Seòmar agus comataidhean

Okay. Thank you.

I have a follow-on question from that. It is good to hear that there is collaboration among the various funding and business agencies. However, if there is partnership co-investment, how do you measure its success, both together and separately?

I just want a point to be clarified. Do you still invest under the enterprise investment scheme, and is there still no capital gains tax after three years? Is such investment still available?

I will leave it there, convener.

When we talk about Government and private investment in the green economy, one of the things that seems to be missing is how we invest in weaving the green economy into our educational environment before students get to tertiary education and college. How do we highlight the opportunities? We were hearing that engineers at Prestwick airport are paid £77,000, which is a pretty decent salary. That is long-term work, because electrical engineering will always be required. I do not think that we market that career well enough in our educational environment. As part of the investment in the green economy, are we considering how we invest in the educational environment to make sure that we have the right skill set?

I have one left.

I think that you are giving us the answers that we want to hear.

As a country, we have always prided ourselves on innovation. The fact is that some of the answers that are required have probably not been invented yet. I disagree with what one of my colleagues said about this: I do not think that anything needs to contract—we just have to decarbonise or encourage decarbonisation. That brings us back to the need to invest in education as a way of creating long-term solutions.

I am glad that you mentioned the risk to small and medium-sized companies. I visited a heating engineer company in Kilmarnock. It will take three or four years to train somebody. However, when that person graduates, there are much bigger engineering companies down the road at Prestwick airport that can just sook them in, so where is the incentive for that heating company to train that person?

There is also the issue of certainty in the marketplace. Those companies want to expand—that is the frustrating thing. This committee went to Prestwick airport, and every engineering company that we spoke to wants to expand, but they cannot get the engineering staff that would allow them to do so.

That leads me to my next question. Kevin Stewart alluded to creating the opportunity before you close down the previous opportunities, so that the highly skilled, transient oil and gas workforce does not end up on the scrap heap. The anecdotal evidence from a friend of mine in international recruitment is that people are being taken from Aberdeen and placed somewhere else in the oil and gas sector. How do we ensure that we create opportunity for them here prior to closing down that sector?

I want to dig a bit more into the preparedness of the Scottish labour market for the potential opportunities. I do not think that there is any doubt that every person in this room, from every party, wants to get to the same place—we just have different ways of getting there. My frustration lies with the fact that we know that there is a shortage of engineers across all sectors and that there is a shortage of tradespeople. With regard to the data, when the Scottish Government set the target of retrofitting a million homes with heat pumps by 2030, the construction industry said that it was 23,500 tradespeople short and that we would need them by 2028 in order to hit the 2030 target.

My point relates to the educational environment and there being no route map when the Government sets such targets. We know that we need 23,500 tradespeople and a certain number of engineers, but there is no process for setting out how that will be delivered in our FE sector, our education sector generally and in our retraining processes.

I am interested in your submission, Stuart. You talked about your operating plan and supporting the retention of young people in the region. You talked about the provision of tech places in education, and I know that the south of Scotland has exactly the same issue in trying to hold on to a younger workforce.

We have seen quite a bit of evidence around the fact that to develop major projects, there is a need for engineering and trade. The threat is that the big companies suck up all the technology, the tradespeople and the engineers, leaving a dearth for the SME supply chain. Is that a threat? Is that a problem? Are you supporting enough tech placements? We are not short of good educational facilities in either region, are we? Are you able to support enough of that to make sure that the targets required by the Scottish Government are hit and that we do not offshore that expertise?