 G wych am y cyfnod 25 yma yw'r cwypit 19 cyffredinion yn 2022. Gwbwn fawr i'r cyfeirio o ddechrau Gwbwll Ysgrifennidig mewn tinteunio'r security a'r cyrraithusedd ond ond ei d Cirthwyr yn gweithio. Mae wedi gweithio'r dweud wedi'i gwaith, Marrack Zymonac, gyflymwyr sydd yn gyfgelwch o'r cyfrwysg yng Nghymru uchydigon, B, Boilaw, Research Economist, Jonathan Cribb, Associate Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. David Fares, Executive Director of Regulatory Policy, Analysis and Advice, and from the Pensions Regulator, who joins us in person. Also, Dr Liz Cameron, CBE Director and Chief Executive of the Scottish Chamber of Commerce, who also joins us in person. Welcome. Thank you for giving us all your time this morning and also for all your written submissions. We estimate that this session will run up to about 20 past 10, and each member should have approximately 11 minutes each to speak to the panel and to ask their questions. But please just catch my eye if you have a question in the meantime. For the witnesses who are attending remotely this morning, if you'd like to respond to an issue that is being discussed, please type R in the chat box and we'll bring you in. I'm keen to ensure that everyone gets an opportunity to speak, and I apologise in advance therefore if time runs on too much, I may have to interrupt members or witnesses in the interests of brevity. I'll now turn to questions, but sorry. Just firstly, I just asked witnesses to introduce themselves. Can I start with David? I'm David Fares, Executive Director of Regulatory Policy, Analysis and Advice at the Pensions Regulator. Thank you. Liz Cameron. Thank you very much. Jonathan Crip. Hi, I'm Jonathan Crip. I'm an Associate Director of the Institute for Physical Studies, and I'm the head of our Retirement Savings and Aging Research. Thank you, Jonathan B. Sorry. B, could you hear me? Would you like to introduce yourself? I think there might be a technical issue there. Marek, can I bring you in? Hi, good morning. My name is Marek Zamanig. I am the Senior Public Policy Advisor for the PIPD. We are the Professional Body for HR and Development. Thank you. B, Bolo, can I just… Could you raise your hand if you can hear me? Okay, I think we've got a bit of a technical issue with one of the witnesses, but I'll just move on to questions if I may. I think… Because B can't hear at the moment if I could start with you, Jonathan, can you provide an idea of what the early retirement trends were prior to the pandemic? Has there been changes to trends previously following global shocks such as the 2008 global recession? Yeah, okay. So I think the broad picture prior to the pandemic was decades of people working longer into their 50s and 60s and fewer people retiring early. We know a little bit about why that was happening. There are generation on generation increases in women working in their 30s and 40s while they have dependent children, and those are feeding them into higher rates of employment in people's 50s and 60s as well. People also… Women also face a much higher state pension age now than they did 12 years ago. That's pushed up employment. For men, it's been a bit of recovery from huge declines in employment in people's 50s and 60s in the 1980s and the industrialisation, and that's recovered since the mid-1980s. This has all been on big upward trends. The 2008 recession was the biggest recession since the 1920s, but if you look at the employment of people in their 50s and 60s, you really didn't see it. That was quite robust, and that really is very different to the set of issues around this time. That being said, the great recession was all about really unemployment, whereas as we will all come on to this time, it's about economic connectivity and people not even searching for work being essentially out of the labour force entirely. Thanks, Jonathan. That's really interesting. One of the things that we've been considering as a committee brings me on to my next question. Do you think that this shift into early retirement will be sustained as we loom into perhaps another recession and the cost of living crisis that we've not experienced in over 40 years, that it may reverse the trend because maybe people won't be able to afford to retire? First, we don't know because we haven't experienced inflation like this in 40 years. The structure of the labour market of the economy full stop is very different to how it was back then, and people's health, for example, was very different to what it was back then. There's a good case to be made that the cost of living crisis will really affect the incomes of people in these age groups in their 50s and 60s. I think that that could well make people regret some people, regret their retirement decision because they have less money than they thought they would have. That being said, whether it actually leads to people going back into work is another matter because there are really very low rates of returning to work, particularly people in their early 60s, and it's not totally easy to do so. Okay, thank you very much. I think that we did have technical issues, but I think Bea Bolo, you are with us now and you can hear. Is that correct? Hi, yes, sorry, I can hear you now. Fantastic. Did you hear the previous questions that I was just asking to Jonathan? I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that. I think that Jonathan said everything that I would have said as well. That's great. Great that you're with us at the moment. If I can move on to Dr Liz Cameron from the Scottish Chamber of Commerce, do you think that the pandemic and the disruption to education has had an impact on the pipeline for the skills that employers need now or in the near future? A quick answer would be absolutely yes, it has, because we are seeing two different age groups here and two different talent pools, one being the very young people and one at the other end of the scale in the 60 plus age group, which we've just been discussing, but as far as the younger end of the market is concerned, we are seeing the students and younger people going into education because in some cases they do not see and identify any opportunities for them right now and there's a level of disillusionment as well. Now from a business point of view, we have to tackle that ourselves in terms of bringing in more young people and bringing them perhaps straight from school. I think that that's this element of training and beskilling and upskilling. There's messages going out that in some cases are driving young people away from the marketplace completely and we can't afford, because it really is going to be an absolute lost generation if we don't actually bring it back. I think that it is important that, although education, whether it be in further higher education, is absolutely important, but it's not the only choice that younger people have and we really would like to see more effort from us as a business community as well as Government and Government support and information to the young people because we are seeing now universities overloaded with young people, colleges overloaded, accommodation difficulties, we want them out into the industrial marketplace and we are doing everything we can in terms of changing our model and how we go about recruiting because the model of young people now, they are demanding flexible working, they are demanding opportunities in career progression, they are demanding training. So I think it's quite important that we actually focus on that group with some urgency. Yeah, absolutely. I do know just going from South Asia's point of view, I think 98 per cent of school leavers at the moment are going into positive destinations, but either being university or college or employment and it's just that joined up thinking between the colleges, the schools and the businesses as well. Is there anything that you think that we could be doing better, the Scottish Government, to help with that? Specifically for young people? Yes. I think it would be worth our while because we've got, you know, I think Scotland's very, very good in terms of our apprenticeship programmes, what we in fact are probably ahead of other parts of the United Kingdom in that respect, but I would like to see a stronger focus from the business community and more of a partnership approach with the Scottish Government so that this positive destination that you referred to in work, in employment, in training is absolutely a real opportunity and I don't think that that's highlighted sufficiently enough by Government and economic development agencies and educationalists because, you know, many, many individuals go in to do whether it's apprenticeships or whether it's a graduate recruitment internships, those are great opportunities where young people can come into the workplace and can learn real skills whilst continuing with their further and higher education. So I think that I'd like to see how are we investing in either that young person, where is the funding going and are we clear that, and I don't have the answers to any of this so I do apologise, but are we clear that we are getting real good value for money and not just putting colleges and universities under such a strain that there are young people that are missing that opportunity? So a little bit more, now whether, and I'm throwing this on the table, whether, you know, if I go back many, many decades, you know, businesses have had to change in the last two, three years remarkably, so they've been forced to in some cases, so therefore I'm seeing a return and it's a good healthy return to investing more in training and investing more in our people, whether that's at recruitment level or retention level. So is there something that more that we can do to encourage more businesses, particularly the small and medium-sized businesses, as we are heading into an absolute crisis that goes way beyond Covid now? Is there something from the taxation perspective or is there something that we should be looking at in terms of where are we investing? What will be a reduced pot from Governments? Are we investing in the right area? So this is a time, I think, to try different models, because we're not alone in Scotland globally there is a skills crisis, globally there is a labour market crisis, but in Scotland even before Covid we had Brexit and even before that we've got a labour market population issue. Thank you, that's really interesting. Could I bring in Marek? Did you want to add anything to that? Yes, thank you. I think Jonathan made a very good point when he was talking about early time and the cost of living crisis. There is, of course, a difference between trying to bring people who have retired early back into the labour markets and the other side of the coin is making sure that fewer people retire early in the first place. Recruitment and retention are, of course, two sides of the same coin. I think that it remains to be seen whether the cost of living crisis acts as a sort of push to try and push people back into the labour market. Traditional has been very difficult to bring people retired early back into the labour market, as Jonathan said, but I think that it's probably likely that it will act as a sort of break to try and discourage people from retiring a little bit earlier. But all points to the importance of the focus on retention and what employers can do to make sure that particularly all the workers have the support systems in place and their preference is catered to ensure that they can work for as long as they want to. That's all about flexibility, it's about skills development as well, and it's about health and wellbeing as well. We can explore those reasons as the session goes on. I'm just going to bring in Jim Fairlie. Thank you very much, convener. This is more for young people and their attitude to getting into the workplace. I'm looking at the CIPD figures here just now, and the question was asked, my job offers good opportunities for career progression and they were asked to agree or disagree with that. I find it astonishing that 16 to 17-year-old, 18 to 19-year-old, 20 to 24-year-old there's very few in that age category who see career opportunities developing and yet as you get up the older age scales you're in your 40s and 50s and 60s and even beyond the 60s and 65s where they see much greater progression. Why do young people feel as though there is no opportunity for them to progress? I'm not sure there's a straight answer to that question. I'm not avoiding that at all because I think it depends, in the business it depends on the young person and I did some work previously with career graduates coming into employment market and at that point in time they were quite clear that their skills were not being utilised by businesses sufficiently enough and that was causing them to be disappointed and wanting to move into other areas. I think that there's a responsibility for business here in terms of that career progression. We have got to where we can and some smaller businesses do not have a defined career progression path but there's others who do and I think that we have got to and I do think that we are changing quite substantially that view that career progression is about the individual and therefore when a young person comes let's say I'll take Scottish Chamber as a perfect example you know I don't have a straight career progression path I'm a small business employing eight people having said that we bring young people in because for them and for us their career progression is getting that skill set with SCC and then moving on to bigger and better things I think that attitudinal issue with many small businesses that needs to come up to the come up on the agenda a lot higher than it is just now because for young people coming in and not seeing that career progression you know we're not informing we're not communicating and we're not actually I think and I'm being critical of us I guess in this respect we need to do more to ensure that a career progression does not mean that you stick with the same company and utilise the opportunity in any business to gain that skill but that needs to be developed and we need to train and we need to support young people and I think that not just Covid but I say the labour market crisis in Scotland has forced and I'm using the word forced many many businesses to change completely their working practices which is good in some cases but there are many others especially in the corporate world who already have very effective very