Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2026 [Draft]
I agree with that. However, the minister gave us the reasons why applications were ineligible, and when I sent those reasons to constituents, they were very confused by them. For example, the wrong numbers—numbers that were automatically input into the system—should not have caused applications to be deemed ineligible.
Although I do not have a lot of time, I want to stress to the minister and to anyone who is watching the debate remotely or who is looking back at the Official Report that Liam McArthur is right to say that we are looking at this after the horse has bolted the stable. However, we still have an opportunity, on Tuesday 27 January. I lodged an amendment to the Natural Environment (Scotland) Bill at stage 2 to get the very information that Christine Grahame is looking for. We need a breakdown so that people can see where they went wrong—whether it was their fault that they did not meet the criteria, whether they were ineligible and so on. They also need to get feedback. My amendment was voted down by Scottish National Party and Green members on the committee. I will bring the issue back at stage 3 so that the whole chamber can consider it, but I believe that it was voted down partly because, at the time and as Liam McArthur’s motion says, we were promised a review by the cabinet secretary. That review is certainly not answering the questions that I and my constituents have, so I will proceed with my amendment on Tuesday 27 January to compel the Government to provide that information, because people are looking for it.
People are concerned about the amounts of money that were spent on the scheme. Many of them had hoped to secure funding, and although they accept that not everyone can be successful, they are struggling to accept the reasons behind their application not being successful when they can see that so many people missed out on the opportunities presented by a scheme that was supposed to help them. I hope that the minister will consider urging SNP members to support my amendment next week.
Finally, we have to look at the number of people involved in judging the applications. We were told, categorically, that no artificial intelligence was used to look at the applications, but the Scottish Conservatives know from the response to a freedom of information request that only six core staff looked at the applications, aided by perhaps another six support staff. They looked at them over the course of a month, which works out at about 10 minutes per application. I am not sure that we can guarantee that only humans looked at the applications if only 10 minutes were spent on each one.
A lot of questions remain. I hope that we get some answers from the minister in summing up. As I said, I will come back to the issue again on Tuesday.