Seòmar agus comataidhean

Just to be clear, cabinet secretary, will the kind of detail on ecological restoration that I laid out earlier be expected to be in a land management plan, as appropriate to the holding?

I will speak to amendments 53 to 56, in the name of Ariane Burgess, and to my amendments 412, 413 and 97A. I will briefly mention other amendments in the group, too.

In relation to amendment 53, the community engagement obligations in the bill are important, and we need to have appropriate routes for any breaches of those obligations to be reported to the land and communities commissioner, who can then take appropriate action. As introduced, the bill allows only local authorities, Historic Environment Scotland, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, NatureScot and community bodies—as defined in the community right to buy legislation—to report breaches. It is right that there are some limits on who can submit a statutory report of a breach in order to ensure that the land and communities commissioner does not need to investigate vexatious or spurious complaints. However, additional bodies should have the ability to report a breach. Amendments 53 to 56 would allow community councils, the Crofting Commission, the enterprise agencies and national park authorities to report a breach. I therefore ask the committee to accept those amendments.

Amendments 412 and 413 seek to ensure that there is cross-compliance on entitlements to public subsidies where a landowner breaches their obligations under this legislation. That would ensure that a landowner who is in breach and is being fined by the state cannot simultaneously access public money for other land management or land use.

Okay.

Very briefly, yes.

Go on, give it your best shot.

I believe that I have already wound up.

I think that we are all wound up enough right now.

I would like to press amendment 53.

As I have said, I will not move amendment 5.

Amendments 127A and 127B relate to group 3 amendments on the definition of contiguous holdings, which we debated last week. We have had a constructive conversation with the cabinet secretary and I look forward to discussing, ahead of stage 3, how the bill will work on the ground. I hope that, in those discussions, we can agree a definition of “nearby land” that will reflect the need for community consultation. Therefore, I will not move those consequential amendments.

Amendment 26 would require land management plans to include information about how landowners

“engage with communities in relation to the development of the plan”

and how that engagement

“influenced the development of the plan”.

Including that information would support meaningful engagement between communities and the landowner, improve transparency about how that engagement impacted the plan and address a recommendation in the committee’s stage 1 report. I ask committee members to support amendment 26.

I do not intend to move Ariane Burgess’s amendment 334, which sought to do a similar thing by another route. Instead, I urge members to support amendment 26.

Amendments 29 and 2 seek to strengthen the obligations on landowners to increase biodiversity on their land and the restoration of beneficial ecosystem processes. Amendment 29 would remove the phrase “or sustaining” from section 1, leaving landowners to manage land in a way that contributes to improving biodiversity only. It would not create an inadvertent loophole whereby biodiversity levels would be sustained at the current levels, entrenching the status quo and the poor status of Scotland’s environment. Removing the words “or sustaining” would help to ensure that LMPs are forward looking and ambitious. It would encourage landowners and managers to think about how their actions can improve soil health, restore habitats, bring back native species and support the dynamic self-will processes that make ecosystems resilient and productive. It would align with Scotland’s broader commitments to a just transition, biodiversity targets and nature-based solutions to climate change.

Amendment 2 recognises that, given Scotland’s high concentration of land ownership, a relatively small number of landholdings hold huge potential to contribute to the repair of Scotland’s ecosystems. Figures from the Scottish Rewilding Alliance show that, of the 623 landholdings that cover more than 3,000 hectares, just 19 seek to restore natural processes at scale. On many large landholdings, natural processes have been interrupted and held back by human intervention, such as the straightening of river channels and habitat fragmentation.

Amendment 2 would ask large landowners to consider how their land could be managed to restore natural processes though, for example, river re-meandering, native woodland regeneration and natural grazing patterns. Although other policies, legislation and funding levers exist to encourage large landowners to restore nature at scale, having that requirement in the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill would underline the importance of restoring natural processes in responding to the climate and nature emergencies. It would also underline the targets that will be set in the Natural Environment (Scotland) Bill. I thank the Scottish Rewilding Alliance for supporting amendments 29 and 2.

In a similar vein, amendment 320 seeks to place a duty on public bodies to set out in their LMPs how they will manage their land for nature recovery. Publicly owned land should lead by example in tackling the climate and nature emergencies, and the amendment would help to ensure that nature recovery is a core stated responsibility. Scotland’s public land provides a major opportunity to restore natural processes at scale. Those areas can act as demonstration sites for rewilding and ecological restoration. Including nature recovery in land management plans would ensure that public land actively supports the return of functioning ecosystems. When it comes to land in public ownership, there is a particular responsibility to ensure that management decisions deliver the greatest possible benefit for the people of Scotland now and in the long term. The amendment would embed the public interest in land that is managed by public bodies. I am grateful to the Scottish Rewilding Alliance and Community Land Scotland for drafting amendment 320 on behalf of Ariane Burgess.

Amendment 395 continues the thread from the previous group about the growing pressures that are being exerted on Scotland’s land market by the rise in natural capital investing. As more landowners might seek to enter that market in the coming years and convert land use to activities such as forestry planting to create carbon credits, we must make sure that that is done in a responsible manner. Both local communities and nature have to benefit from such schemes, and there is a real risk that, in landowners’ hurry to enter the new market, natural capital schemes could deliver little ecosystem restoration or community benefit. The schemes must deliver genuine biodiversity improvements and be transparent and fair. The amendment would require landowners to set out in their LMP how they intend to comply with the Scottish Government’s principles for responsible investment in natural capital, which have already been launched.