Seòmar agus comataidhean

You are saying that there has been no progress. We have already said that we are gonnae have four tiers. Tiers 1 and 2 will take up 70 per cent of the budget—

I do not have the figures just now, but we will bring those to the committee. We will bring the detail to the committee as we build the jigsaw puzzle so that people will know what is coming their way. We have already done that with whole-farm plans and with the calf schemes, and we will do it with greening. We will do it with every bit of the jigsaw as we put it back together.

As I have said to you before, we will do this bit by bit in order to get the complete picture, and people will be able to feed into that as they are affected by it. We have done the co-development. We are talking to the groups. The convener can shake his head as much as he likes—you might not like it, but that is the process that we are in. It is that process that will deliver the policy that will allow us to achieve the vision for agriculture that we have all agreed on. That is how it will develop.

If we are gonnae talk about the IT system, I will let Nick Downes and Mandy Callaghan deal with it.

I cannot remember who it was that said it, but somebody said something last week—forgive me if I misheard or I am misquoting—about how the system is more focused on delivering on time than on developing the new system. I find that curious, because I am absolutely committed to ensuring that the funds get into farmers’ bank accounts on time. I clearly remember—as anyone who was involved in agriculture at the time will—that, when we transitioned from the previous single-farm payment to the basic payment scheme, there were massive delays, which caused mayhem in farmers’ bank accounts and cash flows. The critical point is that we continue to make payments on time.

The fact is that the Government has made a rod for its own back in when those payments are made. They were made earlier and earlier when they could have been made much later, and we could have given ourselves more time, but we got so good at it that the payments came in earlier. That became the accepted norm for farmers, when, in reality, the payments could have been delayed until much later in the season.

The delivery of payments is one of the most fundamental things to ensure that we get right every time. The team that is in place is doing a phenomenal job, and I want to ensure that it continues to do that job.

I would challenge that. When Jonnie Hall and Martin Kennedy of the NFUS did their roadshows, they were doing what Neil Wilson spoke about last week. They were gathering voices, concerns and information as they went along, and they told us that, by and large, people were buying into this and thinking,“Okay—I can get behind this. It feels okay and we’re comfortable with what’s coming down the road.” That is part of the co-design. If they had done 15 roadshows and come back and said, “Look, this is an absolute disaster. We cannae get people tae buy intae this,” we would have had to stop and think, “Okay. What do we do now?”

George Burgess has been itching to come in for a minute or two, so I will let him come in, but I will come back to your specific points.

You would need to ask them why they think that. I genuinely cannot understand Jonnie Hall’s position. When we were initially talking about the suckler beef support scheme, I had conversations with my officials over concerns that information on it had not been disseminated widely enough and on what the NFUS and the Scottish Beef Association had done. I asked, “Have we written to every single farmer?” and the answer was, “No, not at this stage, minister.” I asked why not, and they answered that they were working through a process of getting stuff out. I said, “From here on in, we will write to every single farmer if a change will be relevant to them.” That costs money, but it means that we are not disavowing ourselves of the responsibility of getting the information out. We will continue to do that.

The rationale behind that thinking was this: when I was farming, if I got a letter from the NFUS, the National Sheep Association, the National Beef Association or anybody else, I would put it on the rainy day pile and get to it eventually, because I was too busy working. However, if a Scottish Government letter came through my letterbox, I stopped what I was doing in order to find out what it wanted me to know or what it was telling me was going to happen. Therefore, writing to every farmer is what we committed to do. It is simply not the case that there has been no communication, and I am disappointed that Jonnie Hall made that statement.

Rural payments and inspections division officials have been at roadshows and shows, where we know where farmers are going to be, right around the country. Farmers have been given very clear and simple leaflets about what is coming. As George Burgess said, we have been at numerous committee sessions and engaged widely. My officials are speaking to FAST, which represents a huge number of people, so constant engagement is on-going, and that will continue to be the case.

I am going to ask Mandy Callaghan when communication started, but my understanding is that it has been on-going since the start of the process.

I have been trying to get to the crofting counties for the past six months. It is incredibly difficult—the diary demands are intense, to say the least, and such visits have to be fitted in around other engagements. It is not an easy process. However, I specifically demanded that I get to the crofting counties, because there are important things happening in those areas. In my submission, I said that we should not meet “the usual suspects”. I make that point clearly, because we are all guilty of hearing from the same people. When I was a member of this committee, we would see the same faces again and again, and we would have the same discussions over and over again.

Therefore, I wanted to get “behind the curtain”, as you put it, to speak to people who might not be engaged in such processes and might not know that there are organisations that are having discussions on their behalf, because they are not members of those organisations. Those are the people I was specifically targeting. I used the experience of my previous life as a farmer to approach individuals and say, “We want to have a discussion on these issues. Can you get some people together?” They then spoke to the officials, who pulled those meetings together.

I am more than happy to do that—in fact, I will insist that we do not only bring in the usual suspects, who can talk eloquently all day, but who might not have the same thoughts as people who work on farms from day to day.

That applies not only to crofters. I recently visited the Soil Association Exchange, which invited me to meet an ordinary farmer—an ordinary guy who is doing his job. The Soil Association Exchange had contacted him and asked him whether he would like to take part, and I went to meet him. He is exactly the kind of person we need to be talking to, because he is the kind of person who will make the decisions that will allow us to establish a baseline for where we want to get to and how we will build up to that. He is not engaged politically. He is not engaged in the NFU. He gets letters in the same way that I would when I used to farm. I used to say, “Yeah—I’ll get to that.”

It is really important that we get to people like that farmer, which is why I made a point of going to speak to him. That highlighted to me the language that ordinary farmers use—the language that they live by—and the need to engage those folk in order to take them with us on this journey.

I can only assume that there was an omission sometime in the dim and distant past, long before I, or any people that I know of, were involved. George Burgess may have more of an answer to that than I do.

Perhaps they are not IT experts either.