Ash Regan:

One of the main things that we have done to address the issues that the member has raised is provide £9 million of grant funding during Covid. Some of that money was specifically for business resilience and to help businesses adapt to the situation in which they found themselves, so that they could invest to find solutions to any issues that they might have.

The profession has approached us on capacity. To help to resolve that situation, we set up and invested £1 million in a fund for trainees that is co-run with the Law Society of Scotland. More than 40 trainees are in that system, and 75 per cent of them are women, because we recognise that gender was a potential issue. That is another way in which we have attempted to resolve the issues that the profession has raised.