productive and really high class career progression roles so whether it's when something's in it 2024 they don't see it that's a nation that needs to be addressed but then the older age group you describe they are going through that career progression trail so it's a bit little bit also about potentially mentoring with the you know the other employees mentoring our younger people in employment in terms of this is what it could happen grand thank you I'll go back to convener because I jumped to jump the queue thank you just just one point before we I'll move on to alex rally I think it's we do get the data of the positive destinations of kids leaving school say at the age of 17 but I think it'd be really interesting if we had the data of where they were at the age of 25 so yeah just move on to alex rally okay thank you good morning could I begin by asking we we do put quite a bit off the emphasis on covid but to what extent has these issues been brewing over a much longer period of time um in terms of skills the failure to to deliver skills the failure to deliver lifelong learning last time I looked at the UK level there was something like seven million people lack basic numeracy and literacy skills so so those issues I mean we've made progress in scotland in terms of childcare and the big issue that doesn't seem to be in talked about much brexit so is it a combination a perfect storm with all these things coming and and and that these issues have been brewing for some time or can we legitimately say that the key factor here has been the pandemic could I maybe start by asking jonathan your thoughts on that so I got a bit there uh did this yeah sorry I had a technical technical issue there broke up can you just repeat the very last bit of the question well it's to what extent has these issues been allowed to brew over over many years specifically we don't seem to talk much about brexit but what is that impact certainly the government here in scotland talk about brexit in terms of they're just not the people to actually take the jobs up um poor skills poor education numeracy and literacy skills etc etc okay thank you i'm sorry okay brexit okay so brexit clearly is important for the economy as a whole in terms of the extra trade barriers with our nearest neighbors in terms of productivity and in terms of you know the ease of immigration and that's important for the supply side of the economy you know um in terms of the yeah there is some evidence that the you know the particular high levels of vacancies which is a real labour market problem um you know he's exacerbated by that um but in terms of kind of the employment and then people to kind of um in terms of employment rate i think it's a lot less important the ability to potentially find skilled jobs in companies that are investing then that could be more important um at you know and the extent of it's always been the case that that that the extent that we have the kind of hard of brexit that is going to make these things more difficult in a sense the way that that lower investment and less trade feeds through to real people is in a sense in the in the world of less good jobs with less progression and less um less pay but on the employment side i don't have much evidence that that's important i don't disagree with you that kind of um things on that skills you know has been under appreciated for many years although it's harder to know exactly what to do uh you know there's a lot of good talk about skills and it's it's much harder to i think pull levers um you know in government whether that be in the what what seems to arm to kind of resolve issues that what about the education system i mean we still have children going through a whole education system coming out the other end ill prepared for for a career in anything and numeracy and literacy rates still a major issue i mean is is the education system delivering for the world to work is it geared up to deliver for the world to work so i think that the key issue that we have in the UK as a whole compared to some other european countries um is less obvious route to good jobs and good careers for people who don't attend university in countries like and and and you know i think that is very slowly starting to change there have been expansions of kind of high quality apprenticeships but it's from a incredibly low base and an incredibly you know and so kind of rapid growth from an incredibly low base is still not many um but this is in comparison to places in particular like germany and switzerland which have very obvious routes to technical training on the job learning at young ages into really like highly skilled and productive industries and and that it you know people can and and do every day succeed without going to university but but but the routes are less clear um that the as they kind of made their own way uh through that transition from from school to labour market thank you marik would you like to comment on that is that the rest of me marik is that to me marik but i think yes please um just remember i'm focusing on the inactivity retired sorry marik just on the just just very quickly on the on the education system from another skills from this of course an employer dimension and there's a public policy dimension there as well we know that employer investment and skills and training has declined that being said we are in extremely tight labour market just now and one of the key responses of employers over the last few months has actually been to try and upskill their their employees so maybe we are seeing a sort of forced shift in that direction on the public policy front of course much of this is about the balance between vocational and academic education now the CIP published a report on overall qualification in scotland just last week which shows that the rates of graduates uh that are employed in sort of lower skill medium skilled roles is more than doubled over the last 30 years this just points to the importance of workplace learning apprenticeships and all of that is of course underpinned by careers guidance advice the review that's just been published has been very good it needs to be implemented very fast to make sure that young people understand wide range of routes that are actually available to them in scotland as somebody already mentioned apprenticeship system in scotland is actually very good it just we just need more of it okay thank you i mean you do say convener that concentrate on an activity and work but if you believe that skills and education are actually key to that then that's where i'm going with us um david can i maybe come to yourself in terms of of pensions and so we see the state age pension going up and up and up now my experience has been firstly that if you're in manual work and i think in one of these papers i read the the the numbers of people who are in who are less skilled leds educated are are those numbers are increasingly them being inactive but if you are in manual work and they keep putting the pension age up there comes a point where you're just physically struggling to do that i met the refuse collectors recently and they were on their ffifties and telling me just how difficult it was to go out and do a shift so so is there an issue there because again if we look at local government those in the higher grades on the higher salaries will have massive pension pots they actually leave generally quite young way a massive a massive handout at the same time but for low paid manual workers those options aren't available to them through the pension scheme i mean is there an issue there about about the different professions or manual work that leads to older people not being able to access big handouts but at the same time not physically able to work yeah i mean just in terms of the kind of most recent experience and the study that the ons did the people that are leaving the workforce and not choosing to come back in are as you say some of those wealthy people so something like 66 percent of them don't have mortgage 61 percent don't have debt so it is the sort of the wealthier typically male who is choosing to to exit where people are exiting that sort of 50 plus i think there are indications that those people would want to come back to work but may have mental well-being issues or on you know the number of those people on an HS waiting list is around 18 percent so i think for the 50 plus there are people who potentially want to come back to work but maybe for health reasons can't but you're right and i think to some degree that was behind the government's agenda on freedom and choice is allowing people to access their retirement savings more flexibly so that you know when freedom and choice was introduced the average pension pot was just under 30 000 pounds well if you try and convert 30 000 pounds into annuity it doesn't give you enough to to live on and do the weekly shop but if you could access that 30 000 pounds maybe two years earlier than the state pension age kicked in then you could take that you know in equal amounts and you may be able to leave sort of two years early now the reality is and maybe jonathan knows maybe able to speak to this better than i can pre-freedom and choice what you saw is in the run-up to state retirement age that people were leaving the workforce due to disability illness and and so on and you know bad backs and those sort of things so the people who had very heavy manual jobs potentially were leaving the employment and claiming disability what freedom and choice it was allowed them to access their savings more flexibly and and maybe have that decision okay jonathan i think you wanted to come in on that yeah i think two things one is we basically know that the higher state pension age particularly for women which has risen by six years in in a very very very very six years in a decade you know leaves women of those ages with considerably less support than they you know had before the working age benefit system has been back the the pensions and state pension system has been made more generous for those who get it and this big divide and and you know if you talk about the types of workers and and and struggling financially or with work at that point i think there's a very good case to be made that the support for people in the run-up to state pension age needs to be looked at again even if there is a good case of the state pension age being you know elevated as given you know extra longevity in the population at least compared to you know 20 30 years ago in terms of pension freedoms you know i think it's a good case that you know the pension freedoms allows people to be to do things more flexibly to take small you know to take bits out of their pension to spend it flexibly and it almost allows people to have a kind of portfolio of of of income you know you know and particularly when you got a spouse maybe one's working a bit one's not one's drawing a bit of pension maybe they have some benefits of the disability personal independence payment for example you know all of these things can combine together i don't think we have great evidence that pensioners per se is causing a change in employment at these ages but it might be facilitating people's decision okay thank you and finally can i just quickly lads can i ask you a number of years ago i looked at um i think it was germany involved or forward so they had their academy um they had an academy for cleaners everybody in the workforce was valued no matter what they did but then the academy run it in the whole supply chain and so you had SMEs and others off feeding in being able to scale up and whatever i mean do we need to think a bit more radical here do we need to look at these best practices across Europe and start to engage with employers more so that no matter where you are in the workforce you're going to get continual lifelong lemon skills etc is there any that going on and is that where we need to be moving first of all i'll answer your question can i go back to a moment just to the brexit question that you asked um because your question was i was waiting in somebody asking it because scotland had a big issue way before Covid and indeed way before brexit we had a massive problem with there was just not enough people here and we weren't attracting talent in and there was been there's been lots of good ideas came out of the Government then new talent programmes to bring people in and and it worked in some cases particularly in some sectors and we also had but when brexit came along we we would have even before brexit we were already experiencing skill shortage areas and not going enough people particularly in the sectors like um and you'll know the ones i'm going to talk about pre brexit it was a tourist agricultural hospitality food and drink those ones that are in a lot of cases very manual focus manual skills some people didn't want to work in these in in in these sectors so we were having massive problems so the influx of labour from all parts of europe actually helped scotland in helped us dramatically and then brexit came along and then all of a sudden we were back to square one again um so i think that lessons learned from that because Covid has an impact on attitudes on health and crisis but we can't just you know say it was as a result of Covid because it wasn't so i think that forward planning is and i wrote that down when you asked that question that forward planning because yes um there's some elements of some private sector groups already grouped together and formed their own academies and they've been very successful um because what they're doing is let's employ let's retrain let's up skill because the skills match of individuals that are perhaps doing you're talking about manual tasks um perhaps doing manual tasks and perhaps being forced out of the marketplace because those jobs were disappearing or it might have been through health but that's changed because the business models changed technologies changed but what we've got to be smart at and that is taking these individuals because they're valuable and looking at how we can actually look at retraining them now if i'm sitting here at 66 they're doing like retraining do i want it do i really want to retrain our model we'll just take my pension um there's a lot of people that would want to watch a language here but i think that for both ends of the marketplace and labour this issue about private sector pulling together and sharing in fact it reminds me of way back many decades ago when sectors used