Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am glad that you moved on to that. You are suggesting that parts of the rural economy get funding from elsewhere. While we are still to see exactly how agricultural support is going to be reformed in the future, is the Government planning to place more emphasis on funding farmers and crofters to deliver on the priorities that you have set out previously around climate change and biodiversity loss, to counteract the cost to the sector? As more agricultural policy change takes place, are we likely to see an increased budget in order to deliver those policy changes?

You said that there is additional funding for climate and biodiversity. It is not additional funding, though, because the agriculture pot has decreased significantly in real terms. All that you are doing is reallocating money within an ever-decreasing funding pot while expecting farmers to deliver more. The pot has got smaller, but farmers have to get involved in schemes on climate change, biodiversity or whatever, and they are expected to do more for less. Is that likely to continue when we see more agricultural reform, or will there be further funding to help to deliver those schemes?

09:15

Tim Eagle has touched on the rural support plan. You rightly referred to the minister’s letter saying that the rural support plan will be published as soon as possible, and that it will take the budget process into consideration. At the moment, the budget is more or less business as usual—nothing has really changed, and we are working with the same amount of money. There is an expectation, however, that the rural support plan will deliver some new policy frameworks and, potentially, some new schemes. Are you expecting those new schemes, payments or whatever to come out of the budget that is in front of us, or are you expecting there to be additional funding to deliver some of the new policies and schemes in the rural support plan when it is published?

I appreciate that. Given that the budgets go up and down from one year to the next, it is important for us to understand how much budget there is overall. I am not expecting you to do it now, but if you could perhaps write to us with what the cumulative spend on agricultural transformation and the agricultural reform programme has been since 2021, when those were announced, that would give us an idea of what the budget has been. That is not particularly clear in the budget papers that we have.

Okay. Thank you.

I am minded to have a 10-minute break between the sessions on the two different portfolios, so I suspend the meeting for 10 minutes.

10:15

Meeting suspended.

10:28

On resuming—

Welcome back. We will continue our budget scrutiny and consider the budget for the marine directorate. Once again, for the third consecutive year, there will be a real-terms decrease in its funding. The budget commits to replacing two marine protection and research vessels, along with continuing programmes of fisheries modernisation. How can that be achieved with the budget reduction?

So, that funding does not appear in your portfolio; it appears somewhere else in the Scottish Government’s budget.

In that case, Alasdair Allan has a supplementary.

Once again, I will refer to comments from stakeholders on the budget. You mentioned the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation, which has been strongly critical of the cuts to the marine budget. It has suggested that reduced funding for marine science and management jeopardises sound policy making, enforcement and sustainability at a time when demands on the marine environment are growing. We regularly hear about spatial pressures, and the SFF also notes the “enormous increase” in resources for the offshore wind directorate, which has tripled in size. It says that the reduction in the budget undermines effective fisheries management and threatens to produce unintended consequences.

We have just heard that there was a demand for £30 million-worth of funding but that only £14 million was forthcoming. Are you confident that we can do everything that we want to do for our inshore and offshore fisheries to ensure that they are sustainable and to address the current pressures on them to become more sustainable?

There is no doubt that we have world-leading scientists who are doing a great job, but it could be said that they have one hand tied behind their back in respect of their capacity to develop, or continue to sustain, an international reputation for marine expertise. There is a barrier to that, and they are having to prioritise and make choices.

Should we be seeing an increase in the marine budget, to ensure that, given the challenges that marine scientists have, they are not working with one hand tied behind their back and do not have to pick and choose? Forgive me for mentioning the word “cockles”, but that is a great example of a fishery that could be developed. However, that development has taken a long time because of the capacity and the resource implications. I am sure that that is not the only fishery that could be developed. Are our scientists working with one hand tied behind their back because of funding and resource challenges?