Chamber and committees

As I said, I believe that the process for engaging on the frameworks that have been published has already been set out. However, it will be up to the committee to determine how it undertakes that scrutiny. Obviously, I am willing to engage in that process with the committee. I want to be open and transparent and to work with you as much as possible. If you want to have a discussion about some of the frameworks that will be coming forward and how we will undertake that process—although some of that is for the committee to determine—I am more than open to engaging in that process with you.

The evidence that we have has shown that there has been a dramatic drop. You will have heard a lot of that evidence articulated in the debate on labour shortages that took place yesterday. My rural affairs and islands role includes responsibility for the food and drink industry, which has been heavily affected by Brexit. You can see that there has been a massive shift and a drop in population in relation to the industry’s labour needs. There is no doubt that there have been dramatic changes there.

We have had to consider specific things that we can do within our own powers. Yesterday, I announced some of the rural visa pilots that we will consider. It is very frustrating that our labour needs and population needs tend to be ignored by the UK Government. A number of approaches have been made by me and by colleagues across Government to UK ministers in the Home Office, which have largely been ignored. I think that more than 19 attempts were made at the last count, whether by letter or otherwise, to address some of the issues that we are facing at the moment. There is a refusal to engage with us on some of the issues, unfortunately.

They feel that the impacts are massive. I undertake extensive engagement with stakeholders across the piece, and labour is the issue that has been raised first and foremost above any others. A lot of businesses have been at crisis levels.

There is a fortnightly meeting with the food sector resilience group, at which we engage with our food and drink stakeholders. I understand, from hearing about some of the issues that have been experienced, that 63 per cent of seafood processors have experienced shortages and that some of them are up to 15 per cent down. I have heard story after story about various businesses losing out on multimillion-pound contracts purely because they were not able to fulfil the orders required of them, as they did not have the staff available to them.

There was also the announcement on Christmas eve about the seasonal agricultural workers scheme. Disappointingly, it will be tapered off over the course of the next few years, and that has been met with anger by many of our stakeholders and by NFU Scotland, who are seriously concerned about the impact of labour shortages on the sector.

Those are the issues that we continue to raise time after time with the UK Government, as shortages are at critical levels. I would be happy to check the figures on social care and tourism with colleagues who are responsible for those areas and to come back to the committee with further information as to the impacts there. As acute as the shortages are across the sectors for which I am responsible, there are acute shortages across the piece, which disproportionately impact our rural communities.

That is not the case at all. We are looking at a number of employment initiatives. Of course we want to encourage people to work in these different sectors. The food and drink industry is such an exciting sector and there is so much that we can do to promote it as a career that our young people can engage with and get involved in.

A number of initiatives are working on that, and we are also looking at some initiatives to try to tackle depopulation. However, there is no getting away from the fact that, although we can do these things, they are medium to long-term interventions but the immediate critical issue is helping businesses to survive. That is what we need to address.

I will bring Jesus Gallego in on that point.

There have been some changes to the agricultural transformation budget. We have committed to £25 million overall in relation to agricultural transformation this year, and part of that funding is identified in the budget this year. There is also the £51 million that has been identified for the national test programme, which is spend that we have allocated over the next three years.

One of the main reasons for reducing the agricultural transformation budget was that there are no financial transactions as part of that for this year. There are a number of reasons for that. For example, equipment was not available, which meant that it was difficult to identify options for a loan scheme that would be available for capital projects.

Any loans that we might have been able to offer would have had to be at commercial rates to avoid state aid issues and they would therefore have been unlikely to attract a wide range of applicants when compared to existing loan products. There is also no readily available mechanism that would allow commercial-type loans to be administered by the rural payments and inspections division or elsewhere in the Scottish Government.

The overall reduction in financial transactions relates to £20 million, so it made no sense for us to include that in the budget when we knew that there was no realistic chance that it would be used, for the reasons that I have set out.

In the financial memorandum that accompanies the bill, we have set out some of the costs associated with what we currently expect in relation to the spend. The main costs are administrative and relate to consultation and the publication of the good food nation plans. We have estimated that, for the first year, costs will be somewhere in the region of £30,000 and decrease for subsequent years. We do not expect the costs that are associated with the bill to be a huge burden.

Absolutely. We decided to separate this year’s spending on the islands programme into three strands of funding. We had the islands infrastructure fund, the communities fund and the healthy islands fund—the projects from that fund were announced last week.

We committed to spending £30 million over a five-year period up to 2025—I emphasise that we are still committed to that—but we are proposing a reprofiling of the spend. Putting forward the amount that we have for this year means that we will be able to work on some longer-term infrastructure projects over a slightly longer timeframe and not be constrained by budgetary years. In essence, that means that although there is a £4 million allocation this year, there will be an increase in spend as we move to later financial years.

No specific contingency budget has been identified. The whole aim of our legislation is to prevent us from reaching that stage by ensuring that island communities impact assessments are built in to policy and decision making. The assessments are required to evaluate and take into account the impacts of our policies, strategies and services on island communities. Our officials work every day to ensure that the needs of island communities are fully considered as part of existing policies and of any policies that we create in the future.

The national test programme comes from funding that was previously ring fenced for agriculture. Some £10 million of the £25 million identified is for the national test programme. The £10 million that we have put in the budget this year is part of the overall £51 million that I announced last year for the national test programme.

Of the £25 million identified for this year, there is the £10 million that I have just mentioned, there is the £5 million capital spend and there is a further £10 million for development support. I hope that that explains the situation.