There are two aspects to it: the impact that Brexit might have on exports and the impact on labour supply.
If we look at current production or the relatively modest increases in production that might happen in the next few years, there should not be an issue of not being able to continue to sell to world markets all the salmon that we can produce. However, Brexit is likely to mean a slight reduction in company profits. For example, rather than selling to France where, as I said earlier, some of the premium products are sold, it will mean selling to another country and not making quite as much margin on the sale. That could have a small effect on employment. It has been interesting that, in the past few years, Marine Harvest has twice announced redundancy programmes that were purely based on the overall profitability of the company. It said that it needed to reduce its UK staff by such-and-such a number because it wanted to get back to the profit level, and then it tried to work out how to do it. There is some link but, mainly, the impact on employment will be small.
There might be a different scenario if we look further ahead. If the industry manages to double current production, or just to increase it by 50 per cent, most of that will be exported, because the home market will be saturated by that time. If there is an increase in production, the challenge of Brexit and of the way in which international companies manage it will grow. However, by the time an increase happens, we will know a lot more than we do at the moment, and companies will have their mechanisms in place. The most stable aspect for the Scottish industry is the question of demand exceeding supply, and the growth of countries such as China and others, where more and more people now buy products such as salmon, is likely to more than compensate for the Brexit effect on exports.
However, the issue of labour supply is more worrying, particularly for processing, but also for other activities that are relatively poorly paid and where conditions do not necessarily make jobs popular with the Scottish workforce, so there is a lot of worry that jobs will be lost. As we show in our report, there have been a lot of productivity improvements in processing in recent years and the momentum for that will grow with the impacts of Brexit on labour supply. There will be more automation—more use of robots and suchlike—which will help to sustain those operations, even if employment falls. If we look at it from our perspective in Scotland with the employment of Scottish people, those mechanisms will sustain jobs into the longer term and there will be less requirement to bring people in from other countries. Nobody knows what mechanisms will come about but, as an economist, looking across the board, my view is that more people will come from African countries to do a lot of the lower-paid, less popular jobs that people from, say, Romania fill at the moment. Mechanisms will come along; they always have done. If you look at the past 100 years, we have always had inflows of workers, whether from Ireland or the Commonwealth. Mechanisms are always found, but there could be a transition period.
There has been a fairly interesting, although not major, trend with more overseas people working on farms than, say, 20 years ago. To a large extent, I put that down to an increased reluctance of British people—not just Scottish—to work outside, which I found in other sectors such as forestry, nurseries, fishing, agriculture and construction. People want to work inside, even though rates of pay are not necessarily as good. Therefore, Brexit will have some impact on salmon farms, but salmon farms in Scotland perhaps employ only a tenth of the number that the salmon industry as a whole does, so the impact will be a bit less important than for some of the other sectors.
That brings us back to the question of who will fill those jobs. The fact is that it is not easy to put people up; problems have arisen in a lot of outlying areas where people are most needed for these jobs, because there is really no housing even for the locals who might want to work there. The accommodation of people is an issue, too.