Chamber and committees

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

I thank you and your officials for answering our questions, which we really appreciate, as we have run over a bit. We look forward to a constructive and robust relationship over the next few years.

Thank you. Excuse the pun, but you have given us plenty of food for thought. It has been a very informative session and one that will certainly help us with our business planning in this first year of the parliamentary session. I thank all the witnesses for joining us.

There is a very small supplementary question from Jim Fairlie before we go to our final area of questioning.

We will move on to questions from Jenni Minto.

That is quite all right. Anybody who would like to address that question should raise their hand.

As nobody has raised their hand, we will move on to another question on the labour supply. Maybe that will stimulate some conversation.

We have heard about haulage issues, and we know that those issues are not unique to the United Kingdom. For example, Poland is short of around 150,000 drivers, and Germany has issues. The UK is certainly not unique in facing problems with haulage.

My question is for Martin Reid. What interventions could the Scottish Government or the UK Government make to address the short-term problem? What short-term initiatives could result in a reduction in the haulage issues that we are currently seeing? You touched on tests. I know that that is a reserved matter, but social distancing at test centres, for example, is down to the Scottish Government. There are the issues of speed limits and tachograph hours. Where could quick improvements be made to address some of the issues?

Rachael Hamilton has a small supplementary question on that topic.

Thank you. I call Karen Adam, who has some questions on the impact of our exit from the European Union.

Rachael Hamilton has a supplementary question.

Mercedes Villalba has a question on this subject, then we will go to Jenni Minto.

Welcome back. On our second panel, we have David Thomson, who is the chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation Scotland; Martin Reid, who is the director for Scotland and Northern Ireland of the Road Haulage Association; Colin Smith, who is the chief executive of the Scottish Wholesale Association; and Pete Cheema, who is the chief executive, and Dr John Lee, who is the head of public affairs, from the Scottish Grocers Federation.

I invite brief—I stress “brief”, because we are limited to an hour for this item—opening statements from each of the organisations.