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I suspect that I will be asked to.

Even if we come back with merely an estimate for you, we will look to do so.

Well, Mr Briggs, the budget process has concluded, and I have to say that I do not recall any of the other parties in that process asking for additional funding for the purpose that you have alluded to.

Those moneys were included in the budget in response to some of the challenges that the SFC identified. I also point out that those challenges are not unique to Scottish universities and that it is a UK-wide problem. We have seen issues in Wales and in England, some of which are more serious than those that are faced by the majority of our universities.

There is a challenge for our universities, particularly in relation to the recruitment of international students. We will work, through the SFC, with our institutions. It is a big issue but there is no magic bullet and, as you have alluded to, we are not going to be in a position to come up with an enhanced fund that will resolve the issues. I hate to use the expression, but some universities are effectively downsizing to match themselves to their income. In some cases, they are reverting to the position that they were in two or three years ago, before they expanded in response to an influx of students, particularly from Nigeria.

The issue of international student recruitment has largely, and rightly, been blamed on immigration policy, but the issue with Nigerian students was about much more than that and was caused by two deflations of the currency. My conversations with universities show that they are now far more circumspect about how they will grow in the future and that, although they hope for an uptick in international student numbers, they will be more careful about how they grow and about the projections that come from that.

I am not clear on that—I seem to remember that it might not. Again, we will write to you on that. I am being a bit vague, but that is because we have been completely focused on whether we can implement it in the first instance. We would then look at how we would do that.

When there is a giant bear trap in front of you, Mr Mason, you do not want to step on it. I am not going to go there on that wider question—I am underqualified to comment on it. My focus is on my element of the education portfolio. As I have outlined to the convener, I am frustrated about the impediments to doing what is, after all, the right thing. However, we are working very hard to identify the means that will allow us—I will not say to get round the problem—to deliver on what we want to deliver.

I am open to doing whatever Parliament asks us to do, although I point out that it is not for Governments to talk about individual institutions and so on. There may be other ways of doing it. It may be that the committee decides to invite the SFC in—and me along with it or separate from it—to further interrogate the issue. The point that I was making at my previous committee appearance was about governance as much as anything. If there is something in what happened at Dundee that tells us that the governance arrangements—both internally to universities and externally through SFC oversight—could be tightened up, we will certainly look at that.

Later this month, I will have a meeting with the chairs of all the universities in Scotland. I have no doubt that governance will be at the top of the agenda for that conversation. I am hoping that the chairs have some suggestions about what they think would work better. Whether that is in the formation or training of courts or whatever, I would be astonished if something did not come out of that meeting that made us aware of what is available to us. It is not about taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but if something has arisen at Dundee that would benefit the sector—for example, additional oversight powers or intervention powers on the part of the SFC—we are amenable to looking at that.

I am trying to give you an accurate answer, but things are moving at a considerable pace. I could say to you that the SFC is engaging with the University of Dundee on a daily basis, and has been doing so for quite some time. However, convener, I am conscious that, when we had our exchange at a previous meeting, I was saying, “Look—we need to wait for the recovery plan and react to it.” Effectively, I am still saying that. It has taken considerably longer than I think that all of us would have wanted to get to the point where there is a degree of clarity on the scale of the issue.

Universities may, of course, choose to do that. The point that I am making is that the SFC will make a judgment on the seriousness of the University of Dundee’s circumstances and whether there are measures that the university can take, as other universities have done. The University of Edinburgh and Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen are examples of universities that have taken steps to address the issues that they faced. The measures that RGU took, painful as they were, were designed not only to address an immediate problem but to put the university on a sound footing. It should be said that the financial planning of all universities has been undermined. The ENICs situation was a nasty surprise for them, and they are all having to find money to address that.

I do not know whether you raised that question with the SFC earlier. The money has been given, as we stated, for the purposes that we stated. I would envisage, given the seriousness of the situation at Dundee, that the overwhelming majority of the money would be utilised for that purpose, but the SFC will make a judgment call based on its assessment of the situation there and set against any other institutions that might identify as having issues.

I was quite struck by Mr Brown’s question last week—