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I ask Sarah Boyack to reflect on the fact that, in the previous session of Parliament, a proposed fisheries management bill was in the programme for government but it was never delivered. We have been waiting a very long time to unpack the issues, and trying to unpack an entire reform of fisheries management in 45 minutes or an hour is very challenging work for everybody.

I will not press amendment 33, and I will reflect on the cabinet secretary’s comments. As we move to the debates at stage 3, it would be good to hear “nature emergency” reflected in the Government’s intent.

Amendment 33, by agreement, withdrawn.

Section 38 agreed to.

Long title agreed to.

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

Northern Ireland is one of the four nations. It has clearly set the tone.

I will not press amendment 32 today, but I think that consideration needs to be given to how an appropriate consensus position could be reached ahead of stage 3.

I will press amendment 76. The Scottish Wildlife Trust has been doing a huge amount of work over many years on nature networks. Its concern, and the concern of many stakeholders, is that, although nature networks are referred to in the Scottish biodiversity strategy and are part of the workstream, they are not central to it. There would be benefit in drawing out the work that is being done to support nature networks across Scotland by having specific reporting on that.

I do not see nature networks as being in competition with other land uses; I see them as being integral to all land uses, because every type of land use will have corridors through which nature can pass. Land that is used for agriculture has hedgerows and other networks within it. The same is true of the urban landscape. Our parks and cycle lanes all form part of nature networks, so it is not something that can be considered to one side—it should be integral to all land uses.

In some parts of Government, to an extent, I think that there is perhaps a little bit of a misunderstanding about the central importance of nature networks and the need to integrate them into all forms of land use.

For those reasons, I will press amendment 76. I accept the cabinet secretary’s point that nature networks are being considered, but I do not think that they are a central consideration, as needs to be the case.

I know that this might be a sensitive area, given history, but have there been any interministerial discussions about securing an exemption to the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020? That has been done successfully before, particularly with single-use vapes, and the provision under section 140 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 is available, if everybody is happy with that. Obviously, getting everybody happy in the UK is the challenge.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?

I am trying to understand that argument. You are, in effect, saying that we should have a national marine plan with no reference to fisheries in it. I do not quite understand that. Surely fisheries management is, by its very nature, spatial, and therefore a spatial interpretation of fisheries management and a relationship to a plan alongside other activities, including activities that use the seabed, such as renewables and fish farming, would be quite a rational approach. I appreciate the distinction between onshore and offshore, but surely a marine plan needs to include marine activities, among which fisheries are an important spatial form of management.

In the words of Douglas Lumsden, it has been a monster mega stage 2—[Laughter.]—so I will keep my comments short.

I am seeking to amend the title of the bill to reflect the urgency of the nature crisis and the collective will of the Parliament to act to address it. Amendment 33 would rename the bill to the “Nature Emergency (Scotland) Bill”. I draw the committee’s attention to the fact that the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee scrutinised the Scottish biodiversity strategy and made the recommendation to the Government—I do not know whether the recommendation was picked up—that the strategy should be renamed “Scotland’s Nature Emergency Strategy” to underline the seriousness of the issue, and the intent for what the strategy should be achieving and the action that it should be driving.

The vision and purpose of the bill is important. As we have explored in earlier debates about part 2, the focus must be on moving forward on restoring nature. We are in a nature emergency, and we should reflect that in the title of the bill.

I move amendment 33.

I will start on a note of consensus and refer to the points that Emma Harper has just made. I do not think any member in the chamber would disagree about the need for investment that she set out.

I have not yet heard a single member speak in favour of the Westminster Government