Chamber and committees

Before we get the views of the other witnesses, I will come back on that point. We see that our cattle and sheep numbers are falling, but if our imports will increase to fill that gap, we will—while our balance sheet might look a bit better—be importing something that is not fed on grass, which is a carbon store. How do we get the balance right in that regard? We are not an island on our own in all of this.

No one is arguing that payments should not be made on time. The big issue is that we cannot change what we pay. If you want to increase screening and put more into the system to change the direction, the computer system will not work. Are we really saying that we need a new system? I remember when the system came in. It was a disaster. I sat in committee sessions looking at what went wrong. At that point, it was clear that it could not be put right. Are we really in need of a new system? We have to keep the current one in order to make the payments, but, if we are going to change what we do and move away from the CAP, we need a new system that will do that.

Okay.

But if ARIOB was working, this would not be the case. Take the instrument on calving intervals—the Rural Support (Improvement) (Miscellaneous Amendment) (Scotland) Regulations 2024. That gave rise to an issue for rural areas and islands, and you have admitted that. You have said that you will look at that again. That was discussed at ARIOB, yet we got an instrument that created real concerns in the industry. If ARIOB was working, those concerns should have been ironed out there, and we should have got a piece of legislation that nobody commented about.

The seventh carbon budget report identified measures that needed to be taken to lower emissions in agriculture, such as adopting low-carbon machinery and reducing livestock numbers. What measures do you think are the most important and require the most attention from Government when it comes to lowering emissions? Those could possibly be different things, because there might be some easy things that could be done, but also some things that cannot really be done without Government intervention.

Why are we hearing that the system is a blocker on policy direction?

If there are glaring errors in that jigsaw, and if your explanation to us for that is that the matter was not mentioned at ARIOB, but we go to the members of ARIOB and they say, “Yes, it was,” then that is not working. If members of ARIOB are pointing out things that you appreciate, from talking to us, are issues, but you are not hearing it from them, then the arrangements are not working.

I do not want to hog the session, but I have more questions.

To me, that is an indication that ARIOB is not working. The committee is not part of that co-production—maybe we would like to be a part of it—but we are supposed to scrutinise and vote on legislation. It is surely not right that things that are discussed with the industry end up before us as issues.

On the vision, to go back to the jigsaw analogy, most of us look at the picture of the finished thing as we put the bits in place, but in this instance, no one sees that picture as the bits are being placed. That is creating uncertainty in the industry. People do not quite know what the finished product will be.

For instance, we hear a lot about emissions from beef and dairy animal rearing. People who are involved in such rearing do not know what the Government is going to do or what it will encourage, so numbers in animal breeding are falling, which means that we are importing meat from other countries that do not have anything close to our ability to offset carbon.

How can people work with that? Everyone is happy that there is no cliff edge, but they need at least to know the direction of travel so that they can move in that direction. That is missing.

I want to push a little further on that. I totally get where animals are being fed, but a lot of our animals are grass fed—they are on the hill. That is not arable ground; it is different. They are there, and they are providing a nature benefit as well. We have seen that, where livestock numbers have crashed, that has had an impact on the natural environment. How do we get the balance? At some level, having animals grass fed on the hills is providing a nature benefit. What happens if we lose that? There is always a balance between carbon and nature and what we do to protect both.

No action whatsoever has been taken, and we are seeing the results of that now.

The week before last, I asked the First Minister about a resilience fund, which the Scottish Labour Party has been pushing for. He gave me a hopeful answer, but then I heard what he said in answer to Alasdair Allan who asked him about travel being charged to people as if they were taking the original vessel, which was off. That happens anyway: if people are rerouted because a vessel is off, they have to pay only the cost of their original journey, but we are looking for a resilience fund to pay people’s additional costs. I have heard of people having to spend three nights in a hotel because of a lack of capacity before they can get the next service to the islands.

Businesses are failing—they desperately need a resilience fund. It could be paid for through the fines that are imposed on CalMac for cancellations and late sailings. That would allow businesses to get compensation so that they do not fail, because if they fail, we will have further depopulation of the islands.

Katy Clark and Jamie Greene talked about the Arran ferry going to Ardrossan and the issues that that causes in Ardrossan. Only under this Government could we build, for a service, a ferry that cannot even fit in the port. The Government has had seven years to change that, but it has still not changed it. That adds to costs, and it is total mismanagement.

Of course, we support the direct award of the contract to CalMac. It does not, to an extent, really matter who is running the service, because they will still have to deal with the same old ferries that do not work. The only difference would be that another company would be paying dividends to shareholders, as well as fines to the Scottish Government simply because the ferries do not work.

Many members talked about the small ferry contract and the fact that it has gone abroad. Willie Rennie talked about learning lessons from the past, but those lessons do not seem to have been learned at all. The building of the Glen Sannox and the Glen Rosa has been an absolute disaster, and the blame for that lies with the Scottish Government. Its governance arrangements were non-existent, the contracts were let without a design sign-off, and the decision on dual fuel, which will never be used, was part of a vanity project.

Sue Webber was right—if the Government does not shape up its act, it will doom Ferguson’s, and we cannot allow that to happen. It needs to act to ensure that Ferguson’s is working, to keep the employees who have done such an excellent job, and to stop failing them by giving them the wrong contracts. The small ferry contracts would have been much better for Ferguson’s than the two large ferry contracts, which had no space for the second ferry.

We need a 25-year plan for replacement of the fleet: we must have that in place. Scottish yards must know when ferry contracts will be put out to tender so that they can be prepared, and so that we can schedule that work in our own yards.

Islanders need ferry services that are designed by them and that work for them. Until we have governance structures that ensure that responsibility and good management are in place, until we have a Scottish Government that admits that it does not know best, and until people who are dependent on ferries make the decisions that affect ferries, nothing will change.