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No. At the moment, the consideration has been that small producers and crofters have been feeding into the system. Donald MacKinnon sat on ARIOB, and he is part of the on-going conversations.

As I said, however, I recently received a letter from Donna Smith that outlined her concerns, and I have asked her to come and speak to me. We will work our way through all the concerns that she included in her letter, and I hope that I will be able to give her some comfort. I am just surprised that it has taken until this stage to get that letter. I would much rather have had it sooner, so that I could have had a fuller conversation before this committee meeting. However, I will endeavour to ensure that we have that conversation to allay some of the fears that she has laid out in her letter to me.

Okay.

Yes. I have given some written responses but, as I said, I am more than happy to sit down with Donna Smith to go through them.

An article in The Crofter magazine went through all the things that we are asking people to do and what those mean for the crofting community. A very positive response came back from that, because most of the things that we are asking crofters to do are—I am trying to think of the right words—simple, relatively easy and not cost burdensome.

The crofting community has the information. However, if Donna Smith wants to talk to me about it, we will have that conversation about how we make it as simple as possible.

Yes. As I said, Donald MacKinnon was part of the group that helped us to develop the legislation in the first place.

What do you mean?

No, I cannot guarantee that that financial cost will be met. I can guarantee that there is help and support to ensure that the crofting community has the tools that it needs. As I have just stated, a lot of that is already free and the crofters can do it themselves.

I grant that this is anecdotal, but, as I have just recited, a crofter I know went to an RPID office. The staff did not fill out the form for that person but told them how to do it—they gave that help and advice. The support is available.

We are not trying to corral people or force them to do things that they do not want to do, but they have to be part of the system. Culturally, economically and community-wise, they are a vital part of what we are trying to do, so they have to be part of the system. That will allow us to ensure that we are recognised as one of the leaders in this area and, at the same time, ensures that those rural communities are supported. We will give that support.

Yes.

There is no reluctance at all—I refute the idea that there is any reluctance to give you the information. Iain Carmichael has spent his winter going around crofting communities to speak to people and be part of the conversation.

When we were on the earlier agenda item, I think that I said that some people do not want to do this because, previously, receiving the money did not depend on doing these things. However, that has changed. There will be a requirement to be part of the scheme, and that will require people to do certain things. That has been communicated by the Government. We have sent out letters to every crofter and farmer in the country—they should have those letters. Iain Carmichael and his team have engaged widely across the communities, and there has always been the opportunity for people to feed back.

I accept that Beatrice Wishart wrote to me previously, but my understanding up to this point was that we were in a comfortable place, that people understood what was coming and that they were on board. We were then not in the right place, but that does not mean that we had not done an enormous amount of work to get us to the point at which we thought that we were in the right place and that people were all on board. Perhaps Iain Carmichael would like to add to that.

Yes.

Okay—you will not be surprised to know that I disagree with you. I do not think that this is a boorach. I definitely think that it has been complicated for all of us to try to work our way through this, and I do not dispute that, but it is not a boorach.

The rural support plan is, as I have just outlined, what we will have at the other end of this. We are going through the just transition, and we are working with the farming community to ensure that what we are bringing forward fits with its expectations but also aligns with the policy objectives that the Scottish Government has set and that are expected by the public for the money that we are putting into the sector.

We will all see what the whole picture looks like. I do not know all the answers at this stage, because we have not had the full conversations about all the bits that will be added to the support plan at the other end of the process. I can guarantee that, if I did have all the answers, every one of you sitting round this committee table would be asking if I had thought about this or that. That is the whole point about the method that we are using. Martin Kennedy said that we need to take the industry with us. This is us effectively trying to take the industry with us in order to deliver what is expected.

We are bringing the SSIs to you to approve or not—that is the prerogative of the committee—and we will have these conversations, but I do not accept that this is a boorach. I accept that the situation is complicated, and I accept that there are things on which we would have liked to be clearer from the outset, but they were never going to clear from the start, because this is a complicated matter.