Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am a member of NFU Scotland. I have no other registrable interests.

Thank you, Finlay, and congratulations on becoming convener. It is great to meet the rest of the committee in this setting.

One issue that I would like us to pursue is how the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 will affect farm funding. I would also like us to consider the implications of Brexit for devolution and the rural economy. Another issue is what future rural policy will look like. I absolutely agree that the farming community need a degree of certainty. As you and I know, convener, farming is not about tomorrow or the day after; it is about a generation ahead, so we need to get some certainty about what the policy will look like.

I would certainly like us to look again at a good food nation bill. I am interested in not only farming but in food, the environment and rural depopulation, which Ariane Burgess talked about. All of those things are utterly connected.

The issue of women in agriculture was looked at in the previous session, and we should pursue it further. We have made okay progress on that, but we could make a hell of a lot more progress by encouraging more women to get involved in agriculture and to actually run businesses, because they are more than capable of doing that, as we have witnessed on numerous occasions over the past two or three years.

Inshore fisheries are vital. They are a jewel in the crown, and we really need to protect them.

We all know about the problems with digital connectivity, even in urban areas, let alone in rural constituencies.

I would like us to investigate how we bring together two disparate groups. Rachael Hamilton talked about how people in the rural population feel as though they are not represented in the Parliament, yet I have written something in support of the gamekeeping fraternity on Twitter and been immediately bombarded from the other side. I say “the other side” because we currently have two sides of an argument, and I would like to find a way of bringing them together, because the two cannot and should not be mutually exclusive. There has to be a way of making those two separate groups come together and work out the best way to protect raptors and our environment, but not at the expense of losing rural jobs, which are vital in order to stop rural depopulation. There are a whole lot of interlinked issues there that I am keen to have a look at.

I live in Perthshire, but we have transport problems even there, so it must be an absolute tortuous journey to come to Parliament for those who live in the deep Borders or up in the Highlands and Islands.

Even in Perthshire, we have rural housing problems. We need to look at that issue across the board.

If that is not enough to be going on with, I am pretty sure that we can find more.