to do that and business used to do it they trained and paid for their training yes they got support from government um but these academies focused on the jobs of today and more important the jobs of tomorrow because had we done that 10 years ago we probably would not have had the size and the gaps that exist right now on some skill shortage areas you know and so i think that that model and that focus and i can't remember who said it earlier that focus on looking at investing in more vocational type training and investing on intelligent information not just to the young people but to their parents and carers etc because you know it's fine for us to come out to know yeah there's going to be you know 10 000 green jobs what does that look like what does a green job look like and it's that interpretation is important and let's get you know working with our educationalists in the colleges and the universities but let's start looking at getting private sector to do to more leading in that regard working with our public partners but absolutely focused so that any individual whether they're perhaps didn't do so well at school they've still got talents and in some cases it might be that we create that environment for them to really flourish so i think this changing of models we talk about let's be innovative let's just go and do it because trying to work around an environment and an infrastructure that possibly needs to change faster then it's sometimes able to do so then you know can we try new things and you know what if they fail so what we'll know very quickly and let's go try something else that's how that this scotland is going to be innovative if we're actually all together saying let's change the how or let's innovate a little bit better and i know it's hard because you got public institutions you've got thousands of people when you can't just let's change the direction of the ship overnight but i think it's an element of let's build on some new stuff that's going on thank you thank you Brian please thank you good morning fan i'm gonna i'm gonna continue on that theme thank you for being on that in Elizabeth one of my my my things i think we should be doing we've got this green economy this huge opportunity within the green economy and my view is we're not weaving the green economy into our education system nearly fast enough we have i'm just just last week i was in cormorant college who have apprenticeship places available i was in some engineering works who are sort of apprentices and i come my region is is a place where there's higher levels of unemployment so in my view we've got all the all the bits and bobs there but as i don't think we're connecting all the all the elements of that up and actually we have a huge opportunity here i think in the green economy but but as to your to your point Liz we're not doing that well enough due i've taken that something you would you would agree with i would and please don't misunderstand me because there's a lot of great people doing some great things in our schools i did see it no there are and i think that the government's programme and the development of scotland's young workforce and the recent career service review that's beginning to open up the canising okay let's look at what we have invested in because you've got developed young scotland young workforce all across scotland led by in some cases private sector only led by public sector in some cases led by partnerships um the whole purpose of that partnership was to do just what you're talking about get right into the system get right into where the young people are helping them and their peers etc to make this word informed choices but we're not getting deep enough into the system um now whether that's because i've got a curriculum that's overloaded and can't get in i don't know but it needs to it needs to be revisited in terms of this you know that information and and i know i can hear people saying but that would require further investment budget cuts etc etc and that's where i think we just need to be you know let's look at what we can do because there's no doubt in my mind that that intelligence um if it's going in it's patchy and if it's going in it's not going in in a way that's helping our teachers that's helping our lecturers um to enable them to be able to bring people into that system that can help work with our young people um at a really early age to help them and advise them as much as possible because if we continue with this let's have you know sector groups let's have um we've got sector programmes we've got we've got skills audits the information is there but it's perhaps not either getting through our systems or it's not communicating a way that quite frankly we can actually you know even i'm sitting here thinking where the green job looked like and i should know um you know so i think that's important that we are looking ahead um because scotland is seen you know internationally we are seen as experts in renewable energy we are in many many cases um so we know that's a growth area we know where the growth is coming from so let's get in and actually the academies will help on the immediate short term by taking groups and just putting them through and getting them to come out with qualifications skills it's going to give them a better quality of life at the end of the day that you know that um they're going to be able to afford um to to buy things to to feed their families etc we talk about we need to upskill scotland's population we need to be clear what we're upskilling them to do um so you're you're right you know we should not be sitting here with you know apprenticeship vacancies in something like engineering um you know and we're and as we're sitting here with other countries looking into us saying we we would like to buy your talent and i mean we're not going out there saying well we don't have all of the talent we really need but we've got some good talent here but let's grow our own and grow it quickly no and i think that that's another thing about universities can we grow it quick enough that's that vocational training that's saying okay we're going to do a quick six month nine month year and then that continual um qualification will come we need people in the market please as quickly as possible thank you i know be wants to come in on this and just to sort of add another layer on to that i was just wondering whether we we are marketing potential careers to our young people properly and and giving them the vision of of where they should be or where they could go to um because i think if you you can't do it if you can't see it you know for one of a cliche i wonder what your thoughts are on that be i think um what i wanted to do if that's okay was just to kind of pick up on some of the stuff that's been said about about skills and education and just well there's obviously lots to say about the importance of skills and education i thought it was maybe worth highlighting that when we look at what's driving the rise in activity in particular we don't actually find that the majority of the rising is being driven by people without degrees we don't find huge differences in the rise in an activity between people with and without degrees or between people in professional and non-professional jobs before they move into an activity so just well i think skills are obviously really important things for for Scotland to be focusing on in general it's not entirely clear to me based on the work that we've done on in activity but i focus on skills alone would fix what we see in the labour market right now and i think i'd also want to kind of highlight that so much of this does seem to be driven by moves among all the people in particular thank you i'm glad you've taken us into the to the older market because i think we're in a situation just now where covid has accelerated this this gap between life expectancy and the age in which we're leaving the workforce and that that seems to be that seems to be a growing gap when covid has exacerbated that i wonder if i could bring marik in here and ask him are we again with with those who are leaving the work in the workplace early or potential leaving the workplace early are we giving them the encouragement experience and opportunity to develop and remain within the workforce in a manner which suits them well i think i think this is the crux of the issue actually this is exactly what the piece of work that i did around all the workers was aimed at trying to do it was trying to explain to employers that are certain things that they can do that might encourage all the workers to stay in work a bit longer now at the heart of that is flexibility we know that all the workers are much more likely to work part-time self-employment as well as part of that but also have high rates of home working for example so there is a clear preference there for flexibility but if you look at the statistics about 14 of those over 50 say they would like to work reduced hours even if it meant pay cut so that's a very clear that's a very clear unmet demand there that employers could try and accommodate by for example splitting job roles between two etc etc the other the other thing there and we mentioned this time and again here is skills and career progression opportunities i think it's very important employers don't come to making assumptions just because somebody is over 50 or even over 60 that they won't be interested in development of skills on this particular course etc etc now again a very tight labour market has now forced to a certain degree employers to rethink some of these things and consider their retention strategies and consider their recruitment strategies expand their solution sort of a labour labour pool as well so that skills and careers and then the last bit of course is is health and well-being because without saying that the older you go up the up the age range the more likely you have certain health conditions long-term conditions or disabilities employers have a key role to play there in order to accommodate these conditions. I wanted to just ask Liz around it's not just around the lack of people or bodies in the ground it's actually if the retiring earlier were draining our resources and draining our experience so Covid has exacerbated that and that's something that we really need to tackle immediately. I think it has Brian because it might use the word again I think about forcing employers to look at changing we've not just changed our working models I mean I don't know any business that has come through Covid and not changed the way we work how we work and more importantly how we look after our people. I mean there are certain businesses that are restricted and they cannot bring in as flexible working as a lot of us would have a strong desire to introduce but there's also a great majority of businesses that have had to change because of the experience of Covid but we've actually been forced to introduce technology that we didn't know existed before we've been forced to trial homeworking that we thought wouldn't have worked and you know what it did work because it actually worked in a lot of cases from a productivity point of view it also gave us our employees were actually more satisfied because we took some stress away whether they were carers whether they were looking after children whether they had to do childcare modelling so that this flexible modelling that's not going to reverse if anything I can actually see that I know there's some statistics that are saying it's going to reverse and we're going to go back to the workplace some may do that but we've got to remember that some employees some people actually enjoy going into that workplace they get that interaction they are still productive so I think that that balance that balanced model is going to be here and it's going to be remaining because we I keep saying it we can't afford to go back the way any longer the model of flexible working I mean even when I was in Japan the amount of businesses in Japan flexible working just it's a natural model I actually believe that we're going to be forced to even become even more flexible to retain the people we've got and to get the talent that we need in this country thank you can I move to John Mason please thanks convener yes I mean maybe to if I can just pursue that with Dr Cameron is there a big difference here between large employers and small employers because it strikes me that some of the things we've had from the other witnesses it you know sharing a job all of that kind of thing training reskilling while you're in employment that will work for a big employer but is that a problem for small employers you're right in that regard there is a distinction because we're talking about even career progression you know that the corporate Scotland if you like bigger better more resource not better bigger more resources to invest in more more resources to be able to you know introduce those those types of policies so absolutely it is easier for large businesses in Scotland to be able to do what we've just been talking about having said that not all large businesses can do it depends on the sector and it depends on their use of technology and we know women obviously financial sector that's the obvious one and a number of other services they do it and doing it well for many small businesses it's not possible and the big challenge for small businesses then is how do they compete in a marketplace because the talent is liquid now it goes wherever it likes quite frankly because of the opportunities that are there so i think that for small businesses yes it is more of a problem because you know they've got four people five people ten people they can't afford for some people i'm going to i'm going to work a three-day week or i've got it doesn't fit but having said that i do think that we can do more to help smaller businesses to look at how they can perhaps change some of their business modelling through business support and how we can in some cases it won't work and i think there'd be a reality check that in some small businesses all the flexibility that we all have a desire to to give to our employees it's not possible so i think there's a reality check there but there's also a check that says there are a number of smaller businesses that perhaps don't fully understand how to introduce flexible working and what they need to have in place to be able to do that you know you'll get a business saying well oh my you know ex working from home how am