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Let me give you this scenario. If you had a pack of dogs hunting through a copse and a fox was flushed, and if you had two guns 75 yards either side and the fox went through the middle of them, you would have to go after it. I understand that that is a loophole, and I understand that that would cause genuine concern. However, if you have dogs hunting through a copse, most foxes will never see the hounds, because they are on the way out the other end. If you have 10 guns along the top, the fox is not going to get past the guns, therefore it is dead before the hounds are anywhere near it. Would that not solve the problem of chasing across open countryside?

What, then, would be the purpose of recording numbers?

It is not, then, to show the number of foxes that would be controlled.

Okay.

I very much take Hugh Dignon’s point about the raven licensing scheme. I had a severe problem with ravens. When the licensing process started, it was clunky and it took too much time to grant a licence, meaning that too much damage was done in the interim. However, NatureScot quickly got its act together and the scheme worked a treat.

That said, the method for controlling ravens is different from that for controlling foxes, and the important period in which to grant a licence for fox control is prior to lambing, not during lambing. We do not need proof that foxes kill lambs—they do. We do not need proof that the damage that they will do is anything other than a reality.

The licensing period should not be for a short, 14-day period but for a season, to allow landowners, farmers and tenants to ensure that they have the numbers under control as much as they can. With the best will in the world, Leia—I do not mean this to be derogatory—lamping foxes is not easy. It takes a lot of skill and time, and you have to know the foxes’ movements.

If we have a licensing scheme in which we can control an animal that we know will predate stock prior to the start of lambing, we will already be halfway there. If we wait until after lambing has started to grant a licence, there will be disruption to lambing fields and parks. I urge you to consider how you will create the licence. It should not last for just 14 days, and it should not be issued during the lambing period but prior to it.

Thank you. I will move on from there.

Under what circumstances would the Scottish Government consider it appropriate to make use of exceptions in relation to the two-dog rule? What circumstances would constitute “serious damage” to livestock, woodlands or crops, and under what circumstances would it be appropriate to use the exception for “protecting human health” and “preventing the spread of disease”? Basically, why would there be exceptions? What would be the grounds for exceptions? Can you give us a broad outline of what you are trying to achieve there?

I think that I understand what the bill is trying to do there. There will be people who try to circumvent the law. If some of them say, “We’re going to this bit over here and we’ll have two dogs,” and the others say, “Well, we’ll go to that bit over there, and we’ll have two dogs,” they might say that they just happened to get together, but they would be deliberately trying to circumvent the law. Is that what the bill is trying to prevent from happening?

Thanks very much to the panel for turning up. I have to say that when I started reading all this, I thought of a band in the 1980s that I loved called The Jam. One of the lines in their song, “Going Underground”, is:

“You choose your leaders and place your trust”.

That, to me, is probably the most fundamental thing. If we do not trust those who are leading us—if we do not trust their leadership—none of the other nuances that we talk about will matter. I could be completely wrong in saying that, and I would be interested to hear your views, but we have a bit of a dichotomy. First, we need that trust, but we have science working at pace trying to keep up with something that we do not understand; we have a public message going out trying to get people to change their entire way of life; and, at the same time, we have leaders saying, “Bear with us, because we don’t quite know what we’re doing yet.”

Given what we have just been through, how do we pull all that together and make it fit? We know that another emergency will come, so, very simply, how do we do that?

Public ownership of the media.

I refer to my original question to the previous panel. SciBeh’s evidence states:

“The key challenges of communicating public health messages during the pandemic relate to maintaining public knowledge of and trust in quickly changing information and combating misinformation.”

It goes on to say:

“Underpinning the evidence and recommendations in this statement is the critical role of public trust in institutions during a crisis. It is important to bear in mind how to tackle any challenges while maintaining public trust in health authorities and governments.”

Trust, quality and value are the things that are highlighted. I therefore come back to the point that I made earlier: none of what we are talking about matters if the public do not trust what they are getting. This is now becoming politicised. Right at the start of the pandemic it was not; there were no political arguments about it. However, it is now politicised: we might sit in the chamber or in this committee, and it gets political.

We currently have a breach of trust in the UK Government because of the Prime Minister. I am genuinely not trying to make this political, but we are not out of the pandemic—there are still things happening and there could still be another variant—so, given the situation that we are in, how do we regain the level of trust that we had at the start of the pandemic? Everything else that we are talking about is utterly irrelevant if the public do not trust what we are telling them.

Tracey Brown said that the science that fed into the policy was restricted by the questions that politicians asked of scientists. This might be a question for Dr Phin. With regard to the whole trust issue, if I were a conspiracy theorist, hearing that would make me ask, “Are the politicians only asking the questions that they want the answers to?” Is it factually correct that scientists answer only the questions that politicians put to them and in the way that politicians put them?