Chamber and committees

Why have stakeholders said that the BRIA did not follow the correct process with regard to the impact that the closure was going to have on fishermen?

Has any assessment been made of the future financial benefit that fishermen will get for forgoing their income for 11 weeks?

Will you accept as true the accusation that you put the Bute house agreement before fishermen and their livelihoods and families?

I thank committee members for setting out their stall. Of course, we want to protect cod stocks; so, too, do fishermen—they call themselves conservationists.

I am disappointed that some colleagues are not considering the issue seriously enough. They are just getting behind the Government. It is a spineless approach by SNP back benchers. In particular, I am afraid that I have to call out my colleague Jenni Minto, as she called for compensation for her constituents in January over this. I am sorry, Jenni, that your Government does not support you or your constituents on that.

It is imperative that the cabinet secretary takes our concerns at face value. I will press my motion. The matter is urgent and the Government must quickly come back to the table with new proposals.

I know that my motion to annul will fail today because I do not have the numbers behind me. The odds are stacked against me because SNP back benchers will support the Government’s position, which is regrettable. However, I urge the Government to urgently carry out a review and come back with new proposals.

That means that the best available scientific evidence is deficient—you have made a decision without the Scottish Government having resourced evidence-based studies on which to base decisions. There has been a failure of the Scottish Government to provide evidence.

Cabinet secretary, is this fair, compared to the support that was given through furlough when businesses were shut down due to Covid regulations? Your Government gave such short notice to stakeholders that exemptions would be removed and, therefore, that people’s livelihoods would be removed. As one person described it, it would be three months without income, but it is not just that, is it cabinet secretary? It is about the processors, the hauliers and the skippers’ families. Other than the pleas from the stakeholders, I cannot see anything in the information that shows that the Scottish Government has taken account of the economic impact of removing the exemptions.

I am sorry, cabinet secretary, but displacement can cause safety issues and some fishermen cannot move, so their livelihoods are being completely cut off. We have heard evidence from individuals who have had to take loans or dip into savings because they are still having to pay for insurance and other costs that are associated with fishing. If your salary were removed for three months, I am sure that you would feel it.

You are asking the fishermen to trust the Scottish Government, without evidence, and to put their livelihoods on the line with no future benefit.

Can I take you back to the co-management process that you mentioned, cabinet secretary? In the evidence that we took, it was thought that co-management is the gold standard. However, we heard that fishing families want to be able to feed into the process instead of having to accept last-minute policies and compromises that they do not understand and that they fear because they fear that not accepting them might lead to something worse. Are you aware of such a culture of fear in that so-called gold standard of management?

Will you provide the committee with details of all the publicly funded organisations that, within those stakeholder inputs, campaigned for the removal of the exemptions?