Something significant was absent from Monday�s launch, by the SNP minority government, of its skills strategy for Scotland.

Something significant was absent from Monday's launch, by the SNP minority government, of its skills strategy for Scotland.

Amid all the warm words about Scotland's greatest asset being its people, where was the route map to creating the new skills agency ministers had been promising, one that would deliver on all the rhetoric?

Careers Scotland and learndirect Scotland will still merge by next March, we are told. But apart from a brief reference to that being "the first step towards creating a unified skills body", the rest is puzzling silence.

Two weeks before the minister, Fiona Hyslop, unveiled her strategy, two key people involved in bringing about such unity of skills purpose were told to clear their desks and sent home from Scottish Enterprise's Atlantic Quay headquarters in Glasgow, suspended pending a thorough examination of unspecified "allegations".

Senior director of skills and learning, Charlene O'Connor, and her change project deputy, Isobel Brown, were given the black bin bag treatment over what SE called "potential irregularities in procurement procedures and rules on conflicts of interest".

Delivering national training programmes - like Modern Apprenticeships, Skillseekers and Get Ready for Work - forms a significant part of what SE does. In 2006-07 the agency devoted £123.6m of its £536m budget to skills and learning.

The year before, £94m of its skills and learning budget was paid out to a total of 365 contracted training providers to deliver national schemes. Some of the outcomes left a lot to be desired in value for money terms.

According to SE's own analysis for 2005-06, nearly a third of its national training programme funding (£31m) went to a large number of providers meeting less than 55% - or, in one programme, less than 35% - of their targets. O'Connor and Brown were brought in, at the start of 2006, to sort this out.

O'Connor had had a good record of delivering above-average training outcomes with Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh & Lothians. In her new role, she put together a new skills strategy for the whole of SE, eventually approved by its board this February, and set about renegotiating contracts with providers.

The message, delivered at a series of six meetings with providers around Scotland in late 2006, was "we will only award contracts to providers who are capable of meeting the network's improvement ambitions".

SE let it be known that up to a third of existing training providers would lose out.

Sometime before May's Holyrood election, one anonymous training provider wrote to SE's chief executive Jack Perry, making a series of allegations about the way O'Connor and Brown were planning to award the new contracts. A "number of weeks" later, this same individual wrote to Perry again, making further allegations about a consultancy firm in the training reprocurement, previously hired to deliver aspects of a failed £14m IT project for SE.

Neither set of allegations appeared to trigger much response. I understand that when the new government came in, O'Connor led discussions on SE's behalf with civil servants and with Hyslop over the likely transfer of the agency's training function to the new unified skills agency.

Nor is there any evidence that the new team was failing to deliver on the new training procurement round. Indeed, in the agency's annual review, published last week, Skills and Learning is praised as follows: "Not only did we achieve our performance objectives for the year and surpass most of our achievements in 2005-06, we did so at lower cost."

However, after a full independent appraisal of SE's failed IT project by its auditors, KPMG, was published on the agency's website last month, the same anonymous training provider who had twice written to Perry wrote to KPMG's managing partner, Craig Anderson, elaborating on his earlier allegations and demanding evidence that contracts were being fully market tested.

This letter was copied to Scotland's Auditor General Robert Black and to SNP ministers, Jim Mather and Hyslop. It was dated August 24. Within three days O'Connor and Brown were told to leave their desks. And when the government's skills strategy was unveiled on Monday, there was only a passing mention to the creation of the planned unified skills agency.

The whole affair begs some very big questions. Is there any substance in the whistleblower's allegations? Or is this the inevitable fall-out from a re-tendering process in which up to a third of the current training contract holders may lose a slice of their income?

Why was no action taken against O'Connor and Brown until the third, more widely-circulated letter was sent? O'Connor was even trusted to help the new government develop its skills strategy and to talk to civil servants and ministers about the plans for a new skills agency. Why, if serious allegations were hanging over her, was that considered appropriate?

Although both women are protesting their innocence, I have no way of knowing where the truth lies. But their is another credible interpretation of their belated suspension from Atlantic Quay. Are they now conveniently parked on the sidelines while their bosses at Scottish Enterprise mount a rearguard action to convince ministers that the agency should keep its training and skills function?

After all, if skills goes, SE is immediately turned into a significantly smaller body. And that would presumably reflect on the appropriate level of remuneration for its most senior executives.