Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2026 [Draft]
A number of points have been made during the debate so I will say a couple of things before I actually get into my main notes.
We give farmers the opportunity to select their own items. A farmer in Orkney entered seven items in a single-item claim, when, if that farmer had read the guidance, they would have understood that those should have been seven different claims. That therefore led to a rejection.
Data for the agriculture scheme is not collected on a Scottish Parliament constituency basis, but we might be able to do something on that if it is going to give satisfaction to people and help them to understand what we were doing.
We are taking lessons from the scheme that we put forward, but I say this: in delivering the scheme, the Scottish Government delivered a really good thing; the future farming investment scheme is a good thing. We worked with the industry and stakeholders, which resulted in an investment of more than £21 million, supporting 1,750 farmers and crofters across Scotland to improve efficiency, productivity and the environmental performance of their businesses. That investment is expected to stimulate more than £30 million-worth of economic activity across rural Scotland, benefiting local chains and local rural businesses.
Let us get some perspective. The funding was an additional investment, sitting on top of the most generous non-competitive direct support package for farmers and crofters anywhere in the United Kingdom. I am proud of this Government’s record of supporting and investing in our crofting and farming communities. We have the basic payment scheme, the voluntary coupled support scheme, the less favoured area support scheme, the crofting agricultural grant scheme—the list goes on, and that is all in stark contrast to the car-crash policies that were introduced by the previous UK Government and that have been continued by the current Administration. Direct payments in England are being phased out, falling to a meagre £600 in 2026-27. Put simply, things are absolutely better in Scotland.
The future farming investment scheme was a discretionary and highly competitive grant scheme. No farmer or crofter was automatically entitled to a grant. Although we identified priority groups, that was not a guarantee of funding, as I have said before. Applications still had to be eligible and planned investments had to deliver against the scheme’s objectives. Capital investments were assessed on their ability to deliver the scheme’s objectives, which were to improve business efficiency and sustainability; to protect, restore or enhance the environment; to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change; and to deliver wider public good. Investments that performed strongly across those criteria scored higher than the ones concerning more general items of farm equipment.