Those are challenging questions. A lot of people have mulled over where we need to go with agricultural policy. The bill’s provisions are quite strong in that they allow ministers to amend—under the affirmative procedure, I think—how much we transfer between pillar 1 and pillar 2. The provisions would allow us to change the national ceiling, which is the budgetary constraint. As Richard Lyle rightly said, we do not know what that constraint will be. The decision on what the budgetary ceiling for agriculture will be is for this Parliament to make, as well as for the United Kingdom Parliament. The Scottish Parliament has not made that decision, never mind the UK Parliament, and one has to follow the other.
On priorities and whether we should change the way in which things have been done, we need to determine the outcomes that we are trying to achieve. We are trying to achieve lots of different things through agricultural policy. When we look at the principles of the CAP that are listed, I think, in the explanatory note, we realise that we are dealing with a really broad-brush policy. We are trying to deal with biodiversity, climate change and farm and rural incomes. We are trying to achieve an awful lot. We cannot target our policy unless we better understand the outcomes and the geography of the outcomes.
Food is fundamental to agricultural policy so, at some point, we need to support food production. We need to support marginal areas where there is extensive food production, but we also need to think about trees, for example, and whatever else we are doing in relation to land management. We need to take a step back from the broad-brush approach that is being taken through non-targeted area-based payments. What are they rewarding? They are rewarding minimal activity in some areas. We need to look again at that whole process.
Richard Lyle’s point about those who did not have funding highlights the path-dependent nature of agricultural policy. We always revert to saying that we do not want to have too many losers, but we often forget about the people who came in later and did not have funding in the first instance.
As an aside, I note that I gave evidence yesterday to the just transition commission, which has been set up to provide advice to the Scottish Government. I think that it will come back with recommendations on where our policy on agriculture and land management might need to go in order to accelerate things towards achieving the target for net zero emissions.
Given all the objectives that the Government is trying to achieve, we must be careful about how we target such support in the future. Our approach does not need to be the same for the whole of Scotland. We have been very critical of the EU for apparently having a one-size-fits-all policy, but that accusation is not really true. If we look at agricultural policies across Europe, we see that they are entirely different, although their bases under the EU framework might be the same. We need to do the same thing in Scotland. What works in Lothian might not work in Shetland or the Western Isles, so we need to have the flexibility to have a more place-based or regional understanding of our policy.