We have to listen carefully to what agencies tell us, and that applies not just to SNH but to any agency. At my level, decisions about priorities have to be closely informed by the work of officials and public bodies on budget scenario planning. In the civil service, there is what has hitherto been known as the rural affairs, food and environment delivery board, whose discussions took account of the programme for government, the national performance framework and specific outcomes, and we need to have in mind those higher-level things.
The budget involves a process of collective decision making across the whole Government, so I have taken a strategic approach. We have worked with partners that might reasonably be asked to contribute to addressing costs, such as the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Scottish Water, and where we have to find savings, we are asking those with the broadest shoulders and the biggest capacity to absorb savings to take the greatest burden. That allows us to offer a degree of protection to smaller bodies’ budgets.
As the committee knows, when budgets come along, it is sometimes the smaller spending parts that take the biggest hit, because they have the least flexibility. There has been a degree of protection for the national parks and for the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, for which small cuts would be disproportionately disadvantageous.
For example, with SNH, we take the view that expenditure on outcomes such as biodiversity is not only from the baseline SNH figures, because although SNH co-ordinates activity, reports on progress and funds some activity, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency is also involved, as are the national parks and Forestry Commission Scotland. There is common agricultural policy money and Scottish rural development programme funding. The picture is complex. There are also contributions by non-governmental organisations that we must not forget about. All of that has allowed us to continue that work and to say to SNH that it is not doing that alone.
In recent years, there has been additional in-year funding—for example, for peatland restoration, which the convener asked about, and that supports biodiversity and climate change outcomes. It is difficult to pick out one thing and isolate it in such a budget. When we look at the impact on SNH, we have to remember that a huge number of partners and lots of funding sources are involved in the delivery of something that, from the headline, looks as if it is for SNH to deliver. In reality, there are a lot of contributions towards that.