Seòmar agus comataidhean

I will have to choose between the two questions that I had shortlisted, but that is fine. I will ask about rural connectivity, which is an important area and one that is of particular relevance to Scotland. The report hones in on it in a whole section and particularly in paragraph 21, on coverage in urban areas versus rural areas.

On the back of what Geoff Huggins said, I appreciate that getting to the last couple of per cent of people is always the most difficult and often the most expensive as well, from a technical, physical and logistical point of view. However, I am aware of the Scottish and UK Government schemes and the work in the private sector. Lots of activity is taking place on things such as the broadband voucher scheme, the shared rural network and so on. Can you give me an update on the progress on that? When do you think you might hit 100 per cent to ensure that rural communities have access to 4G and broadband that is as good as the access that urban communities and cities have?

Others will ask about access to local services, particularly through local authorities, and some of the difficulties that people face. You have talked about Denmark, Singapore and other countries. Is anyone at any point a little bit embarrassed by the lack of progress in Scotland? Do you not feel that, as a nation, we should be leading the way and not chasing?

There might be some disparity in the figures. I am just quoting from the Auditor General’s report, which quotes directly from the Scottish Government’s figures. The Scottish household survey was last published on 23 December. I appreciate that another one is probably coming out soon, and it may show that that figure of 91 per cent has gone up; I hope that it does.

Notwithstanding that, having technical access is not the same as having the knowledge to use what you can access. It remains a fact that 15 per cent of our population lack basic foundation digital skills. The number of people who have the skills to use high-speed internet is disproportionate, relative to the number of people who can access high-speed internet. What work are you doing to benchmark that against other parts of the UK or countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development region of which we are a part?

Why do one in 10 households in Scotland still have no access to the internet?

You mentioned the six colleges that are experiencing significant financial difficulties. I appreciate that you do not want to name them because the situation might change as further audits come forward or analysis is done on their finances, but it sounds as though they are in a perilous financial position. What happens when a college simply runs out of cash as a public body?

So, one solution would be simply for the Government to give more cash to the sector.

You can only cut so far. There must come a point when you suddenly cannot pay your bills—when you cannot operate the buildings, pay your staff, buy anything or replace anything that is broken. If that was a business, it would go bankrupt and close. I am trying to understand what happens in a public sector environment. Would the Funding Council simply loan a college cash if it had no reserves? Could a college borrow money, or would it simply have to close altogether?

That message is loud and clear, and it has been widely reported as such off the back of your briefing. However, there is a false economy to trying to make ends meet on an annual basis simply to make your accounts fit for purpose. Redundancies come at a cost. We have talked about the educational, social and even moral impact of making redundancies, but there is also a financial cost. You are hoping that it will save money down the line, but it costs money up front to pay people off. It seems like a short-term fix to a longer-term problem. Is that a correct assertion?

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?