Meeting of the Parliament 25 January 2024
I completely agree, but it is also important for them to apply technology to their work when they seek to do new things. We do not have enough of that and it is certainly not rigorous or comprehensive enough.
One critical point made in the Logan review is that there is still work to do on the capitalisation of, and investment in, tech. There have been some steps in the right direction, but there is still a big funding gap. We still have to get access to critical venture capital funds in other parts of the world, because that is where the money is.
The issue is not just about the tech sector itself. When I intervened, I touched on the idea that what is important is not just the application of technology but its penetration throughout our economy. I come from a small business environment and am critically aware of how poorly most small and medium-sized enterprises currently use technology. According to the business software company Sage, SMEs could double their output from around £200 billion to more than £400 billion if they were to use technology as effectively as companies in the upper quartile use it. That would be a huge boost. Likewise, the Open University recently reported that 79 per cent of SMEs are held back from applying technology because they simply do not have the finance, time or knowledge to implement it properly. We must focus on the penetration of technology not only in the tech sector itself but across the economy.
It is also critical to recognise that the economy is not only the private sector but is made up of the public and private sectors. We are a million miles away from where we should be in applying technological innovation and processes in our public sector. I thank Richard Lochhead for bringing this debate, but it is somewhat dismaying not to see the Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy here to present ideas and not to see any of the other cabinet secretaries who should be interested. We need technological innovation in health, agriculture, education and social security, and I would have thought that at least one of those individuals could have played a really useful role in this debate. [Interruption.]