Good morning, everyone. Before I start, I should say for the record that I am a member of the council of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service and of the Low Pay Commission, which are both public appointments. However, any comments that I make this morning purely represent the views of the CBI, and of CBI Scotland in particular.
In the opening part of our written evidence, we make the important statement that it is our strong belief that the point of economic growth is to raise the living standards of the population of the country. Economic growth and that goal are not in conflict; in fact, the two are mutually reinforcing. The reason why we focus particularly on flexibility is that it is important to ensuring that companies in Scotland are able to compete, grow and create the kind of work that the committee is focusing on.
The regulatory framework needs to maintain elements that provide an incentive for companies to create jobs. If one moved to diminish the relative flexibility of the labour market in both the United Kingdom and Scotland—for example, by removing zero-hours contracts—that would risk making the best the enemy of the good by making it less likely that companies would take staff on in different circumstances. However, I would not want to define labour market flexibility only in regulatory terms. A lot of it is about how companies use skills and how companies and public authorities work together to develop skills.
There has been a big focus on productivity in the economic debate, both in Scotland and in the wider United Kingdom, over the past year and a half, and it is a critical goal of the CBI to support action to improve productivity. I am currently working with the Mayfield review, which the UK Commission for Employment and Skills set up to look at things such as how productivity in manufacturing can be improved through the improvement of manufacturing skills and, in particular, leadership skills.
Those things also fit into our definition of a flexible workforce, which is a workforce in which people are—to borrow the academic term—polyvalent. That means that they can do different things and can therefore be more productive, which enables the business to do more, to produce more and to pay people more, which, as I said at the start of my answer, is an important part of the equation.