Chamber and committees

What is the Government’s understanding of how the register would be publicly accessed? Does that take us into the realms of data protection law? How would people view that data?

Minister, you and the convener have identified the need for education more generally around buying and selling a dog. What does the Scottish Government do at present to promote that education, and how do you see those activities relating to the code of practice proposed in the bill?

I cannot see anything that is relevant, but I refer to my entry in the register of members’ interests.

I echo what the convener said about the group being welcome. You mentioned that Parliament-to-Parliament contact might be established. Is that part of the remit that you would like the group to develop? If so, how?

I will return to a familiar theme. You will be aware that, in my constituency, the population drop has been 5.5 per cent between the past two censuses. In some communities in my constituency, the population has halved since the 1960s. What I am driving at is that I am very conscious that, through your programme and the work on which you co-operate with other departments, a lot is happening on the housing front to tackle depopulation but there is an elephant in the room, which is that housing is disappearing in the islands at a rate that no Government could possibly make up for by building social housing. In some places, housing is disappearing into Airbnb or second homes, or it is simply being bought up by wealthy people to the extent that, in some communities, nobody local can possibly compete. Valuable as all the activities that we are talking about are, how can they be married up with some attempt in the most fragile communities to deal with the problem of the vanishing housing stock?

All those projects are valuable and have an important impact. As you say, relocating 25 families to Uist is very important for that island. I suppose that I am looking at the other end of the pipeline. Will there come a time when it will be necessary to make some of those projects more effective in order to ensure that the housing market is not completely unregulated and that there is not a situation whereby there are no houses available to live in?

The Scottish Government faces a pretty impossible task of trying to second guess what the UK Government might be doing on the matter. We do not appear to have much information from the UK Government about what will happen beyond 2025. Is one of the things that you are having to second guess whether the UK Government will choose to Barnettise agricultural support, which would be difficult, given the different agriculture profiles in Scotland and England?

When you are offering advice or speaking to the farmers and crofters of Scotland, do you have to second guess the likelihood of whether the UK Government might invoke the UK Internal Market Act 2020 in some of that? Do you have to second guess the extent to which the UK Government will be tolerant of difference? I am thinking, for instance, of the continuation of direct payments in Scotland or the continuation of less favoured area support scheme payments in Scotland. Is that something on the horizon that you have to anticipate—whether the UK Government will take a benign or other attitude towards difference when it comes to UKIMA?

That is great. Thank you.

On the final point that you raised, how will you manage to achieve that? How do you co-ordinate the spending in the islands programme with that wider spending? A subject that I never stop speaking about and will not stop speaking about is housing, because there are acute housing needs in many areas. How do those two areas of budgeting activity tally?