i going to evaluate whether they're working how am i going to monitor it now in today's society we like to think that we've got trust and integrity and values but there's individuals that will we've got to look at that closely so i think there's an element of what support and help and advice and whether that's in a group scenario you're talking about your academy training that's a group scenario small business that we can help them put in place different different processes to enable them to be able to do this okay that they won't all do it i will come to the other witnesses but just to you've raised various ideas in my mind but because another part of this would be support for people who maybe whose health isn't so good and that could be long covet or it could be other things so is that also an issue that you know i mean i would have thought employers should be providing more support in order to keep people in the workplace but i connect if you've only got four or five employee employees you know how can you give them health support is there an issue in there i think there is because you know many businesses obviously operate now with private health care and we did a recent survey on what you know future employees are looking for and the list was health cares up there in you know in the top three that then raised an issue is the is the health services whether it's private or whether it's national health service do they have the capacity to to deal with the high demand and the answer is no right now and we're seeing that whether it's dentistry or whether it's in care service or whatever so i think it's an issue there about that reach out even when businesses do introduce it and say okay i'll provide healthcare up to a value of whatever you can go and see a consultant you can go to a dentist whatever the services are not there which is maybe not for this committee but it is an issue but in actual fact i did another we didn't ask in one of our surveys and this was interesting 78 percent of the scottish of the of the participants actually stated that mental health and support for other health conditions should be a joint responsibility between business and governments now that was interesting for me because um that what is that joint responsibility look like we've been we need to dig a bit deeper into that but i think that's a recognition that every business in respect of size we do have a responsibility to support our employees okay and we've got to look at ways in which the best way we can do that and it's affordable for us to do it okay well i want to hear from some of the other witnesses as well so maybe mr cribs first and then i was going to come to mr samannick mr cribs hi i just want to pick up on the flexibility point um and and how flexibility can encourage people to stay and work you know there's particularly if i think about the kind of say 50 plus population i think there's a there is a particular finding that uh full time in the 50s and 60s are particularly likely to be dissatisfied with that they don't necessarily want to work as as many hours as they are doing so and you know to the extent that it's a full time or nothing for some people that can discourage people that can encourage people to leave work and that's you know not good but uh you know have a more flexible part time role um that being said you know flexibility in terms of um encouraging people to stay and work i'll stay with those employees isn't totally kind of costless that's because if you if you have a lot of flexibility particularly on work location there are some there are kind of differences between people some people some people really want to be in a busy office or workplace that provides a great deal of socialisation and friendly friendship for uh some people you know we have some evidence that at older ages that there is some there is at least among a part of the population a kind of discouragement about the quality of work life because because there's relatively few because because working at home doesn't provide the degree of socialisation that kind of everybody in the workplace most of the time uh provides and you know there are similar issues on the kind of younger generation in terms of the amount of training uh informal or formal that they get uh working you know working flexibly um where that means kind of working at home as opposed to in the workplace and when we're talking about flexibility do you see a difference between large employers and small employers in in that area i'll be honest i i'll be honest i don't i don't know on that okay well maybe that's a good one if i could come to a mr zamanic a in your area do you see differences between large and small employers i think there are big differences between what large employers and small employers can can offer and i think that applies to flexibility and applies to uh applies to health and wellbeing support that you that you mentioned earlier as well i mean we know from we know from research that uh large employers are much more likely to provide things like occupational health or wellbeing strategies in place but also dr Cameron mentioned in terms of flexibility very often small businesses simply do not know how to navigate the system and that that that can be that can be a challenge and that's where government and its agencies can actually play a role if i can make one point on the on the whole flexibility issue it's very important that we don't succumb to the temptation to equate flexible working with homeworking there's many many other forms of flexible working out there actually if you ask employees what form of flexible working they would prefer flexi time is the one that always comes up on top so that's using when to start and finish your day compressed hours of course are part of that as well job sharing reduced hours etc etc there's not just about homeworking approximately 31% of jobs in scotland cannot be done from home so it's very important we focus on the other type as well okay thanks that's helpful if i could move on to pensions maybe with mr fares i mean you seem to be quite positive that somebody even with a small pension pot could take some of it and that gives them a bit of flexibility as to what they do in their kind of probably later working life i mean i think the tuc have all have said on the counter that you know that is just leading to people being in poverty once they're retired and i mean i just wonder are people in their 50s and 60s getting the advice they need and also how does that compare to other countries have we got more flexibility in this area than other countries have so just in terms of the way other countries have tackled the covid pandemic some some countries have allowed early access to retirement savings so in australia you could take $10,000 out in the first year of of covid and $10,000 in the second and and getting on for two and a half million people did that so something like three and a half billion australian dollars has been taken out of the retirement system when you drill down to people who took that money out in fall in both years it tends to be younger people and they have wiped out their retirement savings so actually australia has a different challenge in that it now has a cadre of people who have made a significant impact on their retirement world because of of taking money out the us did something very similar he allowed you to take money out of the pension scheme it removes some of the tax charges that would have applied but in the us they're now very worried that actually because people don't have financial resilience they have dipped into their retirement savings and that will impoverish them in later life and the us is now thinking about how it can build financial resilience for people in in the united states and they may look to something like automatic enrollment but in a saving sense to do that in in the uk we didn't see during the pandemic people opting out of automatic enrollment we did expect to see it but actually we didn't it has gone up very recently the numbers from dwp at first of october show that the percentage of people opting out has gone up from 7.6 percent to 10.4 so we didn't see that in the pandemic we are now beginning to see it if you look at people cashing out their dc pots throughout the pandemic then it went up in the first year of pandemic it actually then fell in the second year of pandemic and it has now increased in the last year so there is something that people seem to be under greater financial pressure now than they perhaps were during the pandemic but in total the amount of money that's been taken out from dc pots has only gone up by 5 so there doesn't seem to be a huge strain on pensions because of people dipping into pensions now clearly it will it will be very variable at an individual level there are some people who very clearly have real challenges right now and may have no other choice but to dip into their retirement savings because you know if you've got to feed your children or meet bills then you've got to look to that access but we are concerned you're absolutely right we're concerned on two fronts one is that people can be subject to scams and scammers are very alert to some of the pressures that people are under and so we are promoting we issue just recently a joint statement with the fca maps urging people that if they are accessing retirement savings to look at the signs of scams and be aware that they're vulnerable so there's that element but you're absolutely right people tend to underestimate how much they need in terms of retirement savings and for people that are dipping into their retirement savings you know in their mid 50s as soon as they have access potentially they may not understand what that means in the longer term and you know for the people that are dipping into their savings they in the sense of kind of made their mind that they want access to the money and they just see getting getting independent support from the money and pension service through money helper as a barrier to getting their money so we don't see as many people as we would like actually accessing the free services that are available okay i'll leave it at that thanks we seem to have strayed a wee bit off topic through the course of this conversation but it's been really interesting however i'm going to bring it back to economic inactivity in the older age group and something that hasn't been touched on by anyone and i may be completely left field here but has there been any consideration given by anyone to menopausal women dropping out because there's not enough support in the workplace for menopausal women and that's an open question to anybody who wants to stick their hand up if there's no answer that's fine i'll move on Liz there you go i guess i'll go for that one it's really an interesting question because i think only recently we have started to have that open debate about the impacts of the menopause on on women and the impacts in terms of the workplace so i think that probably over the last just over the last maybe 12 18 months this has began to become higher up the agenda and i think it's a good thing because it's we talk about you know people being ill sickness this this is a serious situation and in a in a country where we need women retaining in the workplace to retain them and also bring others in at certain age groups i think we've got to do more i don't think there's enough done because a lot of businesses don't quite know what to do particularly small and medium-sized businesses so we need i think we need access to more experts and more engagement with that group of individuals either as individual businesses or as you know a group of people we need to understand what we can and should be putting in place in terms to support women who are going through the menopause and not just women but you know all of us to understand the impacts it's having and to be making appropriate changes to the workplace to process to hours to whatever that's going to be necessary because we're not doing enough no and i would argue also that the medical profession need to have a far better understanding so that they can give the right advice to businesses to how we actually need this work and jonathan i think was it yourself that put your hand up there rapidly as well but let's get in first i have nothing to add on top of that right okay i'm going to come to yourself i think you touched on it with john there in terms of what the uk pension system is doing but i want to come to one very specific area of pensions and that is gps now i don't quite understand what's going on but i'm told and that we're hearing that younger gps are retiring because of a pension's issue but someone could actually stay on for longer but it's not worth their while staying in the profession now we've encountered to that that some younger doctors are just tired they're done in and that's why they're retiring can you shed some light on that yeah as i as i understand it is it's a tax issue so there are two ways in which the cruel of pension and access to pension is tax so as you build up tax year by year there is something called an annual allowance if you go over that then you pay a tax on that excess amount and then when you take your your pension at retirement if it's over at the lifetime allowance then you you suffer a penal rate of tax 55 percent effective tax rate so what you what you find is that the first of those tests the annual test for gps as they reach the later state of their career they get pay rises then they are are subject to a tax now doctors have a choice of whether they effectively get a reduction in their pension which effectively pays for that tax or whether they write a check i think some doctors think that the only choice they have is to write a check and those checks can be very substantial and effectively wipe out the earnings that that they've achieved for that year and so i think you know that leads them to think that they should retire because actually it's just not worth it economically for them to do that i think probably some of them don't understand that they've got the second option and maybe actually sort of education and support to doctors to understand that and and the long-term implications may help but certainly you know empirically i see that from from people around me doctors exiting because of that tax so in general do uk pension freedoms are the greater in the uk pension freedoms greater in the uk than the other than there are in other european