Chamber and committees

Absolutely. Soil Association Scotland is one of our key stakeholders, too. Indeed, I met that organisation over the summer and will continue to engage with it. An important part of my role is getting out and about and meeting different farmers across Scotland, and I fully intend to keep doing that.

The question of which committee will consider a bill is a matter for the Parliamentary Bureau, not for me.

We already know. As I have said, the bureau decides which committee will consider the various pieces of legislation.

In relation to your first point, there is no getting away from the fact that Brexit is the single biggest factor that is having an impact across the food and drink industry—it is having a huge impact. I am not focusing on Brexit in order to be political or difficult; we need only look at the industry letters that were sent to the UK Government. We cannot just gloss over and completely forget about the issue for the sake of some people’s political convenience.

You said that there are shortages elsewhere, but I do not think that other countries in Europe are seeing the visible shortages on supermarket shelves that we are starting to see here or experiencing the critical level of labour shortages that we have in Scotland. In the letter that was sent by industry to the UK Government, there were also asks of the Scottish Government, to which I responded last week. I have already outlined what we are doing in Scotland, but we do not have in our power all the levers to fix or control the impacts, so although it is my job to make sure that we work with industry here and mitigate the impacts as best we can, when we do not have all the levers of power or control over the situation, there is only so much that we can do. Unfortunately, a lot of those powers rest with the UK Government, which is not doing anything about it at the moment.

I will cover a few points and come back to the wider piece that you talked about in relation to getting people into the food and drink workforce. Trade deals might be good for the whisky industry, and we are not against them, but the whole point is that we should not support trade deals that come at the expense of one of our most critical sectors, which is agriculture. The Australian trade deal is expected to benefit our gross domestic product by only 0.02 per cent, and who will be the hardest hit in that situation? It will be Scottish agriculture and red meat producers. Again, we are not against trade deals, but we are not willing to sacrifice our most critical and important sectors in order to achieve them. We would really welcome it if the UK Government would take on board some of our concerns about that.

The precedent has already been set with the Australian trade deal, and we have similar concerns over proposals for the New Zealand trade deal, which is not set to increase our GDP at all; the last time I saw it, the figure was about 0 per cent. No impact assessments have been done, and the Trade and Agriculture Commission, which was meant to be set up to scrutinise and look at the impact of such deals, has not even been fully established to do that yet. Therefore, I do not think that it is fair to cherry pick the very few potentially positive examples from the trade deals and to ignore the massive negatives and the huge impact that Brexit will have on critical sectors of the Scottish economy, which will disproportionately affect us in comparison with other parts of the UK.

To come back to the work that the Scottish Government is undertaking to get people into the food and drink industry across the supply chain, we set up a commission to do a root-and-branch review of land-based learning, which goes from the early years right through. The commission has members from the education sector and industry, and it is looking at the skills that we need and what we can do to promote the food and drink industry as the destination of choice.

The commission is considering whether the industry is as open and accessible as it can be and whether we are training people in the right way. There is a great project in my constituency involving machinery rings. Ringlink Scotland has a pre-apprenticeship programme with local schools, through which it has been giving young people real-world experience of working on a farm. That has helped people to end up in positive destinations. We are taking a longer-term approach and seeing what we can do to improve the skills pipeline for our young people.

You are absolutely right about there being impacts, and we know that there have been huge issues in processing as a result of Brexit, as I outlined in my opening statement. We are working on a strategy, to be delivered next year, for which we will look at the various opportunities and what we can do to work with the industry and to develop the market and find new markets, based on what has been lost by leaving the EU. We have been working with the industry throughout to develop that strategy and we will continue to work with it on implementation. We want the industry to be a success.

Jim Fairlie touched on the labour element, which is critical. I have spoken to seafood processors that have highlighted the serious problems that they face in recruitment. The proportion of the seafood-processing workforce that was EU citizens was nearly 60 per cent. In Grampian, the proportion was even higher—I think that it was about 70 per cent or higher. That is one of the immediate critical issues that we continue to press to resolve. We want to do what we can to encourage people in Scotland into the sectors, and we want to develop and help the industry as much as we can.

There is quite a lot to unpack in that question, and I will try to answer it as best I can.

I know that the committee took evidence on this issue last week, so it will be aware of some of the impacts. Indeed, some impacts have been well publicised. In an article last week, Andrew Faichney of East of Scotland Growers Ltd highlighted the critical shortages that it is facing, with the issue of labour, which we have already touched on today, a critical element in that respect. So much food is going to waste. Andrew Faichney says that about 2.5 million heads of broccoli and 1.5 million heads of cauliflower have been lost, simply because there is no labour to deal with them.

Labour is a critical issue across the piece, and that is down to our no longer having freedom of movement. I have also talked about the importance of labour in the processing sector and some of the percentages that we have seen there with regard to recruitment, but the fact is that putting a stop to the free movement of people was always going to have a huge impact.

There has also been a huge impact in relation to trade. I mentioned in last week’s food and drink debate that EU exit and the barriers to trade that now exist cost the food and drink industry about £700 million in January alone. Those barriers are not going to go away. On seafood, the task force that was set up with the UK Government to work through the issues and barriers as best we could has morphed into an action group. However, more barriers are due to come in over the coming months. There is no way of avoiding that. New requirements on export health certificates, which had been due to come into force by the end of this month, are now due to be introduced in January. Those requirements will affect aquaculture, in particular.

We continue to face such issues. As I said, the situation is not going to get better. If anything, the longer we go on, the more checks there will be and the more issues there will be, all of which simply serves to hamper the food and drink industry, from primary producer to manufacturer to the other end of the spectrum. We are seeing the impacts right across the board.

You are absolutely right about that. The experience on Colonsay is that there are job opportunities but there is a lack of adequate housing, including affordable housing. That is a critical point. Although I am not directly responsible for housing policy, just last week I met the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government to discuss some of those issues and to ensure that we work together across Government to address some of the critical challenges that impact on people on our islands. We have the islands bond and various other bits of funding, and we need to try to address those issues. However, although it is all very well trying to encourage people to move to islands or to create jobs there, it is critical that we ensure that there is affordable housing to enable people to live and stay there and become part of the community.

I am cognisant of that issue and, as I said, we are taking forward work on it across Government and making sure that our officials work together as we look to develop policies on that.

I talked about the rural housing action plan that we will bring forward, but I am happy to consider that issue and look into it further.

I was simply asked whether I would be appearing virtually. It is not at all that I do not think it important. This is the first meeting and the first engagement of many that I will have with the committee. I look forward to working with committee members and will, no doubt, meet you in person.