Chamber and committees

Do you have an idea of what it would cost to set up a new independent body?

I hear your point. It sounds to me as though that would be a smaller body that would duplicate what everyone else is already doing. A lot is already happening across the food sector. This goes back to a point that Robin Gourlay made. Mary Brennan said that we are at the start of a journey, but we are not. The change in Scotland’s food culture started decades ago, and Robin Gourlay and I were at the start of that process. A huge amount of work has been done already, and many organisations are already involved. Would it not be better to find a way of using the bodies that are currently there and to get them to do the work?

There is a broad range of work to be done, and we are trying to make cultural change. Mary Brennan spoke about targets. How do we set targets that get people to change their culture or way of eating? We would have to be prescriptive. If cultural change is to be driven by targets, the Government would have to tell people to eat cheese on Mondays, fish on Tuesdays and beef on Wednesdays. This is a cultural and educational change.

I am conscious that we are out of time. My concern is that the messaging is vital, and I really cannot see why we are worrying about whether people are in hospital because of or with Covid. Given the fact that we have only a 50 per cent uptake of the booster in cities, we need to keep the messaging strong that we have to get the boosters out.

I welcome the panel, and I wish everybody a very happy new year. I hope that everybody had a nice break.

I will go back to Murdo Fraser’s and Alex Rowley’s point about emphasising the number of people who have not been vaccinated who land in hospital with real illness. We have to continually get that message out. One thing that I am confused about is why there is emphasis on whether people are in hospital because of Covid or with Covid, which I think Jason Leitch touched on. I struggle to see where the differentiation is.

A clinician just gave us some private advice that people, particularly elderly patients, will go in with a condition and discover that they have Covid, and that it is not until she gets to know them better and studies them that she realises that Covid is hampering their recovery. Also, people who are in hospital with Covid still have to go through the process of being isolated and everything else, whether or not it is affecting them. I would like the messaging to get away from whether people are in hospital with or because of Covid, as that muddies the waters. How do we get over that?

Will Jason Leitch confirm my latter point?

I have a follow-up question. Have you had engagement with the UK Government on the inflationary pressures that your budget will face, given that that inflation has been a relatively new thing and that it has been rising exponentially? Have you had negotiations about that shortfall?

I am slightly confused by that last line of questioning. There is no doubt that Brexit has caused massive problems for our workforce. I have had constant correspondence from businesses in my constituency and right across the country about our huge lack of labour. I take the point about the demonisation of some industries, in calling them low skilled or saying that they involve only labour. A lot of the jobs that we are talking about are highly skilled, and the loss of our European workforce has been significant.

Recently, I had a discussion with a butcher, who made the point that, although he could increase his wages by 10 or 15 per cent, he would only be taking people from some other place, because the labour pool is stagnant. It is stuck, because we do not have freedom of movement.

Cabinet secretary, what steps are you taking? I know that you have instigated a discussion with the UK Government about a Scottish visa scheme to try to tackle the Scottish issue, and I think that there might be a rural migration pilot scheme as well. Will you outline what those schemes are and how they might help us to get through the current labour shortage crisis?

The cabinet secretary has answered an awful lot of the questions that I wanted to drill into. I have serious concerns about the Subsidy Control Bill. As a very recently retired farmer, I know how vital direct payments are to farmers across the country.

Also, I have written down, “Why has the UK said agriculture hasn’t been taken out, given that there are protections from the WTO?” and you have kind of answered that on the basis that there was a consultation. The question that sprang to my mind is: who did the UK consult? I cannot think of a single farmer or farming organisation in Scotland that would have wanted the Subsidy Control Bill to go through in its current form, which, if I am not wrong, is in the second reading in the House of Lords, meaning that its passage is imminent. Who did the UK consult with? I just cannot see how the Scottish agricultural industry would have agreed to the Subsidy Control Bill going through in its current form.

Is that the explanation that we have in paper 1? It says that questions about how much of the £40 million had been spent in 2020-21 were raised during last years’ budget scrutiny in the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee. At that point, only £18 million had been committed under a pilot scheme. Was only £18 million committed because there were not enough applications or because people could not get hold of products? What kind of products could people not get hold of and where were they coming from?

The Scottish Parliament information centre papers that we have been given show a 2.6 per cent real-terms decrease due to inflationary pressures. Is there anything that the Scottish Government can do to mitigate that decrease, given that you have a decreased budget coming from Westminster?