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Over 10 years?

I am glad that you raised education. The Scottish Government famously made a commitment to distribute free digital devices such as laptops, tablets and so on to schoolchildren. Was that successful and 100 per cent delivered?

That is very helpful. Thank you.

I will maybe come back in later, convener.

To put that into context, what proportion is 70,000 of the amount that could or should have been distributed? It sounds a lot, but it could mean nothing.

Is that not reflective of the problem itself? I see some good work being done. You have talked about some of the technical connectivity that is going on. These are long-term projects—I remember talking about the R100 project nearly a decade ago, but that work has yet to be completed. The heavy lifting and much of the investment have been done by the private sector. There is limited intervention from Government in that respect.

Exhibit 2 in the report that we are discussing today talks about digital exclusion and people’s human rights. In fact, the overall report took a human rights-based approach; Audit Scotland made that clear early on in the report. That is a good angle to take, because people’s human rights are important.

The report identifies a number of specific human rights that could be affected by a lack of access to digital services. They include the rights to receive and impart information, the right to protection from discrimination, and the rights to access education, social security and so on. What analysis has been undertaken of the potential risk of the Scottish Government breaching human rights with respect to digital exclusion? Are there any live cases in the system that reflect such a breach?

I just want to summarise that. The situation is that the cash was frozen for three years and then there was a cash cut, which had an obvious effect on the day-to-day balance. Costs have increased, and there were pay awards and other general uplifts to their operating costs, so colleges clearly had to make cuts. It sounds to me as though the lion’s share of those cuts were made through staffing reductions, which leads to reductions in course choice, breadth and availability.

Has any analysis been undertaken of the wider economic effect of the reduction in the number of courses? If people are not being upskilled, reskilled and trained to the levels that they used to be, that will obviously have a negative effect on the wider economy. We surely cannot lose 500 teaching staff from the college sector and see no net effect on the level of education that the colleges provide in Scotland.

It is interesting. The college sector is quite different. Colleges obviously provide further education, but they also provide a large chunk of higher education—26 per cent of college education is higher education and 74 per cent is further education. However, the mode of attendance is different from the university sector. A large proportion of people who attend colleges are part-time students. That is reflected in, for example, the flexible workforce development fund, which is a Government intervention that sought to encourage small and medium-sized businesses to reskill and upscale their workforces. I understand that around 24,000 students participate in that programme, but that fund has been removed as well.

That all points towards a worrying picture. I certainly do not want to put words in the mouth of Audit Scotland, but I sense a frustration that the issue has been raised repeatedly over many years. We cannot just keep coming back to the committee year after year and have Audit Scotland tell us that there are real concerns about the liquidity of colleges, the level of education that they provide and the lack of strategic role that colleges play in Scotland. However, we check the Official Report and see that, year after year, that is exactly what the Auditor General tells us. Where do we go from here? What are Audit Scotland’s recommendations?

I will try to mop up a few different areas, so bear with me. I want to look ahead, off the back of the work that you have done to date.

I have one specific question, which I am not sure that you will have the answer to. You might be aware of a letter that was written yesterday to the Chancellor of the Exchequer by the Association of Colleges, which is an organisation south of the border that might or might not include Scottish colleges. The letter called on the chancellor to introduce an exemption from VAT for the college sector. Obviously, that is a reserved matter, but it is not alluded to in the work that you have done. My understanding is that around 3 per cent of college cash expenditure is paid in VAT. Obviously, that is a high-profile subject, given the changes to VAT in the independent school sector.

Is that something that you might look at? Would such an exemption be positive for colleges’ cash flow?