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It is not the only one.

I have read through all the responses to the call for views, and everybody agrees that the SSI should be passed. Everybody is asking for more consultation—I absolutely accept that. I have read the response from Scottish Land & Estates, and I invite its representatives to speak to me so that we can have a conversation about the issues. All the other people who have written in accept that the SSI needs to be passed to allow us to have those conversations. I give an absolute commitment here and now that I will speak to every relevant organisation that wants to speak to me, and we will have those conversations.

There is nothing that I am trying to hide or delay. I cannot give you more of a commitment than that, convener.

Yes. They are conflating this SSI, which is a mechanism for delivery, with a method for changing the policy and the policy intent. That is not what this is. Those are two different things.

I dispute what you say about current legacy schemes being kicked down the road to 2030. I have just told you that we are having conversations now about what LFASS will look like as we go forward.

We would have to continue to do the work, but time is always running out. Time is the biggest enemy that I and my officials face right now, so we need to make sure that we are actually spending our time doing the things that we need to do.

If you were to look at my inbox right now, you would see that 1,000 different people want to meet me and talk to me about various different things. It is very difficult to keep saying, “We don’t have time for that, we don’t have time for that, we don’t have time for that” when I know that these things are important to the people who are writing to me. I would never easily turn down a meeting, because this matter is important, people want to talk about it and there might be something that we can do. All the time that we are doing this, we are not doing something else. Resource-wise, I would, from my point of view, rather get this done so that we can move on and get on to other stuff.

No, I cannot tell you that off the top of my head. What I can tell you is that I have an inbox screaming at me that people need responses to this, this, this and this. The time that we have is very limited, even though we might be working seven days a week. There are just huge demands on everybody’s time, so if we can get this done, it will allow us to think about other things.

The issue is that we have set a date of 2030 in the regulations to give us a backstop. That is what I am asking the committee to do, and it is entirely up to the committee to decide whether or not to go with that. I have already given commitments to the industry that I will do all the work that I possibly can, and I have given that commitment to the committee, too. We have set a date of 2030 in the regulations. I do not intend to re-lay the instrument unless the committee decides to vote it down.

My understanding is that they represent themselves as individuals.

Work is on-going on all aspects of the programme and what it will look like. However, I come back to my point that the SSI does not touch any of that. It allows us only to put the mechanisms in place to continue to make payments.

We have already been through all the other things that will happen. We have talked about the AECS and the beef scheme. We have talked about all the things that are coming in and which are changing, all of which have been discussed with the farming community and the wider community in order to deliver them. Those things will accelerate as we go through the process, and other things will be added. We will have further negotiations; we will disagree about stuff and we will change stuff, because that is the process that we are in. We are designing a completely new system while trying to ensure that the current one is stable.

I will let James Muldoon answer that.