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On the technical side, my understanding is that there will be no penalty in 2025 if plans are not in place and that there will just be a warning letter. Just to make sure, is that absolutely right?

I declare my interest as a small farmer. I should have said that earlier.

I might not be explaining myself right. Under the 2024 act, you have to deliver a rural support plan. That is law and that is right. It has not been delivered. A draft came out, but it was nothing more than a template. The rural support plan will give us the entire strategy for moving forward.

Are you saying that the route map is the rural support plan? Is that the level of detail that we are talking about and is it the only thing that we will get? Is that what will be in the rural support plan? That seems to be what is being suggested.

I am sorry to have to come back in, but this is an important point. I am glad that you said that the arrangements are messy; I think that they are a bit messy, too.

Tiers 1 to 4 are the future. When we talk about legacy schemes, we are talking about the basic payment scheme, but we are actually transitioning that to the future, which tiers 1 to 4 model. I am assuming that tiers 1 to 4 are not just there until 2028 but that that is the model that we will run forward with until 2032. The SSIs that will be considered in the autumn are actually about the future.

I want to return to why the matter is crucially important. Let us take a practical example. You are bringing out a £20 million scheme this year using the Bew moneys, which you have replaced. John Swinney seemed to suggest that that would be about sustainable and regenerative farming, but you have not produced anything that tells us what farmers might think is the right thing to apply for under that scheme.

The Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Act 2024 says that the rural support plan must set out

“any measures that are intended to benefit small producers, tenant farmers and crofters”.

However, I have organisations telling me that they do not really know how the Scottish suckler beef support scheme fits them as small producers or how the whole-farm plan is going to work for a smaller-than-usual producer.

What about capping and front loading? Those questions came up during discussion of the agriculture legislation, but we still have not answered them. ARIOB is a group that you are quite proud of, but I worry about ARIOB because I do not want it to be a clique; I want it to be an expansive group that really works for the whole industry rather than for the few people who are on that group. ARIOB has been in place since 2021, so I could ask what it has been doing for almost four years. We should surely have the detail by now so that we are clear, and so that farmers across the industry are clear, about what comes next.

Finally, you suggested that you think that farmers, crofters and smallholders are clear. I think that some feel that they are clear, but the impression that I get when I go out is that that is certainly not what is thought across the industry.

It was surely your original vision that the rural support plan would have come out by now, in order for us to have all of these things ready before we start talking about the proper transition from 2026.

You said that the document is currently thousands of words long, so you hope to condense it for it to be useful—otherwise it will be a nice bedtime read, will it not? That is important. The letter that the minister sent says of the code that

“it will be fundamental to the activity required to access support”,

so it is an important document. The 2024 act says that the law can require

“regard to be had by particular persons to the guidance”,

that is, the code of practice for sustainable farming. So, the code is an important document because future payments could hinge on it. To go back to your argument about carrot and stick, do you envisage that as a carrot approach that incentivises the use of the document, rather than saying, “Do the document or a penalty will come”? You said that there would be no penalties through the code.

Thank you.

Minister, I was going to say at the end of our last discussion that I have no doubt that I, you and everybody in this room want the best for the agriculture industry; the thing is how we get there.

I just want to pick up on the convener’s point. This is a five-year plan that will run from 2027 to 2032—or, effectively, into 2031. As a result, tiers 1 to 4 will be in place until then, because that is what the law sets out, is it not? It sets out a five-year plan, as the CAP used to do. Of course, the CAP was set for seven years initially—was it not?—although I think that the last one was set for five years.

Are you saying that there will be no plans in that period to take away or change tiers 1 and 2, and that there will be direct and enhanced payments that whole time? Is what we are talking about a potential future direction, which would come in post-2031?

I have to be honest that I am still not very clear, but maybe I am not picking this up right. Your route map goes up to 2027, which is two years away. You are right that the hope is that there will be no surprises in that, but I am still not clear.

Will you tell me again what will be in the rural support plan? It will be laid in winter 2025 and will start in 2027. It sets the direction, but we already know the direction. It will be about tiers 1 to 4; tier 1 is about direct payments, with a greening something in tier 2 that we are not clear about yet, and tiers 3 and 4 will come later, plus the less favoured area support scheme and the Scottish beef calf scheme. All of that will be in the plan. You said that it will be a collection of all the evidence and discussions that have happened. Tell me more about that.

I assumed that we would have known pretty much all of that by now. For absolute clarity, you are saying that the purpose of the rural support plan is about the future. The SSIs that we will consider in the autumn are about the transition from the legacy schemes into the new schemes. The rural support plan will give us the information, knowledge, strategy, direction and everything else that will take us, post that, through the next five years.

Minister, you said a second ago that you hope that things are clear to the committee. I want things to be clear to the committee, but one of the fundamental problems that we discussed during the legislative process for the 2024 act was the rural support plan, which will provide the real detail about what the future strategy for agriculture looks like. Here you are telling me that the Scottish statutory instruments will come in the autumn but that the rural support plan will not come until the winter, which could be only a couple of months before the new sections of the agri act kick in in 2026 and only a year before most of the major elements of your strategy come in in 2027. Why is it so late? Surely we should already have that plan and we should be discussing it now.

I am still not clear. We are moving to a four-tier system, which will, in effect, start next year with tier 1, which still involves direct payments. You have talked about a 70:30 split, and you have announced your support of £14 million and your £20 million over 20 years. However, the rural support plan will give us the entire strategy for five years from 2027. We are 10 months from 2026 and we do not have a clear picture of what 2027 to 2032 looks like.

I would have thought that that was quite an important document to set out for our parliamentary scrutiny and more widely for the industry. I get the point that there may be no great surprises in it, but the rural support plan is about setting everything out in one cohesive message, as required by law. Is that not correct?