Seòmar agus comataidhean

First, I want to come back on one or two of the points that have been made. Growing mixed combinable crops has been done for years—for example, grass can be sown with barley. Various things are already happening in agriculture. I will re-emphasise the point that you are all making, as it needs to be clarified. The farmers are already ahead of the game—they are doing stuff because they want to, and because they want to hand their farms on to the next generation. There needs to be far more cognisance of that among both the public and the scientific community.

I will move on to the role of livestock in global sustainable food systems, considering both climate change and biodiversity and what the conversations around eating less meat and dairy mean for livestock farming. To come back to a point that came up when we talked about sustainability in the earlier session on the marine environment, how is Scotland’s system different from the global system? There is a misapprehension in that respect that we need to get past. Perhaps I can go to Marc Metzger on that first.

I will, first, give the healthcare sector my personal thanks. Members of my family are currently using various aspects of the service or working in it.

The witnesses have given us a huge amount to think about today. I know that we have only four minutes left, but any one of us on the committee could have used up the full 85 minutes trying to get through the massive number of questions that we have.

I will not ask any wee, pointed questions. The biggest issue for me is the compulsory vaccination requirement that the NHS in England is bringing in. Would that sort of move be accepted in Scotland? I know that Dr Macaskill has just answered that question, but I wonder what Dr Buist and Mr Morrison feel about it.

In the interests of time, I will leave it there, convener. There is no danger of our being able to get into anything substantive.

Once again, gentlemen, thank you for the service that we have received. I know that it has been a hellishly difficult time for all of you. That is not a platitude—I mean it quite sincerely.

On labelling, I want to make a point rather than ask a question. It takes six seconds for a consumer to see a product and decide to put it in their basket. At a meeting that I was at last night, there was talk of labelling for environmental, welfare, hygiene and nutritional standards. With the amount of labelling that we are looking at, people are going to need five hours a day to do their shopping. It is a real issue and we need to find a solution to it.

With regard to the relationship with the EU, following his appearance before the committee on 29 September, Simon Turner has told the committee that there might

“be merit in the creation of a Scottish Animal Welfare Reference Centre”,

given that, having come out of the EU, we have lost access to its notification system. Is there merit in establishing such a centre to support the commission’s work by bringing together the literature and

“identifying research gaps and research needs”?

What is your view on animal welfare regulation being made at the UK level? Are there any implications for the engagement of Scottish stakeholders in having UK-wide legislation on devolved areas?

I presume that Ireland is still the biggest market for pups being bred and pregnant bitches being produced. There is a reasonably good trade of working sheepdogs between Ireland and the UK. Do you have a view on whether sheepdogs should be transferable between Ireland and the UK?

Will you clarify what the UK-wide position is in relation to dog chipping? All my dogs have had to get chipped.

I came across one of those points. I had a dog that went to another farmer and they could not find the chip, even though the dog was chipped and I had all the paperwork. There were only four databases at that point. If the number is now up to 16, how can we tie down the ability to track dogs? I want to consider that, because it is essential to our ability to make progress on the issue.

I cannot remember who mentioned it but, earlier on, there was mention of the hard core that we will never reach. There will always be a hard core that we will never reach. To be honest, I think that we just have to accept that that is the case.

We have figures here for the demographic areas where we are. As we get to the stage when we know that the hard core will just not take a vaccine—and we have to accept that that is the case—at what point is there a tipping point, where we acknowledge that we have everybody who is going to take the vaccine and we are controlling the virus to the best measure that we can? I get the point that we cannot make a straight line, as in “That’s worked because of that.” I get the fact that there is a suite of measures, and there is a belt-and-braces approach.

At what point do we get to a tipping point, however? If we see that everybody who is going to take the vaccine has got it and that the infection is at a stabilised rate, do we then say that there is no real value in having the passport any more, because we have reached that tipping point? Is that a viable proposition to get to at a later stage?

This is the COVID-19 Recovery Committee, so I see this as a bit of an opportunity. Professor Sharpe just talked about the current building regulations. If someone is building a house now, they have to make sure that there is trickle ventilation in the windows, and it has to take into account the size of the room relative to the size of the window and so on. You are right about schools—I, too, have been in some where the windows cannot be opened. That was the case when I was at school a very long time ago, and some of those windows will still not have been opened since then.

There is an opportunity for us as a country to say that we have a problem, and that we know that it will help to transmit the virus in enclosed spaces. A very simple solution for some high-level windows—I am taking in what Dr Fitzgerald said about high-level ventilation—would simply be to put trickle vents into wood-framed windows in older Victorian-age schools. Would it be sufficient to allow there to be heat at the bottom and a trickle vent at the top? Would that create enough ventilation in those spaces?