Meeting of the Parliament 11 December 2025
There were quite a lot of questions in there. I will try to deal with them all.
We are funding a skills intervention, delivered by Forth Valley College, to retrain and upskill workers who are directly impacted by the refinery closure that was announced by Petroineos. The intervention brings protected skills support investment from the Scottish and United Kingdom Governments of up to £2 million. The skills intervention has been extended to include shared services workers at Ineos Olefins and Polymers Europe, who, unfortunately, are also facing redundancy as a direct result of the cessation of refining at Grangemouth.
I am pleased to report that engagement in the process has been very high, with workers using the reskilling to secure employment in in-demand industries, including the renewables sector. More than 300 workers have already accessed the support so far.
We had an account from the principal of the college this morning, at the Grangemouth future industry board, in which we heard that 185 individuals have completed retraining and 49 are actively undergoing retraining. As a result of the monitoring that the college has in place on the final destinations of those who come through its training programmes, the principal was able to say that more than 80 of the applicants who responded about their final destination have secured employment. That does not account for the employment of those from Petroineos who have not undergone the training and who have gone straight into jobs following the redundancy that they faced at Petroineos.
It is not fair to say that the jobs from the projects that we have announced today will not materialise for five years. MiAlgae will start recruiting now, and I was told that the first modules of the plant will be open in April next year. [Interruption.] Sorry, Presiding Officer, but I am hearing noises off. As I said, the plant will be open in April, which is when they will start to produce omega-3.
As I set out, those are just the first two of many announcements that we will make as a result of the work that has been done through project willow and the task force that has been run and headed up by Scottish Enterprise. More than 140 bids have come in for project willow work, but they have been whittled down to the ones that are most likely to get to financial close.