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I agree with most of what the minister has just set out—I think that that should be the process going forward. However, I invite him to consider the quite rare circumstances in which it would make sense to bypass the voluntary control agreement process and allow NatureScot to take action. If the minister is confident that there could not be any circumstance at all where urgent action would need to be taken, I accept his argument. However, if there is any doubt about that, I ask him to have a conversation with me between stage 2 and stage 3 and to think about lodging an amendment in that space that could be better than mine and could leave it open for urgent action to be taken without undermining the important voluntary agreement approach that has been established. We are all behind that approach and wish the minister well with it, but we have concerns in relation to exceptional circumstances.

Were those aspects considered in the development of the draft climate change plan?

I am reflecting on what the cabinet secretary said about the need to move from reviews into action and delivery. That is the essence of Ariane Burgess’s amendment 303; it is about saying that the existing system of land management orders is not delivering the action that we need to restore nature. When people look around their communities, they can see SSSIs degrading in plain sight, so it is clear that the system is not working. I recognise the on-going invitation to discuss the matter ahead of stage 3, so I think that Ariane Burgess and I will take you up on that, cabinet secretary, and we will want to explore with you the provisions that the Government brought forward in the initial consultation and whether there is something either in the bill or outside it that we could take forward to improve that, because delivery is not happening.

I will not press amendments 67 and 67A today, but it is clear that Ariane Burgess is hearing about these concerns from the communities themselves, so it would be good to relate them to you directly, cabinet secretary.

On the other amendments in the group, it is not entirely clear what Rachael Hamilton is trying to achieve. She talks about tree planting and woodland, so I am not sure whether that relates to commercial trees or woodland restoration.

I wish to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 67A, by agreement, withdrawn.

Okay. Thank you.

I am thinking about the primacy of the national park plan. If public bodies are engaging in the national park plan, surely they are actively furthering that plan through operating in that park and supporting its aims. I am trying to imagine a situation in which a public body would be operating in the opposite direction to a national park plan. That would be concerning. It could have regard to the park plan, but there is no commitment for it to work with the park plan that it would have been part of by putting its views in.

That was very well put. It cuts both ways: the park plans need to reflect the wider public objectives that public authorities are working towards, but they also need to reflect the views of communities, as well as considering the biodiversity targets that will be set under part 1 of the bill.

I will leave my comments there. I hope that we can get into some meaningful discussions with you, cabinet secretary, and that we can come to stage 3 with a tighter grouping of amendments that drills down into what we can do now. Perhaps we can have conversations with you about what happens after the national parks designation process. Where do we take the aspirations of communities, and where do we take the debates? If it is not in part 3 of the bill, where should it be for the next Scottish Government and for the local authorities, which have invested a lot of time and effort in getting the debate about national parks going? They have nowhere to go with that now, to the point that it is not showing up in your inbox, apparently. There is nowhere to take it now, and that is a shame, because national parks are working and are achieving things. We need a clear vision of where they will go in the future.

I will end there, and I will press amendment 201.

Gosh, that got interesting. Amendment 28 would allow ministers to transfer NatureScot’s deer function to another public body that might be better equipped in the future to discharge those duties. Other public bodies currently in existence, such as Forestry and Land Scotland, already have significant engagement with sustainable deer management over a large part of Scotland. The intention of the amendment is not to transfer those duties right now, but to future proof the governance of deer management in Scotland by providing the minister with that flexibility in the future. That is all that I have to say.

I am very sympathetic to Rachael Hamilton’s amendment, as I face the daily challenge of looking to see where a deer is going to head out of the forest next when I am driving home, but I am wondering where local deer management groups and NatureScot would sit under her proposed approach. I could see a conversation taking place between BEAR Scotland and local authorities, but I am interested in where the provision of advice around wider deer management would come in and how we could knit all that together. Putting up signs is one thing, but measures such as fencing, which Mr Mountain suggested, culling in particular areas and the management of deer throughout the year are more technical; they are more about land managers and the wider efforts to manage deer populations in an area.

The bill largely fixes what has been, up to this point, a pretty broken system of voluntary control, and that is good. However, it strikes me that there will still be a limited number of urgent circumstances in which NatureScot will need the ability to immediately control deer in order to protect nature and the public interest. In those quite limited circumstances, going through what could be quite a protracted section 7 voluntary control agreement process might take too long to prevent damage to a site. Let us imagine a situation where a particular species was found and the deer were causing damage—it would be too late to go through that kind of process in order to protect that feature of interest.

Amendments 29 and 30 would allow NatureScot to undertake deer control with the necessary speed, allowing it to undertake control measures directly or through its contractors without first agreeing voluntary intervention with the landowner. Although it would be the exception to normal practice, it is important to empower NatureScot by defining clear and specific scenarios where it might need to intervene, which would help to avoid prolonged delays or loopholes that allow persistent inaction.

I turn to amendment 246, which would require ministers to implement

“a national deer management programme”.

Specifically, it would require ministers to publish a national strategy, identify priority areas, set clear expectations for landowners and provide strategic direction for sustainable deer management. That was one of the independent deer working group’s key recommendations, and the Government accepted it. The convener might remember that it was also a recommendation of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee in the previous parliamentary session, which the convener was deputy convener of, and of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee in session 4—we are delving into the annals of the Scottish Parliament here. The recommendation has been there for a very long time and it really needs action.

The proposed national deer management programme that amendment 246 sets out is effectively a modernised form of cull approval scheme. It is in line with what is in the most recent programme for government, which committed to having sustainable deer management pilots that would then be rolled out on a national scale. I think that amendment 246 would achieve that.