Seòmar agus comataidhean

My final question—and it is the last one, convener—is whether you can project the savings that could be made to the compliance and enforcement budget if you were to make a transition to using technology such as drones or electronic monitoring, instead of having aircraft in the sky. It may be early days, but are you able to project any savings that could be made to the compliance and enforcement budget, which is very large?

I am sure that you will stop me, convener.

I am new to this, but SAOS said:

“Food Processing, Marketing and Co-operation Scheme funding was withdrawn which has starved the farming and food sector from access to capital funding to allow it to invest in increasing productivity, improving supply chain co-operation and adding value to primary produce.”

My understanding is that that capital funding was pump-priming money to allow other money to be levered in. How much was withdrawn? I know that you have to make choices, cabinet secretary, but was it a good choice?

You also said that it had a positive impact. Can that be quantified?

It would be useful if you could write to the committee with that.

When I say “positive impact”, I mean cash and funding coming in.

Concern about those charges was raised at a meeting of that group, so we very much welcome the instrument.

But this is law. This regulation says that payments will stay at the current rate—the one that applied in 2018. The legislation will say that. I do not think that you can just say, “Well, if we get more money, we’ll not actually do that. We’ll change the date.” It will be in black and white.

Oh, that was patronising.

I knew what this one was, though.

At 2018 rates.