Seòmar agus comataidhean

I go back to the point that I made earlier. You are saying that there are glaring mistakes. They will not necessarily be mistakes, however. If they are, I will be more than happy to go back and say, “Okay, maybe we have got that wrong, and we will change it.” That was the whole purpose of making the legislation a framework bill. I absolutely accept that we will not get everything right. As we start to implement things, if we need to change something—and we have the ability to do that through secondary legislation—we will do so. We could not have done that if everything had been set out in the bill itself, as was constantly demanded by the committee.

If there are things that become a real issue, I am more than happy, as minister, to look at them and ask whether we are getting things right and how we can change them. In fact, I think I gave that commitment at my previous evidence session, when I said that we will look at things as we develop the policy. The 2025 single application forms will come in, we will see what happens with them, and that will allow us to ask whether the processes that we are implementing, which we are asking people to be part of, are working. If they are not, why is that? What do we need to do to make them work? Do we need to change them?

That is part of the co-development of policy. I am repeating myself but, if we had told the committee and the industry, “There’s your policy. Get on with it,” we would have got it wrong. We have seen how it is possible to get it wrong—all you need to do is look south of the border.

I agree that that would have been the ideal scenario. As I stated at the time, I did not understand why we were getting pushback at the very late stages—but, for whatever reason, we did. If concerns were raised, they were taken into consideration. There was an awful lot of official engagement at the grass-roots level to make proposals about how to make the measures work and to ask if everybody was on board with that.

I accept that the crofting situation is slightly different. I have given you a commitment that the force majeure provision will be in place this year, and it will be a matter of looking sympathetically at any issues that crofters in particular or people farming in the most remote areas have, particularly concerning smaller herds. I have given that commitment before.

If the policy is not working, I am prepared to take another look at it. I have given that commitment before, too. To me, that is part of co-development and getting it right. If we try something and it is not working, we will consider how to change it. Does it still achieve the policy objective?

I spent my weekend travelling round the crofting counties for exactly the reason you are talking about: if there are things that we are not picking up in one forum, I want to go to another forum. I went round Lewis, Harris and Skye, and I met large numbers of crofters. Our discussions were largely on the proposed crofting bill, but we also touched on other things. That engagement and level of interaction is exactly what will allow us to develop the policy.

I get that it is frustrating. I understand that. However, we cannot make a one-size-fits-all piece of legislation and say, “Here it is,” because that will not work. We want to make sure that we do it in a way that gets to the end of the route map that tells us what the policy looks like. Even once we get to that, policy will continue to change and evolve as circumstances change. That was the beauty of using a framework bill.

I think that you are asking me whether I am hearing them or simply listening to them. Every time I have such conversations, I take them away, chew them over, rack my brains and think, “How do we make that work? Is that gonnae work for them? If this is gonnae be a problem, how do we mitigate that?” That is the job. That is what we have to do.

We will not always get it right. We will not always be able to say, “You know what? We can fix that,” because we cannot always fix things. However, I will do my utmost to hear what people are saying and to work out how I can make that fit into what we are trying to do and how the system will allow them to be a part of that process. That is in my thinking all the time. It is not easy.

On the convener’s question about why QMS was not included in 2008, I do not know. I do not think that my officials understand why it was not included in 2008.

The convener also made the point that QMS has an internal complaints procedure, which is absolutely correct. However, that does not give a complainant a second body to go to if they are not happy with the procedure that has been carried out by QMS. The ombudsman gives the complainant—whoever they may happen to be—the opportunity to go to an external body and say, “I’m not comfortable or happy with this, and I’d like you to have another look at it.” That is the reason why QMS is being included as a body under the ombudsman’s jurisdiction.

There were a couple of points in there. I will bring in Mandy Callaghan on how ARIOB was designed and its function.

That is a fair point. I will turn to George Burgess to explain how we measure that.

Now that you have asked me that question, I remember being on this committee when we were concerned about the number of people who were taking up the schemes, because that was not happening quickly enough. I distinctly remember the convener, in particular, saying that people were not taking up the schemes, which meant that the message was not getting out.

We now know that the numbers have risen exponentially, which is a measure of whether our message is getting out. I do not know whether there is a technical thing that we do to measure engagement—I honestly cannot tell you that—but I do know that we get the results of the things that we are putting out and how that transfers into people taking action. A huge number of people are now getting involved in the things that have been made available to them, which is in stark contrast to where we were 18 months to two years ago, when I sat on this committee.

When their president and their director of policy are going around the country saying, “You need to be aware of this,” that is tremendously effective. I am delighted that we have a working relationship with the NFUS and can have conversations and say, “We need to get this out to your members. What’s the best way to disseminate that? We will do our bit as Government, but, if you do your bit, too, through your relationship with your members, that helps us to get the information out there.” That is a fundamental point.

I watched that meeting. I was disappointed by some of the comments and am very disappointed by some of those that you have just read out. I disagree with all of them. I absolutely accept that there will be tensions in the room—I very much took on board the criticisms of ARIOB. However, when I reflect on that, I think about where we were and where we are trying to go.

We talk about co-development and a just transition until they become just words and phrases and people start switching off, but the processes and principles behind them are absolutely essential. Co-development is about sitting down in the room with the stakeholders who are going to have access to more than £640 million of public funds. There will be differences of opinion when those diverse groups are sitting in the room, and being part of the co-design does not mean that you get what you want every time you ask for it; it means getting the opportunity to speak directly to ministers and officials and to talk about the requirements for the part of the sector that you are really passionate about.

Our job is to take that away, distil it down and think about how to take all the competing views and the requirements on us, as a Government, to reach the policy objectives that Parliament has agreed on. We have to pull all of that together to get a coherent policy. That is hard—it is not easy—but what underpins all of that is our absolute determination to continue that co-development and those conversations and to continue taking diverse views as we consider how to get this right.

We have made progress. We have the calf scheme, the whole-farm plan and the audits. We have things in place. We do not want to listen to what everyone says and then tell them that there is a system that they have to go with, because that would be a cliff edge. That might sound like a cliché, but that would be the cliff edge that the cabinet secretary committed not to take the Scottish system towards. We have seen what happened when other parts of the UK went down that road, and the Scottish Government is determined that that will not be the case here. I think we are on a trajectory that will let us allow farmers to put baselines into their own farms and work out where they are on the trajectory, so that they know what they need to do to move forward.

I absolutely take on board the criticisms that the committee aimed at us last week. We will consider those criticisms and will justify our reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with them, but I am more committed to ensuring that we continue our engagement in order to get the best possible policies.

No consultation was done, as none was required. However, QMS is aware that it will be covered by the ombudsman.

I disagree. When I talk about farming systems down south, I am merely giving an example. If you get something wrong, it is catastrophic and, as you and I will agree, a system of inheritance tax has been brought in that is going to be catastrophic for family farms—