Chamber and committees

We are not getting an answer straight away.

Is the committee content to delegate authority to me to sign off a letter to the Scottish Government to inform it of our decision?

Members indicated agreement.

You talked about farmers and crofters coming together for knowledge transfer. On the back of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, sector groups were set up, particularly in Dumfries and Galloway and the south of Scotland. Dairy farmers and beef farmers came together with some strange and wonderful names such as the cowboys or whatever. As far as I am aware, they were hugely successful. They were facilitated by consultants, and it was very much an open-book process in which farmers would sit around the kitchen table and discuss quite openly the challenges that they were facing. Unfortunately, the funding for the facilitators fell away and some of the groups fell by the wayside. Is that the sort of initiative that you would like to see? Do we need funding for facilitators to pull together groups of farmers from particular sectors?

Thank you. That has certainly resulted in a flurry of hands being raised for supplementaries. We will start with Jim Fairlie, followed by Rachael Hamilton.

Nobody is bidding to answer that.

Okay. It seems that we have lost everybody now. I suspend the meeting.

Good morning, and welcome to the 12th meeting in session 6 of the Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee. I remind members who are using electronic devices to switch them to silent mode.

Our first item of business is consideration of draft regulations. I refer members to committee papers 1 and 2. I welcome to the committee Lorna Slater, the Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity, along with her officials Clarinda Burrell, Rachel Coutts and James Nott, who join us remotely. I am sure that this will not be the only time that we shall meet the minister. I invite her to make an opening statement.

Thank you. That is really useful. A lot of the policies that we have discussed are about local procurement, local food production and reducing food miles. The Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill, which is coming up, is pretty empty, but there is scope for it to deliver some of the expectations of stakeholders. Do we need more funding at local level to drive local policies? Should more funding be devolved to local authorities and public bodies to address the priorities in the Highlands, Dumfries and Galloway or the Scottish Borders, for example? Do we need to change the method of funding to ensure that our aspirations for reducing food miles are addressed? That question goes first to Andrew Bauer.

I have laid hedges and whatever in the past. We are talking about an emergency here but, sadly, while the majority of farmers are great custodians, some are still set on ripping out hedges to make it easier for big machinery to get in to cut grass or whatever. We see that daily.

Is now the time for the Government to take action and introduce legislation to stop that happening? The financial penalties for removing hedges do not appear to make any difference. This will be controversial, and I repeat that only a small minority of farmers are continuing the practice, but, given the biodiversity and climate change emergency, is there an argument that legislation should be rapidly introduced to stop the destruction of habitats, whether those are hedges, ponds or whatever?

You can carry on from where you were, Michael. What is your position on legislation to ensure that habitats are not removed?

Thank you—