Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 September 2025
We welcome the good food nation plan and outcomes, especially outcome 4, which talks about businesses and their role in communities across Scotland.
It will be interesting to see how all the outcomes work together. We must not view them as being in silos. As has been said, farming businesses are critical to the sustainability of Scotland from the point of view of the environment and net zero, they are critical in producing the food that we all want people to eat and they are critical to having prosperous local economies. All of that needs to be addressed in the round. If the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act 2022 and the plan do one thing, they allow people—for the first time—to talk the same language in a useful way. It is really important that the act is seen as an act of collaboration rather than an act of bureaucracy and that people do not fulfil their obligation to produce plans simply in order to meet their legal requirements.
On the question of budgets, we recognise—as I am sure everyone does—the difficult state of public finances at the moment. It is very difficult to see how we can do anything other than work through existing policies and budgets and meld them into meeting the outcomes of the good food nation plan. I see it as a strength that so much work and so many policies are accumulated in that area, because that gives us lots of different areas in which action can take place that will improve things. There is a question, though, of whether they all face in the same strategic direction—an issue that others have raised.
One thing that could be done is committing for a longer-term period, though that is a bigger, all-Government problem. The good food nation plan is for five years, and local authorities will have to come up with their plans during that time. However, the budgets are annualised. That creates incoherence, inconsistency and a lack of strategic ability to deliver over a longer time period. Something that we consider is needed across all the public sector to deliver the plans is a budget that can be relied on for a five-year period, even if the same amount of money is allocated. If it can be relied on for that five-year period, that will reduce uncertainty and means that we can keep people who are good, everyone gets where we are going and the work does not have to be revised every year.