Due to factors including a sustained decline in public funding, Robert Gordon University might have to make up to 135 redundancies. The University of Dundee, with a £30 million deficit, has said that redundancies are inevitable. The University of Edinburgh warns of job cuts in response to unsustainable funding. Anton Muscatelli, the outgoing principal of the University of Glasgow, has asked why our Government should not

“properly fund higher education for our own students?”

Will the First Minister answer him by agreeing to an open-minded, cross-party, multistakeholder collaboration on university resourcing, or does the First Minister prefer ideological purity and redundancies?

I prefer to invest in the university system, which the Government does, with £1 billion of public expenditure and a commitment to work collaboratively with the university sector to ensure that Scotland’s research excellence can be deployed as part of the overall economic approach in Scotland. Innovation and creativity lie at the heart of taking forward the fantastic elements of research that come from our university community.

What is not helping our universities just now is the fact that they face a significant increase in employer national insurance contributions. That is the point that has been made by the principal of the University of Edinburgh: the shock to the university’s finances of the United Kingdom Government’s unilateral action in increasing employer NI contributions. It is another argument for why that particular policy approach by the UK Government needs to be reversed.