countries and is that helping drive the the labour and activity in our country as opposed to other european countries i mean it's quite difficult because actually you know the pension system in each country is built on what the state pension is and private pensions and so on so it's very difficult to have a sort of like for like comparison in that way but i go back to us earlier we're seeing probably only as something like a five percent increase in terms of people accessing their pensions at the moment compared to pre-pandemic so that wouldn't suggest necessarily and of course people don't need to retire in order to access their pension but wouldn't necessarily see that that is is driving the inactivity right okay if we do have a greater proportion all the workers leaving the labour market is that going to put much more pressure on the younger age group to be able to manage that pension fund no i mean we we do monitor the and most people now are saving through master trust there are six thirty six authorised master trusts we monitor them individually and collectively so we have monitored through the pandemic the financial strains on those and we're quite comfortable that they are resilient and sustainable there is quite naturally some consolidation that's happening in that market and i'm sure that will continue to take place but we're quite quite comfortable with the sustainability of the retirement system okay thank you that's good is anyone got a couple of more minutes any questions no you said look at your papers brines david one point you were talking about scams there for people getting their pensions and it's something i have said i watch all the time on social media and retweet it do you as an organisation put stuff out on social media warning people about the scams so that we can pick it up and then retweet it and i did two over the last week of scams that we know that are currently going on just now so you do that currently okay okay i'll let you start following you on twitter then there's just one sort of almost a regional question that that occurs to me is the drain there's like there's a consistent drain of workforce from rural to urban what is the impact of coven had on that and what do we need to do to try and and stem that flow i'll ask liz thank you for that thank you very much for that i think even before coven to be worried there's an understanding that this issue about labour um fluidity in terms of movement from the urban rural areas especially our young people moving out of these areas and the declining population and it covers just not in the rural but it's our islands as well so i think we're going to just understand that that's the environment we're in however coven has exasperated that because we we we have seen major geographical regional differences on the increases or or decreases of the economic economically inactive in particular regions and it's not all down to coven but it does play a big part some of it might be down to um age population or unemployment in those areas so that it's not a complete black and white picture in that regard but there certainly has an impact um and you know what can be done about it i don't have an answer to that brian quite frankly right now um in terms of how do we stop that flow i think to stop the flow we need to look at the creation of the economies in these rural and urban areas and perhaps look at more investment in the area to try and bring more jobs in so that we retain the people that are there and more importantly attract other people out of in some cases other parts of scotland into those who are really struggling economically if we can do that and i think that the the creation of the socio-economic agency for um uh germfries and gallow in the borders was a good move because they are focused completely on that area um as opposed to you know having that wider that wider scotish focus um so i think it's it's a tough one and i don't want the answers to that when i'm afraid okay thank you very much can i think the witnesses for the evidence and giving us the time this morning i think we can all agree it's been a really fascinating session if witnesses would like to raise any further evidence with the committee they can do so in writing and the cloaks will be happy to raise a liais with you on how to do that i will now briefly suspend the meeting to allow a changeover of witnesses good morning we will now continue to take evidence on the inquiry and i'd like to welcome our second panel to the meeting ana richie allen executive director of close the gap who joins us in person welcome chris brodie director of regional skills planning and sector development skills development scotland who joins us remotely and angem claire policy officer and jack jones policy officer from the trade union congress who also joins us remotely welcome everybody and thank you for giving us your time this morning and all your written submissions we estimate this session will run up to about 11 30 so each member should have approximately eight to nine minutes to speak to the panel and to ask questions for those witnesses who are attending remotely this morning if you'd like to respond to an issue being discussed please type r in the chat box and we'll bring you in i'm keen to ensure that everybody gets the opportunity to speak and i apologize in advance therefore if time runs on too much i may have to interrupt members or witnesses just in the interests of brevity could i ask the witnesses just to briefly introduce themselves can we start with you inna yeah thank you um good morning committee my name's ana richie allen i'm the executive director of close the gap where scotland's policy advocacy organisation working on women's labour market equality thank you can i move to chris brodie place i'm sorry chris i think you're on mute apologies i think i muted myself there i'm chris brodie i'm the director of regional skills planning at skills development scotland amongst other things i only got evidence in impact team who provide analysis on different aspects of the Scottish economy and labour thank you very much and if i could move on to enjim my name is anjim and i work at the tc as policy officer for labour market and social security thank you very much and jack jack and also policy officer at the trade union congress and i work primarily on pensions thank you very much and i'll just move on to questions now and if i can begin by asking the first question and i'm going to come to you anna and it's something that my colleague jim fairly bought up in the in the last session um and i recently visited nhs esher and aran and it was about a menopausal support for their workforce and 40 percent of the workforce of nhs esher and aran are women of the age of menopause is there anything that you've seen recently that has impacted women's inactivity in the workforce due to menopause yeah i think that that is an interesting question so in terms of administrative data there is there isn't a level of intersectional information that tells us about women's experiences of menopause um but we do know that it's rising i think in the profile is something that needs to be looked at so as as lis said in the in the previous session um that certainly its employers are a bit more interested in it than they were previously um the anecdotal evidence that's available um and also evidence from grey literature suggests that it has a very significant impact on many older women's experiences of the workplace um employer responses to it are inadequate um and because it can go on for quite a long period of time um where women are at loss and there's there's definitely evidence to show that some women have exited um left their jobs they're unable to work because of it um and you know as um it's probably been explored elsewhere much more difficult to get back into the labour market um once you've left if you're older and particularly if you're a woman yep thank you for that that i think it is an area that's very new as we said like in the last 18 to 24 months has been um raised a profile of it and something that we have to do a bit more work on if i can move on to chris from skills development scotland if i may um one things we've touched on this morning and on this inquiry is the cost of living crisis and the financial implications this is going to have on people who are not earning money um and are retired has skills development scotland seen an increase in requests for skills training for older demographics to reflect the changing ways of working following the pandemic with flexibility in hybrid model working that's sure i think before a start it's probably useful to set some context on what we do as an agency and what we don't do so primarily um we provide a careers information advice and guidance services schools and for adults we deliver apprenticeships across foundation model and the graduate apprenticeships a very small part of our service offer is actually direct training support for individuals um having said that i'm looking at our service offer our c i g services haven't seen a huge increase in customers aged over 50 since the start of the pandemic um in terms of our modern apprenticeships we've seen um a bit of an uptick in terms of the way we cut the data is over 25 which again is not really the age group that you're looking at but we've seen an increase in the number of modern apprenticeships over the age of 25 i suspect that's not in relation to older workers um the one area that the one service offer i think that are the one product that we have that might be used by older workers or older learners is individual training accounts and the percentage of um kind of individual training accounts that taken up by the over 50s has stayed pretty much static um across the um occurrences before the pandemic and after the pandemic so i think there's something for us we haven't seen a significant uptick and we haven't seen a significant change in the use of our services but i suspect that may more be down to the services we offer rather than necessarily there being changes in the workforce okay thank you i know during this inquiry we've also learned that there's always been an element of inactivity um in the workforce and people are just weren't going to work is there any opportunity um to connect with people that probably have never worked and maybe now there is some flexibility that they might want to train through apprenticeships and modern apprenticeships if they're a bit older through skills development Scotland um so so again i'll offer i suppose a couple of observations in terms of apprenticeships we know that employers use apprenticeships as part of their induction of recruitment for new talent we also knew that employers use apprenticeships as a means of upskilling the existing workforce i think it would be fair to say indeed i think one of our graduate apprenticeship award grant grant apprenticeship of the year winners about three years ago was an older worker who was using an apprenticeship to to upskill i think there's a more there's a broader challenge i think in terms of how people can acquire skills throughout the working lives and the vast majority of our investment in education and training and skills actually does go on to younger age groups it was on to 16 to 24 year olds whether that's through university places whether it's through college places whether it's through apprenticeships and that's not to say it's only focused on those groups but they're primarily taken up with those groups i think one of the things that's recognised is that we need a broader range of skills training programmes that are available for workers throughout their lives and the importance i think we've already heard today of the ability to upskill and reskill is something i've talked about at parliament to various committees in relation to both the labour market and Covid and that's an area of priority for Scottish Government in the national strategy for economic transformation the school workforce programme board is looking at how a more systemic approach can be put in place for upskilling and reskilling and i think the issue of connecting people who haven't been in work and back into work is a different issue so you know very often people who are economically inactive with older age groups are in a different proportion than they have been out of work for some time i think the solutions and the support of those individuals is going to be different from those who you might be looking to upskill and keep in the labour market thanks chris that's helpful if i can move on to angem or jack do you do you think it's likely that many workers who have taken early retirement over the pandemic will be forced back into the labour market given the current economic outlook and the cost of living crisis that we're experiencing and have any of these concerns been reflected through the trade union congress membership at all if i could start with you angem yeah i mean i'll talk sort of more in terms of the stats and jack's been speaking to some of the unions about this just trying to get a better idea of what's actually happening i mean no doubt there will be some people sort of coming back into the labour market just because of the cost of living although at the moment the data isn't actually showing that the data is actually still showing that the employment group one from overall is obviously less than the pre-pandemic but particularly for this age group and in activity he's still actually rising jack do you want to add anything else on to that and what we've been hearing can i bring you in jack yes yes please um yeah i think um it's likely that we will see people looking to unretire um in large numbers than we've seen previously very few people generally do kind of come back into the workplace after they retire um and i think one of the reasons for that is it's really difficult um if you're looking for work in your in your 50s or 60s um so that's one of the kind of the the big things that we need to look at now is is how to remove some of the barriers that the older people face getting back into work um particularly when they've been out of work for a period but one of the things that i wanted to say and maybe to slightly challenge one of the things that was said in the previous session um i think that Alex Alex Rowley was talking about um we're asking about kind of the um the kinds of jobs from which people are um are kind of being forced to it out of labor markets um early because of ill health um