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That remains one of our priorities. Without pre-announcing the 10-year strategy, I can say that a substantial focus of the strategy will be on Scotland as an entrepreneurial nation and on ensuring that there is the right kind of support for anybody in Scotland to start and to scale up a business so that a lot of our economic growth comes from new and emerging businesses.

If that is a focus in the 10-year economic strategy, it will be a focus for Scottish Enterprise, which continues to provide that support. Over the past few years, an infrastructure has also been built up whereby the private sector supports early-stage businesses, too. For example, Scottish EDGE and Tom Hunter’s foundation are providing support to help early-stage businesses and young companies to start.

Running alongside that, the Scottish National Investment Bank has a role to play, and I hope that it will have an expanding role to play in some of those early-stage businesses, because I see the SNIB’s responsibility as being to provide patient capital where it is too risky for the private sector to do that. I think that we have an obligation, in the public sector, to take on some of the risk that the private sector will not go near, but it is a difficult conversation to have in Parliament. What do we think of risk? How does the Opposition deem risk when it may lead to a loss of public sector funding? It might also lead to some of the most successful businesses that we have ever seen. Is the public sector willing to take that risk, and does Parliament think that it is right that the public sector takes that risk?

Telecommunications has always been a reserved matter, so what we are doing is over and above what the UK Government is doing. The R100 programme is getting infrastructure into non-commercial areas at a time when the UK Government’s gigabit programme, which tries to deliver a programme similar to R100, is still at its planning stage. We are already funding the full extension of full fibre in some of the hardest-to-reach communities anywhere in the UK. We are trying to work with the UK Government to secure a fair share of the £1.2 billion that it has announced through project gigabit to push that coverage even further. Where we can go further, we absolutely will do so.

To date, 1,592 connections have been delivered by the R100 central contract. There are 3,052 currently in build and 1,595 connections to be delivered by the R100 south contract. You specifically referred to the north contract. The build work has commenced as part of the R100 north contract. I am happy to provide the member with a breakdown of precisely what is intended for the north lot, the central lot and the south lot, although members should understand that, if we can increase the numbers, we will do so. I am in regular conversation with Openreach to see how much further we can push the numbers.

I will make three points. The first is that I am determined that the two vessels that are currently being constructed will be completed. There is a lot of discussion about the future of the yard but, if for just a moment I can separate the yard from the vessels, those vessels must be completed. That is one of the most important issues on my agenda.

Secondly, we are making progress on Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited’s procurement of new vessels with the announcement of the most recent two vessels. That pipeline, therefore, is starting.

My third point is that over £500 million has been committed to procuring additional vessels, particularly around the small vessels replacement programme, to bolster and boost the fleet. I know how challenging it is right now for island communities. You and I both represent some of those island communities; this, too, is an issue that I see regularly in my inbox.

Those are my three points reflecting on the fact that the ferries issue absolutely and urgently needs to be resolved.

Thank you.

The short answer is that those issues will be reflected in the budget, because they are some of the most pressing issues that businesses face and it will potentially hamper our economic recovery if we do not resolve them.

I will go through a number of the levers that we have. There are financial levers. Where businesses need financial support or investment in supply chains, there are things that we can consider. However, our budget is severely challenged and, clearly, resolving issues in one area requires budget to be taken from another area. The financial efforts are fairly limited when it comes to resolving supply chain or labour market shortages.

With regard to the labour market, I have already referred to the need to ensure that the right people have the right skills for the right jobs. There is a short-term imperative to help those who face redundancy or who have recently left work to reskill or retrain for new jobs, and we are doing that through the national transition training fund. In the longer term, looking ahead over the next five to 10 years, it is about making sure that our higher and further education institutions are set up to deliver the skills for the future. That is a longer-term measure that will not fix the immediate issue.

The next lever that we have is procurement. We need to incentivise the use of local supply chains so that we strengthen them and are less dependent on uncertain supply chains elsewhere. However, that has limited benefit, because we cannot avoid the fact that our supply chains are exposed to international fluctuations and challenges.

