Meeting of the Parliament 02 June 2015
Of course I acknowledge that, and I hope to come on to that point later.
The Scottish Government should encourage universities to work even more closely with business to ensure that students in tertiary education are taught not only about business interests but how to sell ideas as they go about developing businesses. The Government should increase access for business and employers to schools, from primary school onwards, to develop effective mentoring and wider knowledge of entrepreneurial skill sets. The results that are achieved should be measured.
We need to encourage and support initiatives such as Entrepreneurial-Spark, which reports impressive outcomes for its work, particularly the fact that 82.3 per cent of companies that have worked with it are still trading today.
The Government should make the most of EU-UK regional development funds to maximise their impact on the older industrial areas, and should encourage the use of regional selective assistance.
At primary school and onwards, the Government should promote students’ involvement in engineering and building apprenticeships. As Mr Robertson mentioned, university is not always the way forward in entrepreneurial development.
We need to commit to Erasmus, the EU initiative that is designed to involve Scottish young people in a wider European experience.
The Government should deliver a standard and simplified framework procurement process for all public authorities that is designed to focus not solely on value for money and the lowest price but on quality and community impacts, to encourage local business development and smart working.
The Government needs to redesign the planning environment to deliver timely responses to business needs while balancing the community interest. It should revisit the concept of city and town centres to address the evident decline that is affecting many of our town centres. We should engage with retailers and businesses so that they have a greater influence on future development plans, in relation to traffic management and parking conditions, for instance. The Government should commit to target-driven delivery of public wi-fi in our town centres and the fast-speed broadband that has been discussed in the chamber previously.
We need to encourage the development of crowdfunding initiatives across Scotland. Such initiatives are growing at twice the rate of any other businesses in Scotland, doubling year on year in the past three years.
The Government must deliver energy security, which is important to many of our main businesses, and reduce the unpredictability of policy outcomes. Business enjoys dependability and seeks to be able to plan in an environment in which it knows what will happen. Businesses complain about the obscure governmental language that is used to describe policy intentions.
The Government should also initiate substantial public projects that are designed to offer employment locally. It is better to build for future needs and employ our people than to pay unemployment benefits.
The Scottish Government should undertake substantial work to protect intellectual property rights for entrepreneurs whom we currently do not even know about but who will develop the ideas of the future—ideas that can be removed from their possession, with profits going elsewhere in the world.
There is much that the Government can do to enable the Federation of Small Businesses and the chambers of commerce to develop ideas for the future by tapping into their practical knowledge at the local level. It can also invest in training, education and the development of genuine entrepreneurial skills.
The Government should develop a commitment to manufacturing products in Scotland. In the past six months, as I have travelled the country speaking to people in business, I have been shocked by the number of machines that are used in our factories and in production that come—almost exclusively—from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Scotland led the way in developing machines in a previous industrial revolution. We have the skills to develop the same expertise for the future, and it is important that we should do so.
The Government should show its ability to listen to inconvenient messages from people who are engaged in entrepreneurial pursuits. Although I welcome the “Scotland CAN DO Action Framework” and will support the motion, I trust that the Government realises that it does not know everything that it should know. It needs to develop a listening ear and action what it hears.