Agriculture Bill: consultation analysis

Agriculture Bill workshop, Orkney, 28 November 2022

Alan Robertson

Wednesday 27 September 2023 - 16:26

An independent analysis of the responses to the consultation on proposals for a new Agriculture Bill, “Delivering our Vision for Scottish Agriculture. Proposals for a new Agriculture Bill”, which was open from 29 August until 5 December 2022 have been published.

The report presents the independent analysis of responses to the consultation on a new Agriculture Bill. The consultation sought views on proposals which aim to deliver the Scottish Government’s Vision for Agriculture, which was published in March 2022

The Scottish Government promoted an online public consultation with most of the survey responses submitted through the Citizen Space online portal. The remainder were submitted to the Scottish Government directly, for example, by email. Where this was the case, correspondence was passed directly to the Diffley Partnership for review and logging. In total, there were 392 valid responses to this consultation comprising of responses from 225 individuals and 167 organisations.

Diffley Partnership exported consultation responses from Citizen Space into Microsoft Excel and manually added non-Citizen Space responses for data cleaning, review, and analysis.

In addition to being able to respond via the consultation, nine in-person workshops and 5 online workshops were hosted (details of the locations and dates for these workshops can be found below).

Approximately 330 people attended the in-person consultation events with a further 285 attending the online events. Farmers were by far the most represented group, at just under two thirds of participants. Most events were attended by NFUS representatives, and around half of the events had representation from the local council. Among other attendees were land managers, journalists, consultants, agri-advisors and students.

You can find the full report here

In-person events (2022)

05 October - Inverness

06 October - Skye

25 October - Inverurie

01 November - Oban

03 November - Melrose

08 November - Stirling

10 November - Dumfries

14 November - Ayr

28 November - Orkney