Seòmar agus comataidhean

I very much endorse that approach, especially as the petitioner has outlined her pretty horrible experience. This is a relatively modern crime that has become a thing over the past few years, and I have increasing concern that, although it might not start off as too serious, it can very rapidly ruin people’s lives and even cause them to take their own lives, as has been the case in some of the circumstances that I have read about. It is a newish and alarming development in the sad history of sexual offences, so I very much want to hear the Scottish Government’s thoughts about how it can be tackled. We might also ask the Lord Advocate to offer advice about such matters.

Following on from that point, I am sure that the minister will know that several applications have been submitted for pump storage projects around Loch Ness. As we have heard, there are concerns about the salmon population, angling, recreational interests, and the level of the loch and the Caledonian canal.

There is a group of people who are broadly in favour of pump storage but who feel that the current planning rules do not allow the planning authority to take a holistic view of the cumulative impact—in fact, they prevent it from doing so.

Although I welcome SEPA’s working group, every time I hear about a working group, I think that something might happen in five years’ time if we are lucky, but this problem is here and now. The applications have been submitted and they have to be determined. The problem that the petitioners have is that the applications will all be determined without the council being able to do what the minister has said should be done, in a better system—namely, to take into account the cumulative impact.

How will we avoid decisions being taken that might have significant adverse impacts on the existing interests of salmon fishing, angling and—more widely—the marine environment, recreational interests and the interests of other loch users?

I strongly support that. The lack of response has been lamentable—woeful, actually—and not good enough. I very much endorse your recommendation, convener.

I truly hope that bodies will respond to the committee more timeously in future, in the next session of Parliament, and that, if they do not, they will be named and called out, because it is not fair to the petitioners that, when they come to us to be their voice, they do not get reasonably prompt, detailed and relevant answers. That has been too frequent an occurrence in this session of Parliament.

Oh, okay. In that case, I will go back to community ownership. The last petition was on the energy strategy in general, which also covers community ownership.

When I was the energy minister, although we did not have the legal power to require community ownership—that remains the case—we had a voluntary scheme that was sponsored by the renewable energy investment fund. That fund—REIF—was used to provide grants to communities to enable them to facilitate the purchase of a community share, on a commercial basis, from the developer. The way it worked was that, if the cost of the community share was, say, £100, REIF would provide £10 and the commercial banks that were involved—Triodos, Close Brothers and the Co-operative Bank—would provide £90. That meant that communities that did not have any money were able to leverage a loan through a Government grant, and the loan would be repaid from the income stream from the project.

Local Energy Scotland did the groundwork so that developers did not have to scamper around the country holding lots of extra meetings and negotiating with communities; that responsibility was taken away from them. That scheme worked extremely well until renewables obligation certificates were summarily withdrawn by the United Kingdom Government and the whole thing fell apart.

I have raised this before in the chamber and with the minister, but what puzzles me is that here we are, five years into the parliamentary session, and nothing has happened. I suggested on more than one occasion that the Scottish National Investment Bank could be encouraged to be involved. After all, we are talking about a commercial transaction, not a freebie. Such an arrangement would allow public money to lever in 1000 per cent more potential benefit.

Taking that approach would mean that people in communities that are presently hostile to such developments would see tangible benefits for them, their children and their grandchildren. That would help in some, but not all, cases—some people would see it as a bribe, but others would welcome it. There are mixed views.

What depresses me is that nothing has been happening for the past five years. Where are the voluntary schemes that, with help from officials, we managed to provide when I was in your shoes?

11:00

I was not going to ask about nuclear, but I think that, underlying all the objections, there is a series of wider principled concerns. That is really why I am asking the question; I think that a lot of people would like answers.

I will ask about community ownership in a minute but, before we leave the current topic, I will put one point to you, minister. Although the grid certainly requires to be upgraded, the costs of upgrading it were, this week, estimated at £4 trillion, although that figure is disputed by NESO. That is the scale of the cost. In addition, the timescale for that work will be much longer than Mr Miliband or anyone else who supports it has said will be the case. It will take decades. Is the problem, therefore, that, although there may be solutions in the future such as hydrogen and nuclear fission, and all sorts of possibilities, including more storage, it will be too slow?

Even if we support your policies and Mr Miliband’s policies, the grid upgrade process will inevitably take much longer than he says that it will. The transition from wood to coal took 200 years. The transition from coal to oil, according to Daniel Yergin, the world’s foremost energy expert, took 100 years. How can we expect to move from oil and gas to renewables in just a decade? It is just not on, is it? It is not going to happen. It is for the birds, and therefore the risks that I have described are very serious, and are growing in severity.

This is yet another tragic case, and I would just note the statistics on the number of people who lose their lives as a result of having heart attacks outwith hospital, how access to cardiopulmonary resuscitation and defibrillators massively increases the chance of survival, and how every minute without that treatment reduces the level of survival by a staggering 10 per cent. I just thought that I would mention that, given that 3,752 people’s lives are at stake if they do not have such access.

I am quite sure that this issue will come back to our successor committee, and rightly so. The work that has been done has allowed a real focus to be put on the detail of the issues, which is to be welcome. I would just say that our hearts go out to the families involved in these cases.

Mr Mundell has been particularly dogged in his pursuit.

I see that the officials have it.

What about local authority decisions, though? I am asking how many were overturned by the Scottish Government.

Okay—I am just conveying the feeling. I think that, for many people who were present at the meeting, what underlies that feeling is that although, as I have stated, most of them, in general, supported moving towards a renewable energy system, there is growing concern in Scotland—and in Britain, I think—that no one is asking or answering the following questions. How much wind energy is enough? How much is too much? What is the actual cost?

Constraint payments last year, 90 per cent of which were attributable to Scottish wind farms, exceeded £1 billion. The strike prices that were announced earlier today are just over £90, which is 11 per cent higher than in the previous round, and higher than current electricity costs in the UK. The UK target is 43GW, with an ambition of 50GW. The average energy usage is 44GW, so the new system will rely entirely on wind.

What happens when the wind does not blow and demand is high? It nearly happened on 8 January 2025, when there were dunkelflaute conditions with low wind and no sunshine; there was high demand and the margin of error was 1.3 per cent, or around 400MW or 500MW. In other words, there were very nearly blackouts on 8 January; we came within a whisker of blackouts.

If that is to be avoided, how, in the Scottish Government’s view, do we balance the grid? Must there not be some gas or nuclear element? Can we rely on interconnectors, given that countries in Europe are increasingly looking to secure and use their own supply and cease or reduce the amounts that are exported to the UK, and on which the UK is completely reliant in dunkelflaute circumstances?

The energy policy that was promised in 2023 has not been published—for which we have had a variety of excuses—so we do not know the answer to any of those questions. It is such a big question, and we must really get an idea of where the Scottish Government thinks that we should go on this, and certainly before the next election.