Chamber and committees

Some of the points that I was going to ask about have been covered. I want to briefly get your assessment of the SAWC report. As members have said, in questioning people at committee sessions, it was difficult to get an indication of how evidence was gathered. A lot of our questions simply drew answers such as, “Oh, we don’t have any evidence on that.” Are you satisfied with the report? I am not here to rubbish it, but we were surprised by how many times we heard the answer, “We didn’t gather any evidence on that—sorry, we don’t know.”

Thank you.

I should say that my constituency does have electricity.

I am interested in the point that Alistair Mackie made about co-operation between the NHS and the world of culture, and the benefits that that can have for each of them. This is a theme that the committee has gone to again and again. You feel that the initiative is one way. Does any kind of clearing house, if you like, exist to promote that kind of contact, or is it an ad hoc exercise that you all have to invent over and over again?

Clearly, you are all doing very creditable work on two fronts: the first is to ensure that harder-to-reach groups are being reached and that people are overcoming their threshold anxiety, if they have it, to come to events; and the second is to try to get around the country. How do you combine the two things to make sure that, when you visit different parts of the country, you are not just meeting similar people? What are you doing to make sure that, when you get to different parts of the country, you are reaching as widely into that community as you can?

If you will permit me, deputy convener, I will get on to my familiar hobby horse with my question.

We do not always talk about books and literature in the context of culture. In the past, I have asked officials from cultural organisations in Scotland about promoting literature, and I have stumped them, although I am sure that I will not stump you. Perhaps one of the most liberating things that an individual or a community can discover, if we are talking about place-based culture, is that their community has produced writers and literature, whether that be James Hogg in the Borders, Irvine Welsh in Leith or George Mackay Brown in Orkney. In the past, we have assumed that schools will deal with that, but, of course, they have not. There is an interest in what literature and books your community has produced, but, as a country, are we meeting that interest and that demand in communities?

Testing does not—

I will pick up a point about haulage capacity. Do any of you want to say anything about where things stand? Concerns have been expressed in recent years about the availability of lorry drivers from other European countries, the difficulties of port crossings into Europe and more generally a labour shortage in that sector. Could you say anything about how that impacts on agriculture or whether there are any other factors around haulage that are relevant?

You mentioned uncertainty and the UK Government; they are often mentioned in the same sentence. As organisations, are you making representations to the UK Government about preparing for geopolitical shocks in the future? Would it be useful if some of the relevant powers were exercised here? That is a hopeful last question, but I will put it anyway.

In talking about future geopolitical risks that we face, everybody quite rightly points to the shock to the agricultural economy worldwide that the illegal invasion of Ukraine has represented, but we have to be prepared for other potential shocks in the future. Despite the fact that, regrettably, this Parliament cannot legislate on some of the problems that we have been talking about, can you say a bit more about how resilient Scotland is to future shocks, what those shocks might look like and where the role of the labour shortage is in being resilient to future shocks?