establishment of the Strategic Forum were recognised in the recent Enterprise and Skills Review report. However, to deliver the step change necessary to realise our ambitions for Scotland to become a top performing OECD nation a refreshed and enhanced approach is required, as requested by stakeholders within the Ministerial Review Group. The Enterprise and Skills Review report, arising from Phase I of the Review, sets out this framework.

The decisions reached by the review will further drive alignment by establishing a new statutory board to coordinate the activities of SE, HIE, SDS and SFC, improve the measurement of their impact on delivering outcomes, establish a new vehicle to focus on the specific enterprise support needs of the South of Scotland and protect HIE’s delivery of support in the Highlands and Islands. The review also made decisions to promote Scotland as an open and international economy, streamline the innovation landscape and undertake a review of the learning journey focused on sustained employment.

The Review builds on successes delivered by the Strategic Forum which has a remit to provide strategic leadership and set the direction of travel for public and private sector bodies. It explores the most significant, cross-cutting strategic issues and agrees how to respond. By establishing shared future priorities, the Strategic Forum has provided a platform to develop coherent, united leadership within member organisations and to wider Team Scotland partners with which individual bodies closely engage.

The co-chairs of the Strategic Forum, when its remit was last revised in 2014, were the Cabinet Secretary Finance, Employment and Sustainable Growth and the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning.

Core Membership includes the Chairs and Chief Executives of the main economic development and employment agencies: Scottish Enterprise; Highlands and Islands Enterprise; Scottish Funding Council; Skills Development Scotland; and VisitScotland. Scottish Government directors with lead responsibility for each of the agencies, along with the Chief Economist and Director General Energy, Enterprise and Digital are also members.

Ministerial membership of the Strategic Forum has evolved with portfolio responsibilities. It is co-chaired by Cabinet Secretaries with responsibility for the economy and for education. Membership has included the Cabinet Secretary with responsibility for infrastructure and the Minister with responsibility for enterprise or business. Depending on agenda topics, other ministers have attended individual meetings.

The Strategic Forum met 20 times between November 2007 and April 2015 to consider topics of strategic importance to the Scottish economy and to align actions in addressing these issues to deliver the maximum impact.

Topics covered at meetings of the Strategic Forum, many discussed at more than one meeting over this period, include:

• State of the economy

• Economic Strategy or Recovery Plan

• Key / growth sectors including tourism, oil & gas and food & drink.

• Innovation

• Leadership and ambition

• Skills

• Workforce / place development

• Higher Education contribution to growth / post-16 education reform

• Youth employment

• Internationalisation

• Digital economy

Minutes for meetings have been place in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICE) under 58315.

Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) use performance measures to help monitor the contribution they make in terms of their economic and social impact on the longer term goals of Scotland’s Economic Strategy. These performance measures are set out in their Operating Plan.

The 2016-19 Operating Plan can be found here:

http://www.hie.co.uk/about-hie/policies-and-publications/operating-plan.html

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-03752 on 10 November 2016. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx

The Scottish Government produces a National Statistics publication, Export Statistics Scotland, which estimates the nominal value of Scottish exports for calendar years. The latest data is for 2014. Estimates of Scottish international and rest of UK exports for 2011 to 2014 are shown in the following table.

Source: Export Statistics Scotland, 2014