and i think kind of the the answer that the davis gave i thought maybe gave a slightly few rosie impression of some of the people who are leaving the the workforce earlier over the last couple of years um but one of the things that i thought it's probably it's important to stress is that whenever we've seen kind of surveys of people being asked about how Covid is affected their retirement plans um quite a lot of people do say that the kind of their plans have changed um as a result of um the experience over the last couple of years but it's always more people saying that they are likely to delay retirement as a result of that rather than to bring retirement forward so i think we'd expect the the net effect of people making kind of um recent decisions about their retirement as a result of Covid to actually be an increase in activity rather than a decrease in activity because it's kind of a bit of people um working longer rather than retiring earlier um and i think the the ons survey that davis referring to um in his answer um to look and get over 50 to have left the workforce over the last couple of years um i think there's quite a lot of kind of cause for alarm in there actually um i think it was about i think it was 38 percent of the younger people in that age group said that they were confident or very confident that they had the financial resources to um have to meet their retirement needs which is obviously it's a low number and even among those kind of older people in the 65 age group i think it was only 55 percent that said they were confident or very confident so i think this idea that people are kind of making a choice to retire early um clearly it's a fact that for some individuals but i think um it's generally overstated a little bit i think and also in this idea that people are kind of cashing in quite small defined contribution pension parts and using that to kind of tied them open till they reach their pension age there does seem to be evidence that that's happening but i think that that's also and that's not a good outcome that's quite an alarming kind of situation when you think of of how low our state pension is and it's not designed people to live off without supplementing it with a state pension i think if people are kind of cashing in a small dc part to kind of tied them over for maybe two years and then intending to rely solely on the state pension i think that's going to cause issues when people reach their pension age and have an inadequate income and are forced to kind of to rely on pension credits to top up that income um so i think there's quite a lot of concern around um there are the issue of people leaving the labour market early yes thanks jack um can i move on to brown wittle thank you good morning to the panel um i think we were all aware that covid has made a huge i've made a significant impact packed in the and change to the way in which um we now work and working the practices with with sort of the hybrid system can i just have a general question out there to everybody and ask it do you think businesses are managing to change at the pace that is being demanded by the workforce i don't know who wants to take that one maybe go to you chris thanks i mean i think it's an interesting question i'm not quite sure how to approach this i think the first thing that says that pandemic has brought obvious disruption to the labour market and to the economy i think you saw through the pandemic examples of businesses and indeed workers responding very quickly to you know significant changes and pick out you know very obvious examples you know companies switching from you know plastics manufacture to PPE restaurant businesses moving quickly on line moving to take away so i think you know there was a lot of change happened as a result of necessity during the pandemic i think the the pandemic has had significance of significant effects and speeding up um some underlying issues that were already under way um so you know i think you can look at the change that's taking place in towns and city centres in scotland and see you know the impact of both people switching online to retail and also the fall off and the number of you know people community community into city centres is having quite a detrimental effect on some businesses that would have thought they were much more stable prior to the pandemic i think that kind of gets me to in terms of people in the labour market is we're in a situation arguably we've been in this situation for quite a long time where there's a lot of economic labour market turmoil and i come back to suspect this is a theme that i'm going to return to in a number of occasions through this discussion today the importance of upskilling and reskilling and supporting workers to transition is going to be key for our future skills strategy i think the importance of building resilience and building the mindset into people that actually you know the days if they were ever there of there being a care for life and a job for life are gone but i suspect you know we will be continually asking questions i think over the next five ten years i responded quick enough to external challenges and is the the skills system and our training system adequately can adapt to respond to what really is an unprecedented skill change thank you if i can just develop that a little bit with with angemith i could chris brought up the the issue around city centres and you know the fact that with virtual working or hybrid working there's less there's less footfall in city centres which of course has had an immediate impact on a lot of city centre businesses who probably haven't managed to adapt as quickly as they need to so in that respect you know the city centres are as covid really put our city centre city centres under real pressure and and what really needs to happen there because my my view is a lot of businesses expected post covid to almost fall back to where they were before and the workforce is is resisting that and almost demanding that you know the hybrid working system continues yeah um well so might not be the best person to answer this but i mean obviously um i mean hybrid working is happening and there has been a change in the sort of city centre but and obviously you know there's been um also been changes on the local area if you're working you know you're no longer commuting but then you may be sort of um spending more time and money in the local area but um in terms of sort of going back to the the flexible working option um you know it hasn't actually moved as fast for everybody it still it still seems to be that there are certain jobs which you can actually do um and from home and sort of quite set um those that you can't and that one of the things that we found from one of the rns servers was it actually made it quite key that one of the um the biggest things about the group who were actually inactive about returning back to work was that um 58 percent that the flexible working was actually the most important factor for them and i'm not a few what to come in here yeah yeah no i just to follow on from the the point on flexible working i mean i think the the demand for flexible working has always outstripped supply that we see in workplaces and that has increased i think from Covid so there is a a bit of a story i think a narrative of that Covid has created a more flexible work but i think that's probably not true actually it's much more complicated than that even at the peak of home working in the initial stages of Covid from a gender perspective it's still only about well i suppose about 40 percent of people were working from home but most women are in jobs that can't be done from home and so but the availability of flexibility it is much more nuanced and complicated so there's home working but as was mentioned in the previous session we see different types you know and having autonomy over when you start and finish is really important but even the last year the flexible jobs index in scotland which was published showed still only just over a quarter 27 percent of jobs are advertised as being flexible so i think there hasn't been quite resulted in the revolution that that's sometimes presented as but i would agree with what angem has said and that there's this demand there and particularly for older people older women in particular who have many caring responsibilities so having older parents or doing care as grandparents or looking after a disabled person within their family the the new way of working has perhaps given a little snapshot of the flexibility that might be available but i think we haven't quite seen a true transformational change in flexible working and i just point out a couple of other examples the responses that we see from employers in scotland are very varied so we've had some very extreme examples where some large companies have decided that everyone will now be working from home giving up their leases on city centre offices and everyone has to work from home so these blanket approaches don't suit and so what closed the gap advocates for is a much more tailored approach to individual needs so that you know everyone's got different needs according to the realities of their lives and women have specific needs in terms of their caring roles but i think we're quite far from that and it's definitely having an impact on the way that people view work and whether or not they want to stay in work can i move to alex and we'll come back alex really please can i begin maybe on a yourself and ask is there specific sectors and is there a gender related issue in terms of people leaving the workforce and the one that i would highlight that we have a major problem in scotland is social care um and it seems to be that if you the majority of social carriers are women the majority social care is delivered now in the private sector and the difference in terms and conditions and pay between the private sector and the public sector i mean i don't know how they get away with it it's it's absolutely appalling but but people are now walking with their feet and saying bye bye that enough to go is are these issues and do we need to actually start to look at this fair point if you i did put the debt to first minister a number of months ago that there was a clear gender issue here that if this was a male dominated sector this wouldn't be happening yet no i completely agree with you i mean i think social care is one of these examples that we we use all the time to highlight the undervaluation of the workforce predominantly because it's women that do that type of work so the undervaluation of women's work more clearly but in terms of skill shortages the the low pay and the poorer terms and conditions that are associated with social care work are absolutely a driver of the skill shortages within that sector i think also we need to think about who's working in social care jobs as well and the link between socio-economic background the age of people and the intersectional or trying to get an intersectional picture about the types of workers that are in there but social care work in addition to being increasingly more skilled and more technical it's physically demanding as well and so there's also links with women from lower socio-economic backgrounds and having poorer health outcomes so i think all of these factors come together to contribute to skill shortages in sectors where women work and also will affect women's economic inactivity rates because what we know is the sectors which are female dominated or jobs which are predominantly done by women such as care and leisure and other services and sales and customer service and there's a higher number of women working in them but also there's higher levels of economic activity from people that work in those sectors so there's something to be said there about job quality and increasing the pay in terms and conditions there and taking better care of women and particularly that work in those sectors in order to retain them in the labour market okay thank you and jack i think you would want to come in that jack yes it's something that we've been kind of we've been monitoring for quite a while pre-covid and we found that probably the biggest divide is kind of in terms of who is being forced out of the labour market early certainly because of ill health it is that kind of what kind of job are you doing and it's people in low paid work and kind of manual intensive work who are by a distance kind of much more likely to be forced out of work before they reach their pension age because of ill health and that's primarily people in what are classed as elementary occupations which includes things like cleaning, security guards, call centre work that kind of thing and then people doing more kind of manually intensive work like potentially trades people or people working with with having machinery that kind of thing interestingly when we look at gender it's actually just one of the few things that's quite evenly divided there's no big difference kind of on our group between men and women when it comes to leaving the labour market early because of ill health but where there is a big difference is in older women leaving the labour market because of caring responsibilities and that is a it's a much smaller number than people who are leaving the labour market because of ill health but it's significant and that is extremely gendered and that's mostly women and it's again it tends to be women in lower paid kind of kind of work okay thank you can I move on to that skills agenda and maybe start with yourself Chris but in the last panel I did raise that in some European countries you have brilliant examples so four do it involve the big car manufacturers where they've set up academies and those academies are not just for their own workforce and crucially within that workforce it's for everyone so in Germany I once looked at a an academy that was purely for cleaning and the cleaners were the best qualified probably in the world but it was also for SMEs it was all it was a supply chain it was the whole thing coming together so that the employer took responsibility and pushed that out there is there much that we can learn from and also given the TUCs on the call the role of trade unions in lifelong learning as I know the TUCs done a lot of work over the years in terms of lifelong learning union learning etc but is there more that employers and unions coming in partnership with government should be doing to actually ensure that people have the opportunity