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Good morning, and welcome to the 15th meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Apologies have been received from the committee’s new member, Keith Brown, who attended our past couple of meetings as substitute. On behalf of the committee, I put on record our thanks to Kenneth Gibson for his hard work and the support that he has given to the committee in his role as convener over the past two years.

The first item on our agenda is to choose a new convener. Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as convener of the committee. I ask any member to make a nomination.

I want to push you a little bit on what you said earlier about innovation in our response to Covid. One issue related to the availability of methadone for people with drug and substance addictions. They could take it home rather than having to attend a chemist, and that became far more widespread. Part of my worry about that policy is its elasticity, because things have bounced back. Is there a reason why our system has pulled back from such innovations and is now saying that, in fact, we want to retreat back to the norm?

My final question is about your sense of those fundamental blockages. I agree with Alison Payne; I do not think that Scots are averse to reform and change. There is absolutely nothing in our national character or the way that we do things to suggest that; it is something in our politics and structures. Is there anything that is changing those blockages at the moment, or is there potential for change? You have talked about increasing demand, but is there something to give us some hope that there might be a change in the political and structural set-up?

Are there any other comments? On the timeframe, it is 12 years since the Christie report was published. What I am trying to get to is whether there is a character to our politics, our public services and the way in which we do things in Scotland that is stopping change.

We will do a little bit of shuffling, so that John can take the chair.

In the paper that you produced in 2020, you stated:

“what differentiates Scotland is the acute level of policy focus upon constitutional matters … leading to ‘policy distraction’”.

Can you unpack that a little for us? Is that just bandwidth, or is it something more structural?

You get what I am trying to push at, though, about the structural issues.

Professor Connolly is nodding at that point.

I pay tribute to my constituent Caroline Gordon, who joins us in the public gallery, for lodging the petition, which is now supported by many thousands of people, and for her continued determination to seek answers on this area from the Scottish Government. I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today.

For more than 600 years, our universities have educated some of Scotland’s best and brightest, from scientists and inventors to philosophers, authors and poets—the great people of Scotland who have lent so much to our history and progress as a nation. However, for many of our young people in Scotland today, the basic promise of a Scottish education has been broken. You work hard, you get the grades, you get in: that is the way that it should be for every Scot.

At First Minister’s question time on 12 January, I raised my constituent’s case, which is about a young man with outstanding grades to whom the doors of the University of Edinburgh were firmly shut. There were no grades that he could have achieved from five As to 50 As that could have prised those doors open. The policy of the Scottish Government has locked him out. Since then, my office has been inundated with emails and phone calls from parents and young people across the country sharing similar testimony, so I am clear that this is not a case of one university or one subject area. The sense of injustice is palpable.

My constituent and I are the strongest supporters of widening access to university in Scotland. The Parliament has seen marked progress in that area in recent years, but we have come from a very low base, whereby young Scottish people from the poorest backgrounds were far less likely to reach university than those from any other part of the UK. We should be clear that we are still well behind the rest of the UK in that, and that much progress still requires to be made.

The real issue of concern that is raised in the petition is the dysfunction of the business model that the Scottish Government imposes on our universities, which includes the cap on Scottish university students. It is combined with 14 years of no increase in the amount of money that is paid per student to our universities. The alternative route that is being taken by many young Scots is to seek a place at a university in England. Many will make a life outside Scotland, will marry and will flourish, and my constituent and many other families will be hundreds of miles from their grandchildren, which is a human element of the issue that we must consider. We can all identify with that.

More broadly, for our economy and the betterment of our society in Scotland, these are losses that Scotland can ill afford. At best, this is a case of the unintended consequences of policy, which I recognise. The issue deserves better scrutiny in Parliament in terms of what might be happening as a result of policy and that is not the Government’s stated intent. The committee could seek further information on that.

Perhaps I could be so bold as to suggest a couple of areas that might be of use to the committee in that regard. You might want to seek evidence from Universities Scotland and individual universities to ascertain the scale of the issue and find out whether certain universities or courses are particularly affected. That would perhaps allow the committee to develop a better understanding of the impact of the current policy on the number of young Scottish people who are being forced to leave Scotland to access higher education elsewhere and of the impact that that has on the country. Perhaps the committee might ask the Scottish Government what analysis it has undertaken of the consequences of the current policy for Scottish applicants in general. Importantly, I would hope that it would give an opportunity for the people who are impacted to have their voices heard in the Parliament.

Thank you for your time, convener, and for the consideration of the committee.

Deputy First Minister, you said that there are lessons to be learned in this area. Rather than speaking more about the specifics, will you say how you go about learning lessons? What have you changed or done differently, or what would you do differently, given the experience that you have just recounted in response to Michelle Thompson?