Meeting of the Parliament 08 January 2014
It is not enough for the Government itself to pay the living wage and avoid zero-hours contracts. It cannot be right that employers working on a contract such as the Borders railway, which is fully funded by the Scottish taxpayer, use zero-hours contracts, or that universities—recipients of millions of pounds of Government funding—are among the worst offenders when it comes to those exploitative terms of employment.
On the other side of the employment equation, the Scottish Government is, as the cabinet secretary said, responsible for skills and training. There, too, we need to look behind the headlines. We have an apprenticeship programme of 25,000 places, all work based, which is good, but is the balance right? More than half of those are short term level 2 places. Meanwhile, industries such as engineering, construction and oil and gas continually complain that they do not have enough apprenticeship places. Behind the top-line number, we could and should be rebalancing the programme to match skills to jobs in those sectors with the greatest potential to grow our economy.
The Government motion, however, speaks to none of that. Rather, it rehearses the Scottish Government’s single transferable excuse, which is that it cannot do anything until we are independent. It even hints at the argument that the cabinet secretary made, which was that, somehow, there is no real purpose in investing in the major increases in childcare that will help women back to work, because their tax pounds will not come to us. Presumably, that is why the Government does not think that it is worth investing in our colleges either, because young people will only go out and get jobs and send their taxes down to the Treasury in London.