Further and Higher Education

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at 11:15 am on 27 January 2000.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of David Mundell David Mundell Conservative 11:15, 27 January 2000

I agree in broad terms with Elaine Murray. Yesterday, I asked the Executive to apply as much imaginative thinking to come up with a solution for those students as it applied to keeping the coalition together. If as much effort went into dealing with those students as went into preserving the coalition, given the number of meetings that were held and the amount of resources that were used up, the Executive would probably have come up with a solution.

I am pleased that there is consensus that that issue must be addressed and that it goes wider than the issue raised by Richard Simpson yesterday, which focused more on poverty than on the broader issue of accessibility.

The Conservatives are confident that our proposed saltire awards scheme would meet the legal requirements. We are not confident in the legal advice that the Executive says it has been given, but will not show us.

Recently, the Executive seems to have been good at getting rid of advisers, whether for reasons of advice that it did not like or otherwise. It seems to me that it is time the Executive got rid of its present legal advisers and employed someone who will give an objective view of the EU issue.