Rural Affairs Committee, 31 Aug 1999

Meeting date: Tuesday, August 31, 1999

Official Report 136KB pdf

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Future Business

The next item concerns issues to be raised at the next meeting of the committee. I have quite a list of such issues, so let us move through it quickly.

Convener, may I leave now? Do you need me for anything else?

We will always turn up something that you could be useful for.

In that case, I will get out.

Thank you for coming along, minister; your presence was much appreciated. I hope that you understand what we are trying to do as well as we understand what you are trying to do.

At the next meeting, the members who were delegated to attend the European Committee this afternoon will be invited to give us a report on that committee's proceedings. We need to be kept up to date on that matter and, given that we have two members who understand the issues and who have genuine local connections and relevant experience, it is important that we hear that report.

Another item is the document "Agenda 2000: consultation paper on community structural assistance in the fisheries sector", which will be circulated with the agenda.

The next in the list of issues for the meeting is the situation in the sheep industry. Tavish Scott and Jamie Stone indicated in a letter this morning that they have come under pressure in their constituencies on this issue. Does any member wish to comment on their own experience?

At the moment, any MSP representing a sheep farming community will have been made aware of the severity of the situation in the industry. I should declare an interest: as a sheep farmer, I am dreading the next six weeks to two months. There is a health problem to be addressed. There have already been newspaper pictures of calves being buried in pits and the same thing may happen with sheep—many thousands of sheep will not find a bidder. God knows how many times cast ewes brought off the hills will simply not find a buyer.

Over the weekend, I noticed that the minister had been making noises about possible Scottish answers to this problem. That is commendable, but we urgently need to know what those answers will be. As we are talking about bringing people before the committee, I think that it would be highly appropriate to ask the minister to come to our next meeting, if he is available. I believe that he will be meeting the UK minister, Nick Brown, the day after our meeting on 7 September, so it would be appropriate for him to tell us what he has in mind.

Quite a few statements have been made recently and we need to clarify the Executive's position on the issue. As Alex says, the industry is facing a serious short-term problem and we need to investigate what the Government intends to do to alleviate that. We also need to examine the long term and how we can avoid recurrences of the situation.

Obviously I do not have Alex's personal knowledge of the problems faced by sheep farmers. However, I met members of the local National Farmers Union at the end of last week and, last Sunday, I met sheep farmers to talk about sheep farming and fox hunting, which is another important issue for them. It is clear that some of the immediate problems that need to be addressed—such as the impact of vets' fees and abattoir fees on sheep farmers—would be the responsibility of the ministry and perhaps of the UK Government. The fact is that there does not seem to be a level playing field with the rest of Europe on some of those issues.

However, as Alasdair says, there is also a more general problem to address. Things could be done quickly to alleviate the short-term crisis but there is an issue about how to prevent the situation from happening again and about the long-term future of the industry. This committee could have an important role in discussing the longer-term implications of supporting the industry.

As Alex pointed out, this committee meets next on Tuesday 7 September. The day after, the Minister for Rural Affairs will attend a meeting with his English and Welsh counterparts to discuss the issue. Do members think that we should take the opportunity on 7 September to examine the issue, perhaps to help Ross Finnie to identify the questions that need to be discussed at his meeting on 8 September?

I am sure that he would be delighted to have our assistance.

Absolutely.

Do members think that it would be appropriate to invite people to our meeting on 7 September to give evidence on the state of the sheep industry in Scotland?

We need the minister here to express the Government's thinking.

We also need a representative from the National Farmers Union to represent the views of the sheep farmers. Obviously Alex can do that.

Jim Walker will do that much better than I can.

As we have agreed to invite the NFU to send a representative to our meeting, should any other bodies or organisations also be represented?

If we go down that route, we will find that there is no end to the bodies that want to be represented. We are trying to discover the Executive's plans; the NFU's submission and the minister's submission should allow us to form a balanced view of the present position. I agree with Elaine that we need to address certain long-term issues at some stage, but the immediate priority is to find a solution—if one exists—to the short-term problem; we could achieve that with the input from the minister and the NFU.

I am inclined to agree with that, but I am also keen to hear suggestions from other members.

I think that what Mr Fergusson has said is very appropriate.

We will need to consider the issues that we want to address on 7 September, but I think that we do not need to set out a list of priorities. Given the two representatives that we will be inviting, the issues to be dealt with at the meeting will, I hope, raise themselves.

Will we hear the NFU's evidence first?

I am prepared to accept that proposal.

Are we agreed that, on the day before the minister goes to the meeting with his English and Welsh counterparts, we should invite both an NFU representative to give his appraisal and Ross Finnie to discuss the sheep industry?

