Meeting of the Parliament 09 March 2016 [Draft]
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
Well, what a difference a well-timed Scottish Conservative debate and an impending election can make. [Interruption.] It is a little early for Mr Swinney to get so excited.
Finally, at the last moment, the Scottish Government has magicked up £200 million to ensure that, according to its own press release,
“any farmer or crofter who has not received an instalment”
of their basic payment
“by the end of March”
will
“receive a nationally funded payment from the Scottish Government in April”.
It would be churlish not to welcome that stunning change in direction on the basic payment, even if it played havoc with my beauty sleep last night as I had to largely rewrite my speech.
I welcome the announcement, and I welcome it warmly. I also have to point out in passing, however, that the cabinet secretary originally assured Scotland’s farmers and crofters that they would receive the entirety of their basic payment by the end of April. That now seems to be unreachable, and the cabinet secretary would do himself and, indeed, the industry a lot of good if he would just come out and say so. At least people would then know exactly where they stood. All they know right now is that, if the cabinet secretary’s plans are carried through—and we have yet to hear any details of how those April payments will be made—all farmers and crofters will have received a percentage of their due payments by the end of April, which is a far cry from his original assurances.
The panic button has been well and truly pressed. I just hope that, this time, the cabinet secretary can deliver. Yesterday’s announcement certainly followed the recent trend of last-minute announcements that a cynic might think was designed purely to deflect growing criticism. First, we had the announcement of a £20 million last-ditch loan fund at the NFU Scotland annual general meeting—a meeting that had previously promised to be fairly tempestuous. Last week, in the face of growing pressure about the timing of the less favoured area support scheme payments—not least in this chamber just two weeks ago—the cabinet secretary announced that he would make national funds available to ensure that those payments, worth £67 million, would be paid in March as usual.
Now, faced with this debate and a rally outside Parliament tomorrow, the cabinet secretary has waved his magic wand and found the money from national funds to deflect the growing crisis once again. No wonder that, yesterday, Mr Lochhead was able once again to smile in the chamber—that was nice to see—following weeks of growing and justified criticism. It is as well for Mr Lochhead that his colleague Mr Swinney, sitting on his left, appears to have such deep pockets when it is expedient to do so. That opportune announcement may deflect immediate criticism, but it will not make the underlying problems disappear, and we need to look at just how we have arrived at this sorry state of affairs.
It was on 11 June 2014 that the cabinet secretary made the eagerly awaited announcement on how the new area-based common agricultural policy support system would operate in Scotland. It was in many ways a truly momentous announcement, because it moved us away from a support system based largely on productivity to one based on area alone, which, in a Scotland in which 85 per cent of land is classified as less favoured, presents no small challenge. What that change would bring about was essentially a massive shift in support payments away from the south and east of the country to the north and west—a truly great challenge indeed.
Thanks to the eminently sensible decision of the United Kingdom Government to negotiate Scotland’s ability to design and implement a CAP support system that was tailor-made for Scottish conditions, the responsibility for that system lay solely and squarely with the Scottish Government from day 1.