Meeting of the Parliament 27 February 2025
I hear cries of delight at that from Mr Gibson, who is sitting behind me. Two weeks ago, Highlands and Islands Enterprise announced £5 million for the Scapa deep water quay project, and just this morning, SNIB announced an investment of £6.7 million for Subsea Micropiles, alongside £2.5 million from Japanese investor Marubeni, to develop technology that will unlock opportunities in floating offshore wind. Over the coming weeks, I expect that pace to pick up further still. The momentum is there, spurred on by this Government’s willingness to support investment, the clarity of our policy and our regulatory environment.
At this point, I want to emphasise the bank’s wider contribution. As Scotland’s impact investor, it plays a critical role, not just on offshore wind but right across the economy. To date, its investments of some £700 million have crowded in £1.4 billion from others, and support from our enterprise agencies for businesses and infrastructure is leveraging significant private sector investment. Alongside development of the pipeline, we are working to improve the way in which we engage with investors to deliver a more agile and seamless response to them, especially when they want to discuss specific opportunities.
To achieve that, we are reviewing roles and responsibilities across the public sector ecosystem, we have improved information sharing and co-ordination and we have established a new approach to relationship management. Within the Government, we have focused resources to co-ordinate activity across portfolios, to identify and tackle problems and to work across organisational boundaries to ensure that the system delivers more than the sum of its parts.
To make a difference, we need to understand investors’ needs and priorities. In recent months, I have been engaging personally with major investors with an interest in our priority areas, and that activity will continue to intensify. Next month, the First Minister and I, together with ministerial colleagues, are hosting a global offshore wind investment forum here in Edinburgh, bringing together 100 senior investors and developers to discuss specific opportunities and to further highlight what we have to offer.
Alongside having a strong pipeline and improving investor engagement, we need to ensure that we have at our disposal a full range of financing models and instruments that can be used to de-risk projects. Perhaps I can give just two examples: we are working with the bank and others to consider how public sector guarantees can best be used, and we are taking forward at pace the work on a Scottish bond.