Chamber and committees

Sorry, what was that?

If I have not, I have agreed a letter to go to the committee. There is always a time lag between me saying that something is fine to go and it hitting the committee’s email inbox.

We have the Scottish Crofting Federation, Scottish Environment LINK, which represents a great number of environmental non-governmental organisations, Scottish Land & Estates, WWF Scotland, NFU Scotland, the Confederation of Forest Industries, the Soil Association, the RSPB, the Nature Friendly Farming Network, the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association, Woodland Trust Scotland and the Scottish Association of Young Farmers Clubs.

We did not want to have a big unwieldy group, and we felt that some of the representatives—particularly Scottish Environment LINK, which is quite a big membership group—would represent their members. I hope that we have the balance right. We have had only one meeting. If we feel that we need to bring in other expertise on certain areas of our work programme, we will do so. We will be agile with that membership. We had an excellent, positive first meeting in which we discussed the things that we might want to include in our work programme.

09:15

A number of streams of funding are directly applicable to community cohesion and community work, on top of everything that Mr Fairlie has said about how farming can be the linchpin for a lot of activity. When we left the EU, we left behind LEADER funding and we therefore brought in community-led local development funding. In this year’s budget, just over £9.3 million is associated with that. Since we lost LEADER funding, there has been about £55 million in the fund and around 1,300 local community groups have benefited from it. During the summer, Mr Fairlie and I went all over Scotland and saw examples of where that has been used.

There are additional funding streams that support community development. We have the carbon-neutral islands scheme. A lot of the money in that is used for improving infrastructure, such as retrofitting housing stock that has become damp and unliveable by installing heat pumps and better insulation. Many things that are integral to resilient communities are outwith the rural support plan and in different funding streams in the budget lines that I am in charge of.

Budgets are negotiated year on year. We go into budget negotiations with certainty about the commitment for what will be in the agriculture portfolio, which is £660 million for this year. We want to be able to maintain that.

I also want to talk about the AECS budget—apologies; I have fallen into the trap of using acronyms. The agri-environment climate scheme promotes a lot of the land management practices for tier 3 that I think Dawn Black alluded to. We have already said that that will increase in the five-year period from £106 million this year to £151 million in 2030-31. The trajectory has already been set out. No other part of the UK has that multiyear certainty. We are constantly monitoring the outcomes that are associated with the payments and everything that is associated with what we want the outcomes to do, and we are able to be agile and shift money around in the portfolio.

Some of the budget lines that I deal with are demand led. There will be periods when the demand is not there for one scheme and so I will be able to move funding into a scheme for which there is demand and which will have outcomes that relate to emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, stemming biodiversity loss or any of the other good practices that we want to see on farms. We have the agility to do that. I would be a hostage to fortune if I were to say, “We are going to do X amount in tier X in this year,” because things will need to be adapted to the analysis of the outcomes.

I think that the minister answered that in a previous answer, although I might be wrong. We have set out that the fisheries management plans will be done after the consultation and work on inshore marine protected areas. The minister set out why we had to let that process happen first, to inform the fisheries plan.

I ask you to reflect on my point that we are looking at capacity in the various functions of the marine directorate, where the expertise is, and where the capacity is currently not meeting the demand. There are changing pressures on the marine directorate and we need to be fleet of foot in addressing those.

The situation is not black and white. I certainly did not hear the minister say anything about the marine directorate that suggested that the stakeholders who you spoke to were “incorrect”, which I think was the word that you used. We are alive to the fact that there are pressures on parts of the marine directorate where we need to look at capacity. I alluded to the fact that the director general net zero is looking across all directorates to see where there are capacity issues—where there is overcapacity or undercapacity, and where we need to get additional expertise into the Scottish Government to address the demand that exists for all our directorates.

It remains to be seen whether there will be significant impacts on my portfolio. I am already bringing together three public bodies into a single agency. NatureScot and SEPA are particularly large organisations, and Zero Waste Scotland will merge with them. NatureScot is a body that owns and manages land.

I guess that this is a discussion for the whole of Government. It will take place between Mr McKee and all the cabinet secretaries who have responsibility for organisations that manage public land assets, as well as those organisations themselves. What happens will be born out of the discussions across the Cabinet involving Mr McKee and the relevant cabinet secretaries, including me. I have set out quite clearly, and at an early stage, the three public bodies that I want to bring into a single environmental agency.

I will not read out any more numbers.

First, I do want to talk about livestock numbers. I have wanted to talk about livestock numbers every time I have been asked about that. I feel very annoyed that I was misrepresented in the way that I was. As soon as the Climate Change Committee gave advice to the Scottish Government that we should have policies in place to reduce livestock numbers as part of our climate change plan and our carbon budgets, I, along with the former cabinet secretary, Mairi Gougeon, and the First Minister, immediately said that that was not an option for Scotland.

First, that is because we do not want to offshore our emissions and import food that we could grow here. There are many other ways in which we can reduce emissions on farms that have nothing to do with livestock numbers coming down but are about how we farm, feed and look after the animals.

I want to get this on the record once again: we have no policies in place to actively reduce livestock numbers. This will not be the last time that someone tries to get me to say otherwise. I accept that people will be political about the issue but, when people are political about it and put out misinformation on what I or anyone else has said on the issue, that damages the confidence of farmers and affects people’s mental health. That was what I was hearing. I had to refute that point in talking to farmers in my area, who knew that I had not said it but who thought that it might be a prospect.

I am on the record countless times on that issue. There is no mutual exclusivity between farming well to produce food and doing so in a way that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve biodiversity. In fact, that is the key to those objectives.

Can I come back in on that point?