You are saying that as though that is the only thing that they can do, but it is not.

It would very much depend on how many apply. I do not know whether there has been any indication of that but we know that it has happened elsewhere. If we had to expand the budget, it would have to come out of the agriculture budget.

Yes. There is the potential that producers growing in England could be POs in Scotland.

You are saying that it was not discussed behind the scenes, but there was a consultation. It was consulted on.

As Alasdair Allan pointed out, if we do not pass the SSI and we get a large number of POs wanting to join the system in Scotland, how much money will that take out of the budget? We have no mechanism, because it was reserved by the UK Government back down to England so that it would make the decisions about what the criteria were. That would then impact our overall budget for the agricultural system.

Well, it is a continuation of a legacy scheme. There is no doubt about that, but it is a legacy scheme that works for producer organisations in Scotland.

There is some confusion about what the purpose of the scheme actually is. It is designed to allow smaller producers to get together and become a producer organisation. That allows them to get access to funding that would make them more viable and to achieve environmental benefits—there are producers that, as a result of being part of a PO, have gone from using peat to using coir. There are things that producers can do as part of a scheme that they would not be able to do individually.

The purpose of the SSI is to protect that funding in Scotland, because there is now the potential for producer organisation members in English schemes to join Scottish schemes and therefore start to erode that budget. The purpose of the SSI is to protect the budget and the integrity of the scheme for Scottish growers only. I make no apology for that.

On how we get funding to smaller producers, we are actively looking at how we can support smaller producers through other legislation. The SSI is specifically about the continuation of the scheme, which is vitally important.

I have met members of the producer organisations, and, in all the early conversations that I had with them, I emphasised how important the scheme is to their ability to keep on adapting and developing. They live in an incredibly competitive marketplace, so they have to have all the tools available to them to allow them to be as competitive as possible, while looking at how they can reduce emissions and be more environmentally friendly.

It is a really good scheme, and it works for our producers. That is why we should really want to protect it.

I think that they run until 2028, but I will let Debbie Kessell talk about the technical aspects.

It is for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to say why it moved away from that arrangement—I have no idea. The scheme is another Brexit bonus. The provision used to be funded through the EU, but that funding was stopped when we left the EU. Now, for some reason that is unfathomable to me, DEFRA has decided that the system does not work with regard to helping us to fund the people who are producing the very things that we should be producing more of.

On the pilot fund, it is true that we cite it in discussions about this area, but I stress that it is a pilot. If it is not giving us the answers that we are looking for in terms of how we build resilience across the country, we will continue to look at what would work. I am absolutely open to doing all of that, because I am as keen as you are to make sure that we have resilience in our small producers right across the country.

I will answer your question about the membership of the producer organisations, then bring in George Burgess to talk briefly about the pilot fund.

There is a range of sizes of businesses in the POs. In one of the meetings that I had with a PO, I saw some of the biggest fruit producers in the country sitting beside people who have very small-scale operations and whose only way to develop and grow their business is by being part of that producer organisation.

No. We need this SSI because right now we are where we are.

We have not brought forward another scheme, but have continued to provide the fruit and veg aid scheme to support resilience, and we have the small producers pilot fund. There is a need to pass the SSI in order to protect the scheme.

Is there scope for us to do more? Yes. I have already stated that to at least three other members. Could we have done something sooner? Potentially. However, I was not part of the Government at that point and I have no idea what those early discussions were.

What I can tell you is that you can pass the SSI today in order to give security to that part of the industry, and then we can focus on the other areas and start developing policy to build resilience, as I have already explained to other members of the committee.