The last lever that we have is engagement with the UK Government, which I take very seriously. I recognise my responsibility to engage with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and with the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury. As you can imagine, over the past two weeks, I have had conversations and correspondence with the business secretary on the impact of rising energy costs, alongside Michael Matheson, and when there was a crisis or potential challenge in relation to CO2. We have been engaging with the UK Government, exchanging data on what is happening in Scotland and trying to help the UK Government to come to a resolution on the issues.

The biggest challenge for us in engaging with the UK Government is in trying to put in place solutions to the labour market shortage. The issues have been emerging since June or July. I had early conversations about labour market shortages when they were being raised by the tourism and hospitality industries back in June, so a solution has been a long time coming. The most recent announcement on a visa option for haulage is part of the solution, but most people would agree that it is too little, too late, and that haulage is not the only industry that is struggling with labour shortages.

My official Helena Gray is working alongside business to develop a 10-point plan for how we respond to the issues and where we have levers. I am sure that she would be happy to come in if the convener wishes, although I am conscious that you perhaps want to move on to other issues.

Can I come in on that, convener?

I have been raising the issue of measuring outcomes in discussion with all the enterprise agencies since I first took post. They have metrics of their impacts that they publish publicly, which I can share with the committee. Some performance in businesses is quite difficult to measure. We look at how many jobs have been created, for example, but that might not be the best metric for a small business that is just starting out.

We need to be careful with applying blanket metrics, because that might distort what businesses are trying to do to be successful. The point was brought out in Mark Logan’s report on developing the tech industry, in which he criticised the fact that we often look at job creation as a measure of success without realising that maybe the worst thing for a small entrepreneur to do at the outset is to try to create multiple jobs instead of growing first then creating the jobs.

I am happy to share more with the committee after this conversation and certainly share what—[Inaudible.]

Yes—that is right. I can share the metrics that the enterprise agencies already use.

The enterprise and skills strategic board has made a very strong start in trying to streamline what is available. Covid has complicated that work quite substantially, considering the number of new schemes and initiatives that were announced over the Covid period. The challenge in Government—and, I think, the challenge to the Opposition—is to identify what needs to stop when something new starts. It is easy to call for new things and it is easy to announce and implement new things. It is much more difficult to stop things, because you know that that will never be met with support or with a commendation.

The challenge after Covid will be to reflect on what has become even more complex for businesses to navigate, and to streamline that. Some of the Covid supports have come on stream and have then been turned off because they were no longer needed, but others are still available. There is an action there for the Government, working with the enterprise and skills strategic board, to try to streamline further, taking into account the complications that Covid has added.

Three things immediately spring to mind. I do not, in any way, dispute your characterisation of the need to do that—just to make that clear—and I think the need is doubly so after Covid.

First, small businesses do not care who is behind the portal; they just need one portal that they know they can go to in order to get help. It is our business in the public sector to ensure that they get the right help—that, if they input the question, they will be guided to the right people. Over the pandemic, we trialled the find business support portal, which you will probably be familiar with. I think that it needs to be something like that.

Secondly, it is about making sure that the support is as local and as regional as possible. You and I know how successful South of Scotland Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise are in providing localised regional support. However, there are other areas in which the support is not as localised or as regionalised. I had a conversation yesterday with Scottish Enterprise about how we can break it down so that individuals know precisely who to go to in their local area for support from SE if they are not getting support from HIE or South of Scotland Enterprise.

The third thing that we need to do is rationalise all the pots of funding that are available. I think that the enterprise and skills board was trying to count up all the different pots. I would like to see all that funding condensed into one pot so that, if a business needs support for anything related to, for example, export markets, it knows where to go. Similarly, if it is trying to get help with digital, it will know where to go and will not be trying to weigh up five or 10 different pots for digital—it will know there is one place to go.

Those are my three suggestions for things that need to be done, and we will actively move to implement them. I think that that work needs to done alongside the national strategy, though, so that our delivery is as simplified as our aims and objectives.