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I have to stop you there, because I am not asking you whether the NFUS has any concerns about the Scottish Government’s policy; rather, I am asking you how you respond to its concern—as expressed to other parliamentary committees—that measures such as the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 constrain the future ability of the Scottish Parliament to make its own policy on agriculture.

That would be helpful. I suspect that the costs are more difficult to bear for smaller businesses. I will briefly quote a couple of examples from my constituency. Donald Joseph Maclean of Barratlantic said:

“The new export systems mean it doesn’t make economic sense to send smaller individual deliveries to Europe like before, as these now cost the same as large consignments to process ... As a result, we now bundle smaller orders together in the same consignment ... The costs of Brexit are astronomical and I feel for smaller suppliers who are struggling.”

Another constituent, Amber Knight of MacNeil Shellfish, said:

“it has added a lot of extra pressure and workload that was created overnight. Most businesses going through that level of organisational change would not manage. It’s tough keeping it up and staying consistent, and it has added huge costs.”

You acknowledge that there is likely to be a degree of variation, but do you appreciate the concerns of smaller businesses such as those about trying to cope with all this?

You mentioned that you do not want to talk about trade wars, and you were critical of ministers in Ireland for using such language. However, can you understand why they and others might be fearful about that very situation, if the UK is prepared to step away from what is an international agreement in the form of the Northern Ireland protocol?

Has the UK made any specific assessment of production costs for businesses in Scotland as a result of having to bear the cost of the border controls that we have just touched on?

The UK Government has spoken about bespoke solutions for rural areas when it comes to migration policy. Did we not have that when we had freedom of movement for workers across Europe?

I asked because the visas to which you refer do not appear to be meeting demand and, more generally, because I wonder whether the UK Government appreciates that Scotland has a particular demographic issue in that our overall population has barely gone up in the past century. Our challenge has been outward migration. Is it perhaps time to reconsider the proposals in relation to rural and other areas of Scotland that the Scottish Government put to the UK Government again and again for tailored visas of the kind that exist, for example, for the Canadian provinces, so that you can meet the demographic and labour needs in Scotland more accurately?

Again, I do not understand the comparison. You are making a comparison with the kind of constraints that existed when we were in the EU, but we are no longer in the EU and, since 1998, agriculture has been virtually entirely devolved. We have already heard about GM crops; many people ask about the ability of the Scottish Parliament to legislate on GM crops in the future. Another example is bodies that speak up for people with alcohol problems, who have questioned whether the Scottish Parliament would be able to legislate in the way that it has done on minimum unit pricing for alcohol, if the internal market act and the other laws that we mentioned are to stand in future. Do you understand those concerns?

Like Karen Adam’s amendments, my amendments seek to respond to a call from the committee for more scrutiny in specific areas. The bill, as introduced, contains a number of regulation-making powers, among which are powers for ministers to specify functions or descriptions of functions for Scottish ministers and relevant authorities, to specify additional authorities as relevant and to specify a timeframe within which a relevant authority must produce a good food nation plan. The bill also provides that any regulations that are made using those powers will be subject to the negative procedure in the Scottish Parliament. However, the committee has agreed that that offers insufficient opportunity to scrutinise the relevant secondary legislation.

In our stage 1 report, the committee requested that the first exercise of the power conferred by section 4 to specify functions for the Scottish ministers and any exercise of the power conferred by section 7(2)(c) to make a public authority a relevant authority should be subject to greater levels of parliamentary scrutiny. My amendments 60 and 68 provide for that extra scrutiny. They would also ensure that, if the Scottish ministers wished to make regulations making a public body a relevant authority that would be required to produce a good food nation plan, those regulations would be subject to the affirmative procedure.

I believe that to be the correct level of scrutiny for those regulations, and my amendments respond to the committee’s view on the issue. I urge the committee to support the amendments in my name.

In relation to that, how does your work on strategic objectives on fuel poverty in an island context relate to recent fuel price hikes? I am sure that other members who represent islands are more than aware of that. I am very aware that the price of heating oil, which is still the main source of heating in areas off the gas grid, seems to be accelerating even beyond the dizzy heights of the cost of other fuels. How do you adjust those strategic objectives as you go, to ensure that you take account of what is happening at the UK level?

I want to turn briefly to the islands survey and return to the familiar theme of housing. One theme that came out of the survey was that of younger people expressing the complications that they experience in coming back to an island after being away for education or work elsewhere. How can the Government respond to that problem, given that, as we have heard, many islands face a labour shortage?