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When the idea of introducing a vaccination passport was proposed, it slightly concerned me. However, we all accept that coronavirus kills people and that we cannot really know with any certainty how the virus will change or what other variants there will be. We also accept that the vaccine has had a huge impact in relation to helping us to control the virus, which has enabled us to have the current freedoms. That is my starting point. I am pretty sure that everyone on the committee would agree that that is what we should be considering, given that there is a world pandemic.

Earlier, Alex Rowley touched on an issue about care homes. I will go to the extreme end of how we deal with the situation: we either shut down society, or we go to the next extreme end. There is a care home company based in England—I cannot remember its name—which, I think, has a care home in my constituency. It is sacking people who have not agreed to get vaccinated on the basis that they cannot be guaranteed to protect the people whom they are employed to protect. The care home is balancing the human rights of the person who does not want to be vaccinated against the rights of the person who requires to be protected. How do the witnesses feel about that situation?

We are not saying that we will use vaccination passports in isolation to try to suppress the virus. The messaging is still the same: we are still asking people to wear masks indoors and take all the necessary hygiene precautions. We are still doing everything else that we are currently doing. Vaccination passports are an add-on that are targeted at a specific area where we want there to be a greater uptake of vaccines and to ensure that we suppress the virus’s ability to spread. You said that we reduce transmission by 50 per cent if people get the vaccine. The policy is another layer of our ability to suppress the virus. Do you accept that?

My second question is more constituency based. We still have constituents who are getting their first jag in England and their second jag in Scotland, but the connection has not yet been made, so they are struggling to get their vaccination certificate. Are we any closer to getting a solution to that?

First, I will ask about the factors that you are considering in relation to COP26, which you briefly outlined. Were any lessons learned from the recent G7 summit, or were there any problems after it? Are some of the systems that you will put in place for COP26 similar to what happened with the G7 summit?

My reason for asking that was to do with proportionality in relation to balancing the rights of the individual against the rights of the community. The care home is a microcosm of our approach. We accept that we are giving people a choice. We say that people can work in a care home but that they must do certain things to protect those who live or work there. As Jonathan Montgomery said, we can make it a condition that they have to be double vaccinated.

In the process of deciding whether we will have Covid vaccination passports, we are also giving a choice. As someone who believes in independence, I do not necessarily agree that we should take our lessons from elsewhere—we should be free thinking ourselves—but Covid vaccination passports are being introduced throughout the world. People have the choice to go to a nightclub or to football. Those are social events. Is it proportionate to say that, because we know that football matches and nightclubs are places where the virus spreads, if people choose to go there, they have an obligation for the greater good of society to try to mitigate the effects of the disease? Do you agree with that principle?

Excellent—my constituents will be delighted.

We are looking at a 50:50 policy. Would it be a harder sell to have complete conditionality on public funds for public goods, as there is in the UK scheme, where there is no mention of food production at all? I am not asking you to be political. We want the farming community to go with the policy and embrace it. Will it be easier to get it to embrace a policy in which farmers are still regarded as food producers or a policy where they are regarded as—I am quoting—“nothing but park keepers”?

The question of profitability and resilience in the sector is a very loaded one, because there are so many different sectors, and profitability and resilience will be different across each sector.

I will come to Davy McCracken first, because I want to look at where the profitability and resilience will come from in hill and upland farming. We have already touched on what you called planting trees, rather than forestry—I am glad that you did, because I would like us to get away from the conflict between trees and farming. There has to be a way to integrate them. I can see real opportunities for us to develop a timber industry that farmers could be part of. There are bound to be jobs that can be created out of a timber industry. In addition, rather than having sheds, maybe we could have woodland. I would like to explore some of those issues and how we can tie that in with making sure that we have profitability and resilience in the upland sector.

Can you clarify that? Are you talking about getting support to those farms that are already doing the things that they have been asked to do over the past number of years and continuing to recognise that?

The question is probably directed at Stephen Young and Christopher Nicholson. Earlier, I had a question in my head about tenants’ fears about support for tree planting, peat restoration and stuff like that. We have kind of skittered around that. I would like to understand the relationship between the landowner—who might be investing in planting trees while taking support from the Government to do so—and the tenant, and how that affects the tenant. When I talk about tenants, I am talking not just about pre-1991 tenants but about people who have long-term leases. Is there equity in costs and the funding that comes into a farm as a result of that? How do you differentiate? If the tenant has a 20-year lease but the trees will not be harvested for 30 years, how will that work?