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James Withers had a view about the lead role that enterprise agencies could take on some aspects of regional planning. I am not entirely convinced that it should be a one-size-fits-all approach. I have travelled round the country during the past six months, and I have seen instances in which other entities might be the best lead for that—perhaps the local college, for example. I am open minded as to what form that would take. That is what I referred to earlier when I said that there are elements of what James Withers has called for on which we have not made up our mind.

The committee will differentiate between workforce planning and skills planning, and it is important that we get that on the record, because an awful lot of what is talked about relates to a shortage of workforce and not to skills. We are going through an exercise, with ministerial colleagues, to plot what the skills shortages are and what form they take. If we are told, for example, that we are short of 4,000 engineers, my question is: what kind of engineers? We need to plot that and map it properly, and that needs to be done at pace.

We cannot simply do that and then ask what we can do about it; we want universities and colleges to be part of the conversation. The next question is: if those are the shortages, do we currently have the capacity to train the individuals who are required to meet those skills shortages, and, if we do not, how do we go about getting it? That is one of the immediate things that we are doing currently.

There will be geographical differences, and there will be hotspots—perhaps the member’s constituency is one of those—where there is a particular type of demand that is not the same in other parts of the country.

We are utilising the staff at Skills Development Scotland who have been involved in that work. There are not a lot of them, it has to be said—we will have to look at that—but there is some decent information that is helping to inform our thinking, and that is a particularly active workstream.

On the purpose and principles, we recognise some of the challenges. Language is important, as is the culture that surrounds all this and the appetite that there is for change. It is easy for people to respond to the Withers review and say that they agree with a lot of it and that we need change, but then, when it affects them, they are not so keen on it. To be fair, I have largely found that there is a positivity about the review and a recognition that it presents an opportunity and that, if we get it right, we can make a huge difference.

Of course, there is a bit of overlap among the agencies that have certain responsibilities currently, and that can be problematic. My job is to pull people into the room and to make sure that we overcome those overlaps. Some of the structural change that we are going to make will help to facilitate that, because we will consolidate responsibility in one place.

Perhaps one of the most important elements is the role of employers, because the employer voice, if it is constructive, will be critical. If employers tell us what they need and the role that they would like to play in ensuring that the change happens, as opposed to their simply demanding things, which is what we are seeing at the moment, we will have a real chance to facilitate the change.

I have a round table with employers coming up shortly. It is not just a talking shop; it will probably be a stocktake on how far we have come and what more we need to do. My approach is very much about trying to get the right people in the room at the same time and going back to having the universities and colleges in the room as we discuss what the skill shortages are. In that way, someone need not talk to universities and colleges separately; we can just get on and do it. That is the approach that we are taking. I am not going to pretend that it is simple and straightforward—it is not. It is a big challenge, but I think that the appetite is there now to seize this opportunity.

Universities and colleges have the opportunity to better align their offering with the needs of the economy, and they will get financial benefits from that. It will make them more sustainable. However, we need to be driven at all times by the need to improve opportunities for our young people and for those who are retraining and upskilling in the current workforce.

I certainly hope that I do. You mentioned ambiguity. The discrepancy is—rightly—between the interpretation of what was in the budget last year set against now. That is a valid set of figures. I am articulating the difference between what colleges will end up with in reality this year and where we will start off next year. Things might be slightly better than I have said that they will be, but we will have to see how that is worked through.

As you know well, Mr Rennie, the budget process is an open one, and there is an opportunity for other partners to pitch budget ideas. I am sure that the finance secretary would be happy to sit down with the Liberal Democrats, as previous finance secretaries have done, and hear their thoughts. That is not a challenge; it is just an observation.

In all seriousness, it is a very difficult situation financially. I absolutely get how important colleges are to us. With the difficulties and challenges that we face financially, we will do everything that we can to support our colleges.

As I said to Ruth Maguire, my intention is to accept the recommendation in the Withers report. I also hope that I was clear that that is with a view to expanding quite markedly the employers’ voice in the development of apprenticeships.

I make it clear that this is not about privatisation in any way, shape or form. I have found that, without much prompting from me, and sometimes with no prompting, employers recognise that they are asking for something more and that they are willing to contribute if they can get that support for their businesses. We should recognise that many employers contribute to the system quite markedly in a variety of ways, and not just financially. In the space where we may be looking for more short, sharp training courses and qualifications that allow employers to upskill their existing workforce, a large number of employers are saying, “We’re up for playing our part in that.” That will be useful, because the public purse is under great pressure, as we all know. It will be incredibly important to be able to tap into those additional funding streams, because everyone will benefit.

We are still in the foothills of some of this, but we need to strike a balance between sectoral skills planning and geographical skills planning. There is a difference between the two. The principal conduit that we envisage will be the SDS staff who are currently working on skills planning. To be fair, more preparatory work has been done on that than I thought had been done when we started to look at the matter. The issue has been more about the implementation. What do we do with that planning and the data that lies behind it?

We will have to engage more closely with individual sectors to ascertain their needs and then develop a model from that that works in each locality. One of the challenges in all of this is smaller businesses and what they need compared with, say, a major employer that wants to train 100 staff members in a particular direction. I am not going to say today that we are well progressed on all of that—we are still working through it—but we are alive to your point.

I have to confess that we have not considered that. I have enough on my plate without taking on more. However, I think that our universities will always be thinking about those things. They are pretty creative places and they realise that the challenges that they face will require them to develop new offerings. For example, graduate apprenticeships will come to the fore more and more. However, there will always be an emphasis on the arts and various other things in our universities. If they choose to offer combined degrees in those areas because they believe that there is a need for them, I am sure that they will do that.

I have come across a number of very rounded young people who have been developed under the modern apprenticeship scheme, not just in terms of the skills that they have learned, but in a wider sense. I visited an aerospace company in Ayrshire, and every single person who showed me round that day had come through the apprenticeship programme. They were amazing young people. The young women who were going into schools to try to entice girls into engineering were incredibly impressive. Those young people were developing skill sets as engineers, but also developing as individuals. I think that we should look to the apprenticeship programme to do a bit more of that.

However, it is important that the implementation of all of that is done in partnership. That is why we have tried—for example, with the establishment of the tripartite group with the colleges—to have a platform where we can discuss all that in detail. We can have overarching principles and a direction of travel, but delivering it will require the buy-in of the colleges and universities. We need their input because they will understand best how that can be put into practice.

We are trying to take a much better partnership approach so that we have the ability to say, “Wait a minute—if we did it this way, it would be more productive.” We are in the early days of that, but that is how we are going to take this forward.

There is a conversation to be had with employers about what form that takes: whether they might put money into the system or whether we need to do something to assist in that. I absolutely recognise that. I am being as open as I can, convener. The situation that we are in is not ideal, but I believe that there will be discussions on the offering that we talked about earlier, including on how it is delivered. It might be that we need to find a mechanism to provide that opening for some employers.

If you will bear with me, I have some detail on that, which I am trying to find in my papers.