How Highlands and Islands farmers have come to expect to be let down by the SNP

The first step, as they say, is to admit that you have a problem. Last week, First Minister John Swinney announced renewed funding for the Future Farming Investment Scheme, a programme that was supposed to back small farmers and crofters across the Highlands and Islands – but which fell flat when the results were announced amid much acrimony at the end of last year.

That there will be more support forthcoming ought to be good news – and yet I fear that this renewed funding round will fail again, unless and until the SNP can admit what went wrong in the first place, and listen to the people of the Highlands and Islands.

So far, the signs are not good. When the first complaints rolled in from our communities about the fund’s allocations in November, the SNP response was not to take criticism on board but to circle the wagons.

It was the fault of farmers and crofters who applied in the wrong way; it was “political point-scoring”; it was simply that the plan was too popular for its own good – anything to avoid admitting that the scheme was not working the way it should have.

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Scotland's small farmers and crofters just want to be listened to by those who walk the corridors of power (Picture: Andrew Milligan) | PA

Four out of five rejected

Island crofters, farmers and other smaller operations were supposed to be targeted as beneficiaries, and yet Orkney businesses were awarded less than 3.5 per cent of the funds, Shetland 1.9 per cent, and the Western Isles a miserly 0.2 per cent.

Just 3 per cent of funding went to farms smaller than 74 acres in size (for those keeping score at home, the average size of a Highland croft is 12 acres). Just this week, new data showed that a total of 5,910 applications, nearly four out of five, were thrown out. For a programme supposedly aimed at small farmers and crofters in island communities, this is pretty thin gruel.

It is easy to claim, as the SNP have done, that this is because those who applied were simply ineligible. If you are at the point where huge numbers of people are applying for funding without knowing that they cannot succeed, however, then either your criteria or your communications – or both – must have gone badly wrong somewhere along the line.

This is not the sort of outcome you would expect if you had genuinely engaged with Highland communities beforehand – but it does look suspiciously like what you would expect if the policy had been dreamt up in a windowless room in Edinburgh.

Rural Scotland at odds with Holyrood

The funding scheme’s failures may seem like a niche issue, but they are emblematic of the growing disconnect between rural Scotland and their government in Holyrood. As with so many of the gripes that Highlanders and islanders have with the SNP after 19 years in power, what is missing here is transparency from the top – and a willingness to listen to anyone living outwith the Central Belt.

The Future Farming Investment Scheme was a great idea in concept, but its delivery has been an enormous letdown for people in my constituency and across rural Scotland. Unless and until the SNP admit to their problem and start listening to our communities, they are going to repeat the same mistakes time and again.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland