Meeting of the Parliament 20 January 2026
In part, ministers will have a far greater ability to direct the strategy when more of the objectives and purposes are sitting under one roof. There is a need for greater ministerial direction, and some of the amendments that we have made to the bill should also aid that greater strategic alignment.
I will quote from paragraph 417 of the report by James Withers, where he says that
“there must be a clear articulation of the areas that are a national priority. This goes beyond signalling ‘economic transformation’ or ‘net zero’ into a specific articulation, aligned to strategic policy intentions, of the sectors and occupations that will be critical to their delivery and their workforce needs.”
In essence, he calls for fewer buzzwords and more clear strategic direction, and his point about net zero is one obvious example of that. We need far more people who are trained to install and maintain heat pumps, we must transition the existing workforce who deal with gas boilers, and we need to increase the workforce. However, during my party’s time in government, I saw how hard it was to get the system to line up behind that objective.
We are also trying to legislate for cultural change because part of the difficulty in getting the whole sector to line up behind that objective comes from the cultural differences between the organisations. Again, I think that will be part of the value of having everything sitting under one roof. It was clear in the Audit Scotland report in particular that the different cultures in the two organisations led to significant barriers to achieving the kind of alignment that Withers and Audit Scotland asked for and which I believe Parliament expects. That is one reason why we support the bill: bringing more parts of the system under one roof should reduce the risk of the sort of culture clash that we saw between the two organisations.
We wrestled with similar challenges during the progress of the Education (Scotland) Act 2025 and the need to replace the Scottish Qualifications Authority. Legislating to change culture is not easy, but we have made a number of amendments to the bill, particularly those dealing with the membership of the council and the apprenticeship committee. It is not perfect and there was a range of views, so we needed to compromise, but I think that we have established an underpinning structure that should allow for the kind of cohesive culture that will, in turn, create the alignment that we all expect to get from the system.
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