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Will the ARIOB still sit after the consultation has finished?

We had him here before, but we have a new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at Westminster now, and there is a whole new budget. The UK Government has also crashed the environment land management scheme decisions—

I have a supplementary question. Given that you have levelling-up funds coming into areas and are having to work around them, have you made representations to the UK Government that that money should come directly to you so that you can use it to deliver the priorities in those devolved areas that the Scottish Government has set out?

Absolutely—the Scottish Government is being held to account and the cabinet secretary has been here on numerous occasions. If the UK Government is bypassing the Scottish Government, surely it is in our remit to ask the UK Government why it is making things more difficult for the Scottish Government.

You have already answered many of the questions that I was going to ask, cabinet secretary, but how is the £1.7 billion reduction as a result of inflation—in other words, the loss of funding that the Scottish Government is dealing with—going to affect your overall budget? I know from farming businesses that, despite the £300 million that has been delivered earlier than planned to deal with their cash flow issues, their budgets will still be affected. How do you see farm budgets and, indeed, your own budget being affected by the £1.7 billion reduction in the Scottish Government’s funding?

So, because those allocations are indicative rather than set in stone, they can be changed at the last minute and you will have to make adjustments.

Are you saying that the Government will deliver interventions via different channels but that the funding for rural affairs is ring fenced and will come back to the rural economy later?

I have one final question. I have concerns about the reports in The Guardian in the past week that the UK Government is talking about changing the system in England, that the environmental land management scheme may be discarded and that there might be a return to area payments. If that happens, will it affect the budget that comes to Scotland in relation to agriculture?

I want to go back to multiyear budgeting. Is it because funding is allocated to you on a year-on-year basis that you cannot give multiyear funding to local authorities?

There are going to be serious problems in the coming year, and the costs of fertiliser, feed and fuel will put enormous pressure on agriculture. I get that we are seeing the same situation right across the country, and I am genuinely concerned about where that is going to leave us. However, that was more a statement than a question, convener.