Seòmar agus comataidhean

Does any other member wish to comment? Karen Adam wants to come in.

I absolutely appreciate that. That is not a problem, but what is unclear at the moment is when the Scottish Government got the notification. The Scottish Parliament and the committee got the notification only on 7 December. We can ask for clarification on when the Scottish Government got the notification. Does that make things clearer?

It is unclear whether the UK Government was late in sending the notification. I do not have that date.

My understanding is that we do not know why the instrument is urgent. We have not been given the full 28 days, so I intend to write to the Scottish Government to ask why the SI is urgent and why an extra few days, which would have allowed us to scrutinise it properly, have not been given. As I have said, it is unclear when the Scottish Government received the policy proposal in the instrument, and the Scottish Government notified the Scottish Parliament late. That is what we need to clarify. In the letter, I will ask why the SI is urgent and what impact on trade relations an extra few days would make.

You are talking about a different SI, Jim.

The SI in front of us was sent to the Scottish Parliament on 7 December with the intent of its being laid in Westminster on 16 December. We can write to the Scottish Government to ask why the Parliament was notified of it only on 7 December. When the Scottish Government got the SI from the UK Government is unclear to me at the moment. That is my understanding.

That is fine. Pat Snowdon would like to come in.

I am sorry, but Jim Fairlie wants to intervene.

I have a supplementary question. Traditionally, and at the moment, farmers are carbon farmers, nature farmers, food farmers, cultural farmers, soil farmers and tech farmers all at the same time—they have to have regard to all those matters. Some pay more regard to food production than to nature; for others, it is the other way round. In the future, will that broad spectrum of responsibilities be spread as they are now, with farmers taking responsibility, to varying degrees, for all aspects of land management, or will regional land use partnerships and so on specify areas that should focus on food production or on protecting crested newts, for example? How do you see everything coming together to deliver the biodiversity and climate change recovery that we need?

Over the past few weeks, the damage that has been done by storms has been very clear. Thousands of hectares of trees have been flattened. Some argue that those trees have been planted in the wrong place—for example, on good farmland.

How should we properly account for natural capital, given that we are seeing what is potentially a bit of a land grab, in that, in order to do a bit of greenwashing, big commercial companies are buying land, some of which is of very high value in terms of agricultural production, and planting trees? Do we need to rapidly have a baseline and look again at how we classify land to ensure that some of our best agricultural land is not turned into forestry? Is that part of what we need to do to assess our natural capital?