Chamber and committees

A brief opportunity—I am sorry; nothing is ever brief with me.

My idea, which I have tasked our team with delivering, is that we have an army of people from the Borders to Shetland producing food in line with the objectives that we have set out in the plan. The only way in which we can do that is through activity. Front loading and, potentially, capping are all tools that we can use, but the primary focus is on making sure that we have people who are delivering a resilient food system, supporting sustainable communities, delivering for nature and biodiversity, and undertaking sequestration. In addition, all of that must be done through a just transition.

That is why the first meeting that we will have with the policy development group in November is based on the elements that I told you about. We need to determine what the regions are, what activity is taking place and what the definition of a small producer is, so that we can specify how best to support the people who are doing the job on the ground.

Front loading and exemptions may well be part of that, but we will take those issues one chunk at a time and work our way through them. We will build that into the system so that, by 2030, everybody will know exactly what is coming and that transition will happen. However, if people are sitting on huge chunks of land and doing very little for it, we are not intending to pay those people any money at all, if we can get away with it, on the basis that they are not delivering the activity that the objectives of the 2024 act set out in the first place.

Mr Langan, ask me the question again so that we know exactly what we are talking about. We are talking about two different consultations here.

My apologies. Okay, I will go through the chair. I refute—

I apologise.

One of the lessons that has been learned from previous systems is: let us not delay payments. That is essential. You will know exactly what I am talking about. We had a period when getting payments out the door was a problem.

Let me put on the record that the Scottish Government never actually missed those payments and was never given any penalty by the EU during the entire time for making late payments. There was a period when the IT system did not keep up. However, we have stretched every sinew to make sure that the IT system enables those payments to hit bank accounts at the right time. We have brought that forward to the beginning of the payment period. By law, payments can be made between September and June. We start in September and get out as many payments as we can—to the point where that has almost become embedded and farmers expect their payment in September. The reality is that we have until June to make those payments.

We are going above and beyond to make sure that we are helping farmers in the best way that we can. As we change our IT system, work is going on behind the scenes on what I think is called the target operating model. These guys sitting next to me—my officials—are getting on with the hard work of making sure that we can make the transition.

I have heard criticism in the past that we are not doing nearly enough because the IT system is broken. It is not. The IT system continues to deliver funding payments every year, on time and into people’s bank accounts, which is exactly what it is designed to do.

As we change it, we will have to make adaptations. We have a fabulous team that is led by Jo. I cannot remember Jo’s second name, but it does not matter. She is doing a phenomenal job of making sure that, as we bring changes forward, she can say, “Yes, but we will need to do it that way.” That work is under way simultaneously. The IT team is working with James Muldoon, and John Kerr has oversight of the whole thing to ensure that we transition come 2030 and beyond.

09:30

Hold on. I have it written down. The group also includes Ian Davidson from the Scottish Land Matching Service; Donna Smith from the Scottish Crofting Federation; and Andrew Moxley, who is a scientist. Government officials will take down the actions—not the minutes but the actions—that come out of those meetings.

No. That might have been what stakeholders wanted or expected, but that was never what we intended or what we told people. I do not think that I ever put on the record that the rural support plan would give chapter and verse on what would come next. If I did, that was on me, but I do not think that I have ever given the assurance that the rural support plan would provide a timetable of exactly when things would be delivered. What I did say about the rural support plan is that it is the next stage of how we go forward.

The other thing about the rural support plan is that it unlocks our ability to move away from the CAP measures and allows us to move to our own system.

I hope that what we have been talking about this morning will have provided an understanding of what the just transition will look like from our point of view. Things will not change dramatically between now and 2030, but I say to anyone who is out there listening to this, “Please pay attention to what is happening, because these changes are coming and you need to be aware of them and be prepared.” We will deliver as much information as we can, so farmers need to know what is coming and be prepared for it. Farmers should do the whole farm plan, understand what their farm needs and get the ineffective cows out of their system. They should do the things that they need to now in order to get their baseline to where it needs to be so that they can take advantage of all the other funding streams that will be available in tiers 1 to 4 when we get to 2030.

That is what a just transition will look like in practice. It will deliver a long-term and resilient agricultural sector that keeps rural communities in Scotland producing food, delivering for biodiversity and sequestering the emissions that we produce while growing food—that is the panacea and the golden ticket that we are aiming for. I encourage our farming community to pay attention to where we are right now and to get engaged in the process.

The engagement at an official level gets to the point where officials have to say, “Okay, we have made the point.” At a political level, we will absolutely not be letting this go. I will continue to raise the issue, because it is scandalous that the fishing community has been let down on numerous occasions. The big promise of Brexit was that fishing communities would be protected. Since I came into this job in marine, I have been asking fishing communities for their assessment of where we are, and it really is not great.

11:00

What is the upside that we could have achieved? We could have put in the right kind of protections in the marine environment. We need to put protections in place, but how do we do that? We have to make sure that we consult properly and that mitigations are put in place for fishing communities that might be affected. We could have been doing things around changing gear or getting new entrants into the system, because we need the next generation of fishermen to come in.

We have a world-class fishing sector and an unbelievable global reputation for the quality of the fish that we produce, yet that budget has been slashed to the bone by a UK Government that clearly either does not care or does not understand what Scottish fishing does for Scotland. We could have been doing a range of things and making great progress in Scotland, but all that has been taken away by the reduction in the amount of money that we get from the coastal growth fund. I think that the announcements are now out on the funding that we have issued this year, and we had an additional £2 million. That could have been, and should have been, a hell of a lot more. We will continue to press the UK Government to get that funding back to its right level.

Planting trees on farms—that is what the integrated trees network is about. I continually pump out on Scottish Government social media the need for farmers to think about putting trees on farms. If every farmer in the country planted trees on 2 per cent of their land, our planting targets would be done and dusted. Those trees would then become assets to the farm, as the cabinet secretary mentioned, including for shelter. The planting could take place on areas of land that are currently not that productive.

There are things that people can do differently. Unfortunately, we got into the mindset that trees are bad and sheep are good, or vice versa. It became very polarised. We are trying to move people’s thinking away from that.

In terms of what we can do about the tiers, of course we will look at integrating trees on farms. That is part of the thinking as we go forward. How do we get more people to plant the 2, 3, 4 or 5 hectares of trees that gives them a benefit that will not affect their productivity but gives us that biodiversity?

A lot of the stuff that we are doing has unintended consequences. The stuff that we do will put something in one place, but the unintended consequence will be something else. It is a wee bit like predator control. I hear many people hammering grouse moors because of predator control, but the result is that you see far more red-listed birds in areas where predator control is taking place, and we have seen the numbers that prove that.

It is about taking our siloed thinking and asking, “How do we bring all that together to have an integrated land management plan across the country?” There will be bits that we will disagree on, bits that we will get right and bits that we will try. We will have to work together to get through this and make sure that it all works.