Seòmar agus comataidhean

It brings me back to another point that you touched on when we were talking about the island communities impact assessments. We have some helpful tools to help us in relation to that. A few weeks ago, I talked about the work being undertaken on a rural delivery plan and some of the mechanisms that will help us to address some of those issues. I also referred to the rural data dashboard, which will help us look at some of that information.

I accept your wider point, which is about ensuring that there is no disproportionate impact on people who live in rural and island communities. Of course, that is my role.

In one of the first tables, we have highlighted the overall quantum that that makes within the ring fence that we receive from the UK Government. I do not know whether George Burgess wishes to add more.

I appreciate that point. To be honest, capital has been one of the biggest challenges that we have faced in the portfolio. We have seen an overall cut to the Scottish Government’s capital budget of about 10 per cent, which has had huge ramifications. Ideally, we would like to have been in a better position on capital than we are. The cuts to capital also led us to the situation that we faced in forestry.

However, in relation to the particular funds that you touched on, we saw a decrease in the published budget for the agricultural transformation fund from what we initially had last year—a cut of £2 million. However, we have ended up in a better position with the ATF than we had initially anticipated. We had been prioritising that fund. The water environment regulations are coming into force, and we had therefore focused that fund largely on helping to support slurry stores and irrigation lagoons. When we opened the fund this year, we were hugely oversubscribed—I think that we received applications for about £7 million in total. Fortunately, we have been able to fund all the applications: we were able to use underspends in some areas for that. Therefore, as much as it looked like there was a cut this year from last year, which there was, we have been able to supplement that money and to fund all the applications.

I can highlight other funds that are really important for all the things that you have talked about. For example, we also had a record approval rate for the applications that came through from 2023 under the agri-environment climate scheme; we have been able to fund all of those.

Therefore, although there has been a cut in some areas, we have been able to utilise some underspends or moneys from elsewhere. I do not know what the overall quantum for the budget next year will be. That is a significant concern, particularly if we are set to see further cuts to capital budgets, because those funds are hugely important for enabling all the work that we want to see being done to support food production and to help farmers and crofters to do what they can to lower emissions and to enhance nature and biodiversity.

Yes, of course. We have tried to prioritise such schemes at all costs, because we recognise how important that is. Especially in this period of transformation, we want to support farmers and crofters as best we can with that money. I take all those comments on board.

FPMC is the food processing, marketing and co-operation grant. We have not been able to run that programme for the past two years because of the situation that we find ourselves in of there being significant capital restraints. I am sure that George Burgess will correct me if I am wrong, but I think that, in the last iteration of the scheme, we had about £10 million funding available. I would have to look back at the detail to see the number of projects that we were able to fund through the scheme.

Of course, it is really disappointing. I engage with food and drink businesses and I know the impact that not having that funding has had. It means that some are not able to make the investment that they would like to make. I have also visited businesses that have had FPMC funding previously and have seen the positive impact that it has had on their business. Ideally, this is not where we want to be. and, If we are able to reintroduce the scheme in next year’s budgets or whenever we get the opportunity, we will look to do that. We would be pretty much ready to get up and running with it.

We would also utilise the time when the scheme is not running to review it, to see whether it could be improved in any way, and to get feedback from people who applied to it previously. We have taken on board and built in the recommendations, but—again—the lack of capital funding at the moment means that we are not able to fund the scheme.

Yes.

There have been calls for clarity around what the overall split between tiers 1 and 2 would be. We are still engaging with stakeholders on that, so I am not in a position to set that out at the moment. However, in what we announced earlier in the year, we set out that tiers 1 and 2 would make up 70 per cent of the future quantum of funding, with tiers 3 and 4 making up the remaining 30 per cent.

That is the starting point, and I am not going to predict the future. I certainly do not have in mind what the figure would change to if it was to change. It is really important that we start to implement the new tiers of the framework and see how it all operates.

The likes of tier 4 would help supplement that work. If people are baselining their business and undertaking, say, the soil tests and carbon audits, we want them to get support to work on that information. The tiers very much complement one another, and, as you have said, it is not a hierarchy.

The islands team works really closely with other departments. From the team’s establishment, it has been a case of reaching out and ensuring that they have that engagement. That will always be a work in progress, but I would like to think that the team is fairly well known now.