Chamber and committees

My understanding is that that is double the period of scrutiny that there has been for previous national planning frameworks. As I said, and as the minister has outlined, there has been an extensive engagement process leading up to this point and our consultation is open. I would like to think that that would be adequate time for that scrutiny to take place and for any further ideas or comments to be provided.

There have been some changes to the agricultural transformation budget. We have committed to £25 million overall in relation to agricultural transformation this year, and part of that funding is identified in the budget this year. There is also the £51 million that has been identified for the national test programme, which is spend that we have allocated over the next three years.

One of the main reasons for reducing the agricultural transformation budget was that there are no financial transactions as part of that for this year. There are a number of reasons for that. For example, equipment was not available, which meant that it was difficult to identify options for a loan scheme that would be available for capital projects.

Any loans that we might have been able to offer would have had to be at commercial rates to avoid state aid issues and they would therefore have been unlikely to attract a wide range of applicants when compared to existing loan products. There is also no readily available mechanism that would allow commercial-type loans to be administered by the rural payments and inspections division or elsewhere in the Scottish Government.

The overall reduction in financial transactions relates to £20 million, so it made no sense for us to include that in the budget when we knew that there was no realistic chance that it would be used, for the reasons that I have set out.

In the financial memorandum that accompanies the bill, we have set out some of the costs associated with what we currently expect in relation to the spend. The main costs are administrative and relate to consultation and the publication of the good food nation plans. We have estimated that, for the first year, costs will be somewhere in the region of £30,000 and decrease for subsequent years. We do not expect the costs that are associated with the bill to be a huge burden.

Absolutely. We decided to separate this year’s spending on the islands programme into three strands of funding. We had the islands infrastructure fund, the communities fund and the healthy islands fund—the projects from that fund were announced last week.

We committed to spending £30 million over a five-year period up to 2025—I emphasise that we are still committed to that—but we are proposing a reprofiling of the spend. Putting forward the amount that we have for this year means that we will be able to work on some longer-term infrastructure projects over a slightly longer timeframe and not be constrained by budgetary years. In essence, that means that although there is a £4 million allocation this year, there will be an increase in spend as we move to later financial years.

No specific contingency budget has been identified. The whole aim of our legislation is to prevent us from reaching that stage by ensuring that island communities impact assessments are built in to policy and decision making. The assessments are required to evaluate and take into account the impacts of our policies, strategies and services on island communities. Our officials work every day to ensure that the needs of island communities are fully considered as part of existing policies and of any policies that we create in the future.

The national test programme comes from funding that was previously ring fenced for agriculture. Some £10 million of the £25 million identified is for the national test programme. The £10 million that we have put in the budget this year is part of the overall £51 million that I announced last year for the national test programme.

Of the £25 million identified for this year, there is the £10 million that I have just mentioned, there is the £5 million capital spend and there is a further £10 million for development support. I hope that that explains the situation.

The member has raised an important question. As the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy said, we have faced some difficult choices right across Government in relation to the budget settlement. We have undertaken careful work to identify the key priority areas, looking at the areas that we need to invest in and need to protect. That always includes difficult choices throughout the process.

Referring back to one of my previous responses and to the LEADER programme, over the course of the past year, we had invested to introduce a tests of change programme, looking to invest with our own domestic funds. That funding has been vital for our rural communities, and I note the sheer diversity of the projects that it has been possible to fund. I think that the overall funding amount for that was £3 million over the past year. There has been an increase in that budget for this year.

There has also been an increase in the budget for Marine Scotland in the region of £10 million, identifying the work that needs to be done to protect and enhance our marine environment. We are looking to offshore renewables, too, and to the extra resource that we need to be able to put in place to deliver on the ambitious commitments that we set out in the programme for government.

There are a number of different areas where we have considered the spend and where we have either increased resource, readjusted spend or reprofiled it over the coming years. For example, as I mentioned in my opening statement, we are looking to invest more than £8 million of funding for the islands, and that will be critical for our island communities.

There are areas of spend right across Government that impact on rural areas and on our island communities that do not necessarily fall within the remit of this budget, but that will continue to be very important.

I do not have an opening statement, convener. I am happy to move to questions.

Parliamentary scrutiny of the frameworks is important, and we are committed to engaging in that process. However, it is up to each parliamentary committee to determine the time and depth of scrutiny needed for each framework. The process for that was agreed at official level between the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament, and was set out, around the start of last year, I think, by the then Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, Europe and External Affairs, Mike Russell. He set out a flexible approach that depended on the size and complexity of the proposed area for consideration.

Obviously, the four legislatures will review the same version of the provisional frameworks, which will not be finalised until all the Parliaments have had the chance to fully scrutinise the relevant framework. As I said, in a previous role, I took part in the Health and Sport Committee’s scrutiny of one of the frameworks at the start of last year. That is one of the frameworks that has undergone a formal scrutiny process by the Scottish Parliament. I think that there were others that related to hazardous substances, planning and nutrition labelling, composition and standards.

The four Governments have agreed to a revised timeline that would secure ministerial clearance for the final frameworks ahead of the pre-election period in Northern Ireland, which was anticipated to take place in mid-March this year. UK Government delays in obtaining ministerial clearance to publish the other frameworks leaves a limited window for completing the scrutiny process ahead of that pre-election period. Therefore, as it stands, the earliest opportunity for the publication of the other frameworks for parliamentary scrutiny is the end of the month. As I said, there are another six frameworks that will be relevant to the immediate work of the committee and its portfolio interests.

I do not at all agree with that. Absolutely, there is scope to try to get more women into some industries, and I come back to some of the investment that we are making through the budget. This year, we have increased to £400,000 our investment to develop skills in agriculture and get more women involved in it. That includes a number of different strategies. In fisheries and aquaculture, too, we have commitments, and work is under way to deliver on that.