Chamber and committees

Are you able to share with us the quantum of the reserves position?

I have just one small follow-up question about the extent to which you have reviewed the criteria. There is always a trade-off between being too rigid in saying what the money can be used for and giving local authorities a lot of freedom and flexibility. Do you think that you are getting that right?

My final question is about support, advice and training for workers who are currently in the sector—I mean crofters, farmers and farm workers. In 2022, there was a PFG commitment to invest more in skills and advice for farmers and crofters, not least to support the just transition. Can you tell us a little about the funding that has been allocated to that and the progress that has been made in supporting those workers?

I am fairly new to the committee, but I understand that, off the back of last year’s engagement with local authorities, it was largely felt that this year’s application process was much better, so taking on board the feedback from the committee and the local authorities has been positive. Thanks for doing that, cabinet secretary.

Two themes came through in the response that we got when we wrote to the six island local authorities, which had said that the process was much better. One was that applications are resource intensive. It always concerns me when it costs a lot of money to access a lot of money. What is your response to that? How can you reduce the onerous burden on already stretched local authority staff when they make applications?

The second theme, which we have heard about for the past few years, is the cluttered nature of our funding landscape. Local authorities are trying to cobble together different funding options for investment, but that makes it cluttered. Have you considered the scope for combining schemes under the heading of the islands programme?

I have a series of short questions on workers. First, as a brief aside, I note that it is somewhat fortuitously exactly a year since you published the proposals for a bespoke rural visa. I mention that in the context of the National Farmers Union saying that about £60 million-worth of food was wasted last year as a result of labour shortages. Have you had a response from the UK Government yet to the proposal for a bespoke rural visa?

Thanks very much.

On your concerns about the number of workers that we have in the agriculture sector, do you feel that we face another challenging year?

I will come back in briefly. That has all been extremely useful. The point that we could return to—maybe not in this session but in future—is the point that Liam Sinclair made, which is that if we accept that there are significant outcomes when there is joint working, how do we formalise that joint working on a macro level? That only worked between health and social care when joint boards had to share a budget. That is formalising it on a macro level—a universal level. We need to further unpack how we get to a point where people share budgets in order to embed preventative spend.

Over the summer—this relates to Liam Sinclair’s point—I had the privilege of seeing the quality of the creative and cultural industries, particularly across the Highlands. I want to focus a bit more deeply on three questions, which pick up on Kara Christine’s point about preventative spend and the need to acknowledge and quantify the wider outcomes that culture spend can deliver, because I think that all of us have continued to be inspired by the Christie commission. Preventative spend has been notoriously difficult to do, because any fixed budget requires funding to go up in one way and down in another way.

When it comes to the public discussion about funding the creative and cultural industries, to what extent do you think that progress has been made in acknowledging that culture contributes more generally to outcomes? When I talk about acknowledgement, I do not mean politicians saying, “We accept that”; I am talking about the concrete movement of funding. That might be a short answer.

Secondly, when it comes to more general outcomes, Duncan Dornan talked about the impact of culture on health and wellbeing, education and the economy. As we have seen in the Western Isles, it has acted as a tool for reversing depopulation, through spending on MG Alba. What further work would you like to be done to demonstrate and quantify the wider impact of culture spend that can be used as proof, for want of a better word?

My third and final question—I am just throwing them all out there, because I thought that you might be able to pick up on different elements of each—is about partnership working between the private and public sectors. I am talking, for example, about joint projects with the NHS or with organisations that are tasked with delivering economic outcomes and so on. To what extent have you seen growth in such partnership working so that some of the risk around projects can be shared, with the result that not just the museums, for example, have to fork out, but they can partner with other organisations?

It might be worth asking one of my follow-up questions now, just in case anyone else wants to come in.

To what extent might placing more requirements on the buyer—including adding more costs to the process—push buyers into trying to circumvent the formal process, thereby making the situation even worse? For example, if buyers have to complete the certificate and, as a result, might have to pay more for the whole process, that might make some more inclined to buy a dog from the back of a car in a car park. Is that unfair or incorrect?