Meeting of the Parliament 25 March 2026 [Draft]
I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests—I am a small farmer.
This is one of those moments not of anger, but of disappointment. It is disappointing that the Scottish Government waited until the last days of the parliamentary session to release the rural support plan, thereby avoiding the scrutiny that it deserves. Seventy per cent of the document is about things that we already know, and there is next to no detail on future support schemes. The few figures that are in this document show year-on-year real-terms cuts that amount to nearly a quarter of a billion pounds in lost funding.
Will the First Minister explain not to me but to my constituents and everybody in the agricultural community why, if the Scottish National Party Government is so proud of this uninspiring plan, it released it too late to be scrutinised by the Parliament?