Chamber and committees

You will be aware of the phrase, “You can take a horse to water, but you cannae make it drink.” We are providing as many opportunities as we can for farmers to engage in the process. If there is a farmer who does not know that a process is on-going, I do not know where they have been, because it has been talked about since the decision was taken to leave the European Union. It has been talked about and discussed, and we have been going through the process, so farmers are bound to have noticed that things are happening. There is a certain amount of responsibility on individuals to ask, “What does this mean for me and my business?”

You are absolutely right about the diversity in the numbers and types of farms. When I was on a hill farm, I had 2,200 hill yowes and 75 cows, and the breed had a very specific purpose. Three miles down the road, there was another livestock farmer, and the breeds that he was using had a completely different purpose. There is massive diversity among the sectors in the whole agricultural scheme in Scotland, so we are gonnae have to do it in this way, but there must also be a degree of responsibility on the part of the individual businesses and the individual farmers to ask, “What does this mean for me, how do I get the knowledge that I need and how am I going to make the new system that is being developed work in my favour?”

Agricultural shows are a vital part of our ability to communicate with folk, because that is when a farmer might say, “Do you know what? That’s been bothering me. I’ve got 10 minutes—I’ll just pop in.” If that gets them reading our leaflets and they think, “Oh, I need to get more involved in this,” the process is doing its job. However, we can only ensure that we make the information available to people; they then have the responsibility to pick it up and act on it in the most appropriate way for them.

Let me clarify. There is a whole team of people who feed into that. I do not just sit on my bed thinking, “That’s what we’re gonnae do.”

What happens is that I will say, “How about if we do this?” and the army of people behind me will say, “You could do that, minister, but these will be the consequences.” Then I have to say, “All right, okay, I’ll need to have a rethink.” There is a whole army of people looking at this, but, ultimately, it will be up to me and the cabinet secretary to say where we are going to go.

George Burgess knows the history of that.

That is simply not the case.

Could you let me finish answering the question?

I go back to the point that I made earlier. You are saying that there are glaring mistakes. They will not necessarily be mistakes, however. If they are, I will be more than happy to go back and say, “Okay, maybe we have got that wrong, and we will change it.” That was the whole purpose of making the legislation a framework bill. I absolutely accept that we will not get everything right. As we start to implement things, if we need to change something—and we have the ability to do that through secondary legislation—we will do so. We could not have done that if everything had been set out in the bill itself, as was constantly demanded by the committee.

If there are things that become a real issue, I am more than happy, as minister, to look at them and ask whether we are getting things right and how we can change them. In fact, I think I gave that commitment at my previous evidence session, when I said that we will look at things as we develop the policy. The 2025 single application forms will come in, we will see what happens with them, and that will allow us to ask whether the processes that we are implementing, which we are asking people to be part of, are working. If they are not, why is that? What do we need to do to make them work? Do we need to change them?

That is part of the co-development of policy. I am repeating myself but, if we had told the committee and the industry, “There’s your policy. Get on with it,” we would have got it wrong. We have seen how it is possible to get it wrong—all you need to do is look south of the border.

I agree that that would have been the ideal scenario. As I stated at the time, I did not understand why we were getting pushback at the very late stages—but, for whatever reason, we did. If concerns were raised, they were taken into consideration. There was an awful lot of official engagement at the grass-roots level to make proposals about how to make the measures work and to ask if everybody was on board with that.

I accept that the crofting situation is slightly different. I have given you a commitment that the force majeure provision will be in place this year, and it will be a matter of looking sympathetically at any issues that crofters in particular or people farming in the most remote areas have, particularly concerning smaller herds. I have given that commitment before.

If the policy is not working, I am prepared to take another look at it. I have given that commitment before, too. To me, that is part of co-development and getting it right. If we try something and it is not working, we will consider how to change it. Does it still achieve the policy objective?

I spent my weekend travelling round the crofting counties for exactly the reason you are talking about: if there are things that we are not picking up in one forum, I want to go to another forum. I went round Lewis, Harris and Skye, and I met large numbers of crofters. Our discussions were largely on the proposed crofting bill, but we also touched on other things. That engagement and level of interaction is exactly what will allow us to develop the policy.

I get that it is frustrating. I understand that. However, we cannot make a one-size-fits-all piece of legislation and say, “Here it is,” because that will not work. We want to make sure that we do it in a way that gets to the end of the route map that tells us what the policy looks like. Even once we get to that, policy will continue to change and evolve as circumstances change. That was the beauty of using a framework bill.

I think that you are asking me whether I am hearing them or simply listening to them. Every time I have such conversations, I take them away, chew them over, rack my brains and think, “How do we make that work? Is that gonnae work for them? If this is gonnae be a problem, how do we mitigate that?” That is the job. That is what we have to do.

We will not always get it right. We will not always be able to say, “You know what? We can fix that,” because we cannot always fix things. However, I will do my utmost to hear what people are saying and to work out how I can make that fit into what we are trying to do and how the system will allow them to be a part of that process. That is in my thinking all the time. It is not easy.

On the convener’s question about why QMS was not included in 2008, I do not know. I do not think that my officials understand why it was not included in 2008.

The convener also made the point that QMS has an internal complaints procedure, which is absolutely correct. However, that does not give a complainant a second body to go to if they are not happy with the procedure that has been carried out by QMS. The ombudsman gives the complainant—whoever they may happen to be—the opportunity to go to an external body and say, “I’m not comfortable or happy with this, and I’d like you to have another look at it.” That is the reason why QMS is being included as a body under the ombudsman’s jurisdiction.