throughout their life to reskill as and where required and to get general I mean numeracy and literacy seven million people in this UK and UK lack the basic skills in numeracy and literacy is there more that we should be doing in a partnership approach do we need new policies so there's quite a lot in that question Mr Rowley so I'll try and work through that and from where you started just in terms of you know kind of learning from the German model we've done we've spent a lot of time looking at the German model in relation to apprenticeships and there's probably a couple of things that I would pick out there I think in apprenticeships apprenticeships are valued as a kind of equal route of developing kind of high level skills as say a university course and a college course and that's something that we've been working very hard in Scotland to get that kind of parity of esteem I think the apprenticeship system in Germany tends to go to much higher qualification levels than we've traditionally done in Scotland so you know you get master qualifications equivalent to a master's degree again we've looked to introduce some elements of that best practice in relation to the introduction of graduate apprenticeships I would agree I think there's lots to learn from Germany in terms of that academy model I'm not familiar with the model that you're referring to but I think the notion that you're getting at in respect of employers or groups of employers you know taking responsibility for ensuring that their own kind of supply chain of people is met is absolutely one which I personally subscribe to and one which I think we've put a lot of effort on in Scotland another part of my team works very closely with different industry leadership groups including health and social care including in engineering life sciences we're doing some work with retail sector at the moment and the heart of that work is to understand you know what are the future skills requirements of those different industry sectors and to what extent are you know the working conditions in some cases that are offered contributing to some of the skills shortages so you know that notion of partnership between employers trade unions and government I think is something that is really important and a central part of you know how we approach the skills challenge in Scotland at the moment. Thank you and John would you I think this was one more for Jack sorry yeah okay jack um yeah I think kind of the the first thing to say is that the kind of the high level there's just a really obvious issue of not investing enough in in skills I think we kind of we spend about half the year average on workplace training so that there's a good news there is it's it's kind of there's a lot that can be done to improve that um I think yeah the kind of the social partnership model which is common in a lot of European countries where it is employers and unions coming together to set kind of a strategic direction for that kind of investment is obviously something that yeah we absolutely should take and we should um we should develop here. I think and also there's kind of there's a question of how do you access the skills as well which is kind of it's a whole separate kind of issue I think is that um what are the mechanisms for identifying training needs and to kind of point people in the right direction um and that's something where I think there's kind of a government has been looking at you know with kind of some enthusiasm it's like midlife MOTs which I mean the feedback we get from members is I mean they hate the name at first start it's going to be it's not a it's not a I guess a positive way to give up people but as a concept it's um yeah it's got pretty widespread support that you need some kind of mechanism to allow people to kind of take stock of what their training needs might be if they're going to kind of stay in employment into older age and then kind of give them access to the training that might be needed they've you know either to kind of stay in their current role or if they're in a job which they may not be able to they might not be able to do as they get older which will help them to kind of change positions and also I mean I guess one thing that is worth actually flagging up is the the role in the past of the new learning fund which um has provided um a really good vehicle for people to get training they need mostly kind of basic training into the literacy and maths in the workplace um and I think kind of we've we've had audits of that we've found that kind of for every £1 spent on it it delivers over £12 in kind of economic benefits um and that was obviously scrapped um last year I think so I mean obviously a key priority for us is is kind of looking at that and getting something like that reinstated great. I just wanted to follow up on the skills intervention points actually I mean I think in terms of thinking about how to get women back into the workforce or enabling women to change careers the offer that's available just now is inadequate both in terms of the skills interventions that we see but also in terms of employability and I think there's commonalities across there but in particular neither of them taken to account the gendered barriers to the labour market but also to um skilling and retraining so we see where these interventions are in place they're designed by default they reinforce occupational segregation which um if women do participate in them that they end up funneled into low paid stereotypical work um we don't see adequate support for women with childcare payments to to provide support with that and for travel costs particularly um if they're already living in poverty um they don't take account of women's experiences of men's violence for instance domestic abuse and economic abuse and how that prevents women from participating in the labour market um and I suppose on the reskilling point in particular because women are more likely to be in a low paid in part time work and those are the types of workers who are least likely to have access to training and reskilling but um it's really difficult or it can be quite difficult to change career particularly if you're wanting to do something that is non-traditional changing something so as um I think Chris had mentioned modern apprenticeships there's an age barrier there which I think is a real um barrier to reducing occupational segregation because people are more likely to do non-traditional jobs when they're older as well and so there's some really systemic challenges there to addressing occupational segregation so what we need to see in Scotland is these skills interventions that recognise the way that women engage with training and skills acquisitions recognise the gendered barrier to the labour market particularly women's caring roles and how they influence the way that they participate and I would say that was the case particularly with the green skills agenda because there's certainly a very high level ambition to enable women and other underrepresented groups into green skills agenda but there's nothing to make that happen there's no targeted action in order to actually go to those women to try to upskill them in that way so it's unlikely to be I think creating more women within the green skills thank you that's very helpful chamber can I move on to you please yeah okay right do you have a surprise there convener thank you I want to stay on that point with yourself I think it was part of your submission you talked about men are more likely to and this ties in with something that jack said earlier on that people who are coming out of the labour market at an older age men and women the numbers are relatively stable and relatively similar but men are more likely to be able to come out of the labour market because they can afford it which indicates to me that women coming out of the labour market is because they're being forced to so what's forcing them out of it I think you've touched on the fact that you could be caring responsibilities but then we're kind of putting women in a position then where they're relying on their male partner to be able to allow them to not work is that your understanding of that well in some cases that might be the case I think it's probably a bit more complicated than that but I think that women's caring roles do reinforce financial independence on a male partner and particularly where there's an assumption that household income is distributed equally between men and women which is not the case as we know but certainly women's caring roles definitely shape the way that they engage with the labour market contribute to women's higher levels of economic inactivity that is the the single biggest factor which drives women's economic activity as women get older they're more likely to work part-time not just because they've got children to look after because that burden falls mainly on women still but also what we see now is this sandwich generation of caring where older women are also likely to have caring responsibilities for older parents or for an older family member say and because the labour market is so inflexible and it's quite difficult to find a flexible quality work which fits in with these caring roles it means that many women are forced into taking the only types of part-time work that they can find or else if it's financially viable or even if it's not financially viable have to leave the labour market and I think what that means in terms of skills is that many women are working in jobs below their skill level which has an impact on the labour market on individual employers but also on the economy okay and jack and anjum you both want to come in in this point i'm going to come back to that either or you choose okay might have been the same thing anyway i just wanted to sort of say that the data that we actually looked at we apart from gender we also looked at ethnicity as well and we found that although the inactivity levels for BME workers were slightly lower than sort of for white workers the the main difference was the fact that they were more likely have left the labour market because of health rather than sort of like early retirement to suggest and that sort of being forced out of the labour market and also in terms of caring responsibilities we also found that was higher but the major issue there was actually health okay jack you got any add to that was that the same point yes i have um this might be a bit of a tangent but um i mean one of the things that we have been highlighting a lot in the last couple of years is the gender pensions gap um and I and you know and it's huge because the income gap between men and women in retirement currently is just under 40 percent so it's a lot bigger than kind of the um the the gender pay gap um and it's a very long-term kind of project to close that but um but i think it's a very relevant the question of kind of um I guess whether whether women can afford to retire before a state pension age if they want to or just kind of whether they have the resources to kind of to manage that transition from from working to retirement um in a way that gives them control over how they do that um and I mean we've done quite a lot of work in it and I have quite a lot of policy around it I mean the primary ones actually around kind of um kind of um I guess the kind of whole of career experience and kind of and um how do you make sure that women either don't have to take as much time off um as they do or you know the kind of caring responsibilities are quite so gendered or kind of how are you trying to stop those from being quite having quite a good impact on people's workplace pension savings um actually it might be slightly off topic here but I think it's if people are interested I can go into more detail or kind of send a written submission on that okay um that might be worse on coming back to but I'm going to come back to tell on what we're talking about is the terms of skills training for women the opportunity to progress if you looked at the cpid paper that we had earlier on I mentioned this in the previous um the previous panel the age group of people who believe that progression and training opportunities that the the actual statement was my job offers good opportunities for career progression it's the 50 and beyond who actually still feel as though their jobs are offering them good opportunities to progress so that doesn't quite chime with what I'm hearing here just now that there aren't the opportunities for women to progress in the workplace so do they need to break that down into a more gendered survey or can you expand on that at all? I mean if that's just one number without disaggregating the data I would say yes so something that we always advocate for is identifying the gender breakdown of data intersectional data wherever possible because there's I mean I think other evidence and I'm not sure what survey that is sorry other evidence does show that there was a bit of research done which was published by the fair work convention recently looking at women over the age of 50 for their pay and progression which I think tells a different story to what you'd mentioned there which is either opportunities for progression were limited but also there was less interest from women but I think what we know generally about how older women talk about their experiences of the workplace is that being often overlooked for promotion and progression opportunities being in a part-time role as well I think generally we see assumptions in many organisations about part-time workers being less committed but to go back to the flexibility point it's difficult to progress into senior roles if you're looking for particular types of part-time work so I think it probably needs to be unpicked a little bit to really work out what those gendered differences are okay jack do you want to come in in this bit yeah it also needs to be unpicked by sector as well because we've we've done studies in the past of sectors like retail and I think accommodation as well and just found that kind of the progression prospects are just almost zero in those sectors they're really appalling and obviously they are sectors that tend to have slightly younger workforces as well so I think there's probably a degree of kind of of what sector people are working in that that's going to influence how they would respond to that kind of question okay thank you I'm going to move on again going back to the point of this session today is working why people are leaving