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For clarity, are you saying that, by 2028-29, it will be £7 million a year, or are you saying that it will be £7 million up to and including 2028-29?

I will move on to the Scottish Property Federation, which said:

“Tax legislation will rarely cover each and every eventuality and given the potentially high taxation burden of ADS we continue to feel that a power to enable a relief for exceptional circumstances, to be applied on the discretion of Revenue Scotland, could bring additional fairness to the ADS system.”

The Scottish Property Federation went on to say:

“there is something of a missed opportunity to address these wider concerns which we raise.”

What are your comments on that?

That is a matter of real concern. In paragraph 23—this has been touched on by Mr Scott—you say:

“EU Exit means Scotland no longer has long-term certainty of funding. HM Treasury have provided yearly allocations for the current UK Parliamentary term, however, there is no funding commitment from 2025.”

You also say:

“Agriculture requires future funding certainty”.

Given that there has been no commitment beyond 2025—this parliamentary session—where are we in providing certainty through the financial memorandum and the bill for Scotland’s agricultural sector? There has already been a knock to the funding for the next financial year. What is the likelihood that that will be exacerbated? I know that you have not got a crystal ball, but what are your concerns about that? What are the likely parameters should we not see a commitment beyond 2025?

The next agenda item is to take evidence from the Scottish Government bill team on the financial memorandum to the Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill. We are joined by Scottish Government officials John Kerr, deputy director of agriculture, rural policy division; Mandy Callaghan, deputy director, agriculture and land transition; Karen Morley, head of finance, agriculture and rural economy directorate; and Ewen Scott, branch head, Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill.

I welcome you all to the meeting. We finished our previous item a lot sooner than we had anticipated, so I apologise for rushing you in a wee bit earlier than scheduled. I invite John Kerr to make a brief opening statement.

When will we have that? It feels like groundhog day for the committee. We keep getting financial memorandums and framework bills—I apologise for the generalised moan, and I know that this is the only one that is your responsibility—and we keep having to ask questions about future resources, how things will be funded and what the secondary legislation will look like. When will we reach a position where administrative issues are no longer, to quote your own financial memorandum, “unclear”?

Over what period? Is that £7 million extra revenue for the Scottish Government or less revenue for the Scottish Government?

The financial memorandum makes clear that the money that will be available for financial support to the sector will be set in tablets of stone, so we are looking at exactly the same funding level from 2023-24 to 2027-28—£741.9 million. It is clear that the financial memorandum is already out of date, because the actual funding in the current financial year, according to page 94 of the Scottish budget 2024-25, is £738.9 million. That drops to £705.7 million, which is a 4.5 per cent decrease. Does that not knock a wee bit of a hole in the financial memorandum?

On page 96 of the Scottish budget, if we look at money for woodland grants, which has been raised in the chamber on several occasions, we see that you are again looking to hold the amount of money that is being invested in that area at £77.2 million, which is the current figure for this year. However, in next year’s budget, we are looking at a decline to £45.4 million, which is quite considerable.

How can we have faith in the figures for a period of five years when there are significant changes to the sums in the financial memorandum in the budget that we are about to vote on this month?

In paragraph 15 of the memorandum, you said:

“This mechanism will provide a platform to build momentum for private sector green finance investment by offering financial support explicitly linked to action for nature and action for climate on farms and crofts which should in turn give the land manager confidence to engage with private market investment in nature”.

However, a lot of the submissions are suggesting that the financial memorandum beds in vested interests and the status quo. The RSPB Scotland submission is the one that I have in front of me, but I have read four or five submissions that say almost the same thing. The RSPB Scotland submission says:

“the bottom 40% of recipients only receive 4.8% of the budget i.e., the larger businesses get most of the ‘income support’.”

It also states that less favoured area payments

“are not connected in any meaningful way to income and profitability”,

and that

“Farm Business Income data suggests, for example, that only 23% of LFA Cattle businesses have an income greater than zero without support payments”

whereas

“82% of general cropping farms, for example, make a profit without support.”

One could suggest that the bill basically continues with the status quo whereby LFA payments are made based on land rather than on what is happening on that land to achieve some of the objectives that the bill supposedly seeks to achieve.

That is not really what it says there. It suggests that they will still get the payments whether they meet those conditions or not. That is how it reads.

One issue that has come up is the cost of administration. Paragraph 47 of the financial memorandum says:

“The 2023-24 budgeted costs to administer payment, compliance and supporting services are £61m. This represents approximately 11% of the £692m budget for all current schemes.”

My arithmetic says that £61 million would be under 9 per cent of that, so I think that there is a wee error there. However, more importantly, the memorandum goes on to state:

“Future administrative costs under the proposed Future framework support are currently unclear and will depend on the chosen delivery model.”

That figure of £61 million is a lot of money for administration. What would it be spent on specifically and why are the future costs “unclear”?