Meeting of the Parliament 25 October 2023
If we want an illustration of the lack of leadership and urgency from the Government in facing up to and tackling the skills shortages that we face today, and which will become even more profound in the future, it comes from the treatment of Scotland’s colleges, as Willie Rennie highlighted.
A week never passes without local businesses telling me about the acute labour and skills shortages that they face. Those businesses are desperate to recruit, upskill their staff and take on apprentices. However, when I speak to my local college in Dumfries and Galloway, it tells me that its Skills Development Scotland apprenticeship contract for 2023-24 has been cut by 13 per cent. At a time of peak demand for apprenticeships, crucial areas for the local economy, such as construction and engineering, have waiting lists for apprenticeship places at that college. It is the economics of the madhouse.
It was bad enough that the budget that was agreed in February meant a real-terms cut of £51 million for colleges, which would have led to a 10 per cent reduction in activity levels at the college in Dumfries, but the decision to axe a further £26 million has meant brutal cuts in colleges, with courses axed not because of a lack of ambition from our colleges or a lack of demand from students or employers but because of a lack of priority on skills from the Government. Where is the SNP’s green fair work agenda when those cuts mean that colleges are now embarking on compulsory redundancies? Where is the fair work agenda when college staff are having to take industrial action to fight for a fair deal for last year, never mind for this year?
I have lost track of the number of times that ministers have stood up in this chamber and told us that there will be no strike action in the NHS because of their interventions or that their actions settled the teachers dispute, but when it comes to college pay, the perception of college staff is that Government ministers have been posted missing. I do not know whether the minister has been on a picket line and spoken to college workers; I have been on many. If he had been, he would know that none of them wants to be on strike.
The workers’ demands are not unreasonable; what is unreasonable is the real-terms pay cut that they have been offered, the funding of that inadequate pay offer on the back of sacking staff and the lack of intervention from the minister to broker a deal. That says all that you need to know about the lack of priority that the Government is giving to our colleges.
Our colleges are the powerhouse of our economy and skills at every single stage of the learning journey, whether that is in relation to new qualifications for school leavers or upskilling and retraining those who are already in the workplace. James Withers’s review of the skills delivery landscape described that role as absolutely “pivotal”, but it is being held back by Government cuts and by funding bodies that do not properly recognise the additional costs of delivering college courses in rural areas, where skills shortages are often most acute. The role is also being suffocated by the cluttered landscape in which it operates. When the Government eventually gets round to responding to the Withers report, I hope that it will heed the calls for stronger leadership and direction from the Government and—crucially—heed the recommendations that would see far more focus on our colleges as key anchor institutions that drive the skills agenda forward.
I will end on a final plea to the minister to take a more interventionist role in brokering the deal between college staff and colleges, so that they can get back to the job of delivering the figures that Willie Rennie highlighted, which strengthen Scotland’s economy.
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