the workforce and I want to bring in long covet you've got some very specific views on the what we need to do with long covet Anna is that right I mean I suppose one thing to say about long covet is that we don't have enough data on it but what we do know about the way that it affects people is women are more likely to have long covet they're also concentrated in those sectors that were more exposed to covet and as workers were more likely to contract long covet I think we haven't really seen adequate responses from employers and supporting women and other workers that do have long covet and there's probably still a lot to find out about the longer term impacts of that but I think in terms of the way that employers have responded to long covet and treating it as a disability that we haven't seen good enough responses in that area and so we would like to see more reasonable adjustments made for women who have long covet in the workplace anybody else want to come in with that no thank you thank you move on to yes oh sorry sorry who did we miss was that Chris we'll need to come in yes please sorry i dropped an ar on the sidebar there i begin kind of agreeing with something that annas said about the importance of kind of granular data and the importance of intersectionality and the data doesn't always give you that particularly in terms of economic connectivity however i want to kind of major inner focus in on some of the data that we do have about what's happened to economic connectivity in scotland before the pandemic and after the pandemic you know so in 2018 there were 760 000 people economically inactive that went up to 830 000 in 2020 it's fallen back but it's still higher than it was prior to the pandemic we've got 790 000 people economically inactive if you look at what's been driving the change the reasons that people are stating why they're economically inactive and the big changes are in long-term sick an extra 25 000 people saying they're economically inactive because they're long-term sick an additional 7 000 people saying they're economically inactive because they're short-term sick the committee's interest i understood was around kind of the over 50s and that pattern slightly different for the over 50s so the number of over 50s we have seen a big increase in economic connectivity and the over 50s run about 25 000 people but the increase there has been in about 5000 additional people saying they're looking after family or home or a family member 7 000 short-term sick and 12 000 long-term sick the numbers who have said they're economically inactive because they've retired has remained flat you know if the question that the committee is interested in is what can we do to address early retirement my kind of challenge back would be that i'm not sure that that's the bigger issue the bigger problem bigger issue is what you do about addressing i think in two dimensions of those people who are long-term sick and short-term sick significant proportion of them would like to find a job and they'd find a job if the right support was available or the right sort of job was available i think there's a second bigger issue that 80 percent of people who are economically inactive are not currently looking for a job but if you break that down out of that just under 800 000 we think there's 150 000 people who if the right support was in place and the right support was in place for employers it could be encouraged back into the work but retirees that's a very small number so the two percent of those who've taken early retirement have said that they would like to take another job so i'm going to ask the committee to be thinking about where it can have traction on the challenge thank you moving on John Mason please thanks very much convener we've covered quite a lot ground so i might just touch on one or two issues that have already been touched on you make the point ms allen that the phrase economically inactive may not be the best one i just wanted to ask you a bit more about that because some women especially are very active but they're not being counted as economically active because they're not in being paid for it so do you think is there a fundamental problem here with the way we do the statistics and things i mean i think that there's a fundamental flaw in mainstream economics which doesn't recognize women's unpaid work as productive to the economy and so the international system of accounts shows that when you're caring for someone when you're doing housework when you're taking out the rubbish all of these things says that you're at leisure which i think anyone doing those things thinks they're probably doesn't feel that they're at leisure and so it's so i think really important and it really this is an underpinning in concept in feminist economics which is about valuing women's work but making sure it's counted and so the term economic inactive doesn't quite so being inactive if you're caring for someone or you're taking time out of the paid labour market to do other types of work doesn't quite capture that because it perhaps suggests you're maybe lying on your steve watching netflix which you're probably not doing that so i think there are some fundamental problems in the way that we frame economic activity and who's productive and who's not productive and what it means to be doing the work of caring for other humans while also doing work in the paid labour market okay that's helpful thanks and long covet was mentioned as well and we just have quite a brief answer that maybe employers should be doing more to support workers and especially women with long covet could you expand on that and what kind of help do you think what what should employers be doing so i suppose that it really does vary by sector and it depends on people's jobs so because women are significantly more likely to have long covet but also because they work in those sectors where there has been a really high rate of long covet in particular but i suppose it depends on it's not as if the impact of long covet is the same on on a person every single day and it's about employers taking more of our responsive approach to meeting the needs because if it's about one in ten people with long covet that they stop working but mostly on sick pay that really does i think need a bit of focus in terms of working out what individual women and other workers need in order to carry because employers should want to retain the skills of valuable people within the workforce first of all recognising the significance so there have been calls and over the TUC and others and we would support those to recognise long covet as a disability under the equality act so we would support those calls but it does i think contribute to this wider picture where a lot of employers don't have the capacity or the competence to effectively implement reasonable adjustments for disabled women and for disabled people more generally so i think it really is about being responsive to what individual workers want and what they need to do their job well and to keep them in the labour market okay well thanks so that miss clear could i maybe come to you with the TUC i mean are you agreeing with basically what was said there are employers just not doing enough and should there be some kind of enforcement on employers yeah i mean long coveted unfortunately has obviously sort of been a hateous day so there needs to be an adaptation do this and that we need to know more about the long coveted, as well with the bit more of analysis and research into the area because it's still actually sort of quite early days it's normally too stock started in the day to break down the it's quite hard fad i, rwyf yn ymdraeth, rwyf yn iddo ddim yn dda, ond rwy'n hynna жai, ond rwyf yn iddo ar lesiau gwahanol, fyddwch i'n ddechrau amdanoedd. Felly mae'r ddych yn tynnu ar gwrthod hyn gyffredinol? Felly mae'r ddweud hynny yn gweithio'r ddych yn cael eu gymhau sydd yn ôl i ddiweddol i, mae'r ddych yn ddiweddol i c expanding? It is pretty complex. I told my colleague who is about to look at my print... I unfortunately don't know the announcement, but I can check it now because I did a recent work on this and can get back to you with that. I think that it will be helpful because when I read your evidence it could suggest that some employers are not adhering to the law let alone something else when it came to health and safety Sometimes, however, we can cover that as well. At the time of Covid we have an existing health condition. There are other health issues which are arising because people are leaving the labour market because of health. But if people have an existing health condition then you were more wary of Covid at that time. We have a report on that so I will get back to you. Y gallwn eich bod newie yn wirionedd gael i chi d Placebeth yn agorod yn yma'r cwrs i fod yn llwyfodol yn gaforau wrth tro i ddefnyddio'r ddaf i ddefnyddio'r간 mwy. A oedd yn gweithie i ddefnyddio'r gwaith, o wlad, ond yn gweithio'r ddaf i ddaf i ddefnyddio'r gwaith? Felly there is a lot of aedism in the labour market and anecdotally the stories I hear of certainly of people looking for work once they are over 60. A lot of them are heartbreaking. Just the kind of people sending off hundreds and hundreds of applications and not getting a single kind of interview off them and obviously there is a degree of kind of... is that because these people are being failed by skills policy and things like that. It's also it's clearly Edward Mountain mwneam fel hwnnw—onarae. I will follow up with what Jack BMH came out with. There is evidence of more often ageism in the workforce, but that intersects with gender and what it means for older women in the workplace who are talking about experiences in their workplaces, who are overlooking opportunities, who are undervalued in the workplace for having fewer access to training and development around that and on the ages and more generally, definitely. OK. Mr Brodie you wanted to come in as well? Yes, I want to come back to the animation which I absolutely agree with that traditional economics does not take into account the value of the contribution of unpaid work particularly from women. Coming back to economic connectivity in the way that is currently framed, economic connectivity does have quite a binary meaning The qualification that Anna provides is really helpful, actually. It's a distinction between how you undertake paid work and the economy, or how you not. I think that there needs to be a bit of nuance in terms of understanding that technical definition or that technical characterisation of economic connectivity. Looking at the data, I think that where it gets really quite interesting and quite challenging in terms of policy responses is the reasons that people are not engaged in paid work are quite complex and sometimes overlapping, so there are no simple policy solutions. Really importantly, at a time when Scotland's facing and has been facing significant challenges in terms of its workforce pressure, I think that our economic connectivity rate is too high and we need to do something to address that. If we are looking to do that in the short term, some people who are economically inactive would be happy to find paid work if they had the support to do so and if the type and the quality and the nature of employment fit with their skills and their circumstances. There is a bit for me in the same way that Anna has rightly been lasening in on the challenges that women face in the workplace. In getting back into work, we need to look at economically inactive as quite a diverse group with diverse set of challenges and that the support for them should be based around their needs. Who should be leading on that support? Is that the employer or Skills Development Scotland or who? Skills Development Scotland at the moment are not delivering. We are not being asked by Government to operate in that area. That is a policy decision for Government. I know that that again is an area of interest around the national strategy for economic transformation where it recognises that for Scotland's economy to be thriving, to be a wellbeing economy, we are going to need to engage more people in the workplace. That is a place where Government can and will show leadership. I agree with everything that Chris had just said. The idea that economically inactive is quite fluid in that group, where people are saying that they are retired or not working because of ill health. You have to recognise that it is not necessarily a stable situation where people say that they are retired and that is a fixed status. One thing that I wanted to flag up as a potential area of concern is the impact on individuals of becoming economically inactive as opposed to unemployed. Obviously, in building up pension for later in life, at that point, you stop accruing your workplace pension. You stop saving for retirement at that point. However, if you are economically inactive rather than unemployed, you will also be missing out on your national insurance credits. You will also potentially stop building up your state pension as well. There is definitely a degree of concern there that aside from issues that might be caused for individuals by being economically inactive in their 50s or 60s, there is also that kind of… It is possibly creating further issues down the line for when you actually reach state pension age in terms of both your resources personally in your workplace pension but also the degree to which you can access a full state pension. I think that that is very helpful to make these points because there is obviously quite a lot of repercussions. We could probably explore that further but I will leave it at that. Thank you very much. Can I move on to supplementaries? Brian, did you want to come back in? Any other member would like to make any other comments, questions? All right. Thank you so much to all the witnesses this morning for all your evidence and giving us your time. If witnesses would like to raise any further evidence with the committee, they can do so in writing and the clerks will be happy to liaise with you about how to do that. The committee will undertake some informal engagement sessions before we conclude the evidence taken on the inquiry on 8 December. Then we will hear from the Minister for Just Transition, Employment and Fair Work. That concludes the public part of our meeting this morning and I suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave and for the meeting to move into private. Thank you.