I do not want to prolong the discussion, but I have a small proviso. The main physical problem will be the disposal of unwanted stock. Since the end of the calf-processing date scheme, the problem has also encroached into the dairy industry; it might be unfair to restrict the discussion to the sheep industry. I suspect that the discussion will overflow into that issue anyway.

The on-going issues about calves and ewes are definitely related. It would be appropriate for us to comment on that at the time. At this point, the problems faced by the sheep industry are our priority and we should deal specifically with them on 7 September.

We are calling the NFU and the minister to give evidence at the meeting. On a point of clarification, would the NFU be representing hill farmers as well as bigger farmers?

The NFU may choose to be represented by its president, and I suspect that his knowledge of hill farming runs deeper than that of anyone else in Scotland.

I raise the matter in case we thought that the Scottish Crofters Union was worth inviting to represent smaller farmers.

I would not object to that at all.

I would support that. It would be useful to hear from the Scottish Crofters Union too. As Alex says, once we go beyond that—

Then we would end up getting into all the group associations.

I am prepared to accept that the Scottish Crofters Union may have a slightly different perspective from that of the NFU and that it would be appropriate for its view to be expressed.

I move on to other business likely to arise at the next meeting. There are likely to be three statutory instruments for our consideration. They are the Food (Animal and Animal Products From Belgium) (Emergency Control) (Scotland) Order 1999, the Food (Animal Feedingstuffs from Belgium) (Control) (Scotland) Regulations 1999 and the Plant Health (Amendment) (Scotland) Order 1999. I imagine that those orders will be circulated.

Yes, they will be circulated as soon as the Parliament has sent them formally to the committee.

What is our function in regard to those statutory instruments?

The recommendation, through the Parliamentary Bureau, is that this committee will remain the lead committee on those regulations. This committee will also consider the opinions of many other committees and then pass back its view back to Parliament through the bureau.

So our role is to express a view on the contents of the instruments. Have those statutory instruments already come into effect or are they drafts?

In effect, statutory instruments become law when they are laid.

That will depend on which procedure is used. I have not yet received the instruments, but I hear that they are in the offing and are likely to be with us by next week.

From the outset, the function of this committee is to be aware of the instruments and their contents. We need to be prepared to deal with them and other committees' comments about them.

As the lead committee, are not we to judge whether to accept or to reject a proposed order?

I believe so.

After that, does the statutory instrument go to the Parliament? I think that it is important to get this clear. Statutory instruments come to us; if we consider them and agree with them that is fine, but do they then go to Parliament?

On a subsequent date the instruments need to be approved by the Parliament or they lapse and have to be laid again. I was concerned a moment ago when the clerk said that there was more than one procedure.

There are a number of different types of statutory instruments and different procedures for each one. When we receive the statutory instruments, we receive a note that tells us which procedure to follow.

Will we be briefed on the procedure?

I will brief members on the procedure.

That was the point that I was about to make. Maybe we should have a background note.

I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that there was more than one procedure for statutory instruments, as I was aware of only one. The documents will be circulated when they become available. Members will be briefed on what they are meant to do if we need to follow more than one procedure.

Other priorities for the next meeting are to discuss the future business programme and priorities. We have decided that shellfish will be added. We will need to take a moment to address the priorities of the committee and to decide how to proceed and what priority we should give to the individual issues that we intend to pursue.

There are also a number of administrative matters. Was it the clerk's intention to deal with them today or was he simply flagging them up to be dealt with at the next meeting?

At the meeting next week, I will give the committee some indications of the business likely to come before members.

A number of items were raised at the meeting of conveners. None of them were burning priorities, but I intended to go over the matters relating to meetings of the committee outside Edinburgh or outside the Parliament. The other priority for us to discuss is the proposed visit to Ingliston to meet the NFU. As we are inviting the leader of the NFU to visit us at our next meeting, we may be able to sort that out on or around that date.

All the business that we had lined up for today is now completed. Would anyone like to raise anything else before I close the meeting?

Yes. Above all, this committee should, in its work, set its sights on visiting different parts of the country. I think that we all agreed to that at one of our first meetings, but we have not mentioned it since then. The other day, when we visited the Scottish Executive rural affairs department, there was a suggestion that we go to a Scottish Fisheries Protection Agency vessel in the harbour; someone remarked that they were not sure whether there was enough money for us to do that. If we cannot get down to the harbour in Edinburgh, we will have problems visiting Stranraer or Orkney. I wonder whether we could put that on the agenda for the next meeting; we should establish what the budget is and how we can visit different parts of the country.

I intended to deal with that as part of our discussion of what came up at the conveners group meeting. We can make that a specific issue and discuss it then.

Thank you very much for your attendance. We have managed to get through the agenda in reasonable time, so the two members who are going to attend the European Committee can get some lunch before they attend that meeting. Thank you for your support.

Meeting closed at 13:07.