Chamber and committees

Before I bring in anybody else, Karen Adam can ask her questions. Other questions can be addressed after that.

That brings us to the end of the session. I very much thank the witnesses for their contributions, which have been very welcome and will inform our work programme. I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow a change of witnesses.

There was an awful lot in that. Do we have time to do it all before we see a bill go through the process and become an act by 2023? Are we already too late?

The regulations do not appear to do anything to halt the trading up of kittens, which often happens when individual kittens are offered for resale on the internet at a higher price, with people posing as the owners of the parents of the cat, as if they have bred the kittens. Do you foresee any further amendments to the licensing regulations to clamp down on that form of trading?

We will move on to questions from Ariane Burgess on climate change and biodiversity laws.

That completes consideration of the affirmative instrument. I thank the cabinet secretary and her officials for attending today. We now move into private session.

Thank you. I appreciate you all keeping your opening statements brief, because we have plenty of questions. Members will explore a number of themes as we go through the next 80-odd minutes.

I will open up with what is probably one of the broadest questions, which relates to future agriculture and rural policy. We have heard that the Government plans to introduce an agriculture bill by 2023. That seems a long way away, but we know that the guarantee on rural support payments is due to finish at the start of 2023. We seem to be a long way from understanding what future policy will be. What are the key requirements for any new agriculture and rural policy?

Members have some supplementary questions on that.

We are almost at the end of 2021, so we have one more year until the bill is introduced, but it appears that we still do not have a direction of travel on policy. We have had consultation after consultation, and we now have another consultation group. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, the principle of public good for public money has been in the public domain for some time, but there is no such direction of travel in Scotland. I am surprised that there is not more of a message from you that we are running out of time to get policies in place. How long do we need to run the pilot schemes for before we can decide on policy? We had an announcement from the minister that, by November, which is only six weeks away, we would have policies to tackle emissions in agriculture, with absolutely no indication of what those policies might be. Is there a bit of a lack of urgency?

Thank you very much. I will move on to Tavish Scott. I am sorry, Tavish, but we do not have any sound at the moment.