Seòmar agus comataidhean

I shall ask the lawyer for the technical definition of “due regard”—you are a lawyer. [Laughter.]

To my mind, it means that public bodies would have to take the guidance into account and ensure that they have addressed the issues that it contained. The point of having guidance is that it would force public bodies to go through the process of thinking about the issues, such as what they are doing, how they can contribute to the agenda, where their spend goes, and how they can maximise that spend in the right places.

The national performance framework includes a range of economic measures. You can look at what we are doing in relation to job creation and the value of those jobs. We already have procurement measures in place in existing legislation, and we measure and report on that annually. You can also measure business creation through the number of business start-ups in a community. A range of economic measures are already in place. GDP growth is one of those, but it is by no means the only measure. At a macro level, it will be very hard to know how much of an impact the bill has had, compared with the range of economic and other measures that are in place. At a local level, local authorities—they already do this—will look at what is important in their local economy. That may differ from economy to economy, depending on their priorities.

The first group would do that. The relevant bodies would work with the local authority to produce the plan—that would be colleges, health boards, Scottish Enterprise, enterprise agencies, Skills Development Scotland and the regional transport partnerships. That is the core group that would work with the local authority to produce the plan, and then the bodies in the wider group are the ones that must take it into account when they produce their corporate plans.

I suppose that that comes back to where we started the conversation about the purpose of the legislation. If the legislation flushes out such conversations in local authorities as they sit around the table with the relevant partners and put the plan together, it is clear that, depending on which part of the country they are in, there will be different solutions, given that credit unions and other organisations have different profiles. If the legislation flushes out those issues and the guidance says that credit unions should be considered, that points to the value of the legislation in enabling people to have such conversations.

The purpose of the way in which the bill has been designed, in enabling or requiring local authorities and local partners to sit down and pull together the local action plan, is to give a framework but also to allow scope for locality-specific issues to be pulled together. You will know much more about island groups than I do, but I am sure that, if you sat down with people from Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, they would have a lot of similar challenges but also a lot of different challenges. Having things at that local level is really important to flushing that out. From our perspective, it is about making sure that the legislation enables that and the guidance lists the things that should be considered, and how they should be considered, in order to enable that to happen.

Are you asking whether the Government is doing anything to enable credit unions to lend to organisations in the community?

If you look at the annual procurement report, you will see that 47 per cent of the total public sector spend—£16.5 billion—goes to SMEs. I made the point earlier that that is a significant number, although that does not mean that work is not happening to increase it further. Interestingly, the proportion of public spend that goes to SMEs is higher than the proportion of the economy that is represented by SMEs, so SMEs get a bigger proportion of spend from the public sector than they do from the private sector. That is an interesting thought to reflect on.

In local areas, the issue becomes one of definition. In Clackmannanshire, the scope for spending with local bodies within the council area is different from that in Glasgow, where there are a lot more businesses and, therefore, a lot more scope to spend with local bodies. The setting of targets at that level becomes an issue. Last week, the committee talked to the Federation of Small Businesses, which tends to focus on microbusinesses. Those are very different from what we would call medium-sized businesses, but both are in that SME range—a huge range of different businesses is caught by the SME categorisation. In setting targets, we would need to be very careful about what exactly we would measure and how we would compare like for like. As you said, the spend of a health board is very different from that of a council in terms of the scope that each has for spending locally. The best way to set such targets would probably involve considering that as part of a plan, in order to allow for local variations.

Absolutely. I think that some of that could be in the bill and some of it could be in guidance, depending on how we want to articulate it.

That is absolutely true. It is important to recognise that we are not starting from ground zero. There are a whole series of workstreams in the national strategy for economic transformation that seek to address the point about entrepreneurs starting businesses. There are a lot of great examples of community development trusts, including in my constituency, and a lot of work is being done at a Scotland-wide level through organisations to pull that knowledge together, share best practice and give the momentum and impetus to take that forward. There is a lot happening, but I recognise the points about capacity and our role in helping to support that where we can.

Capacity can be a challenge. Going back to the point that Willie Coffey made, I note that there will be good capacity by definition in areas where good progress is being made, but not in areas where it is not. How that is balanced is important. We are keen to work with partners in the broad sense to take that forward. However, I note again that the bill is not the only opportunity that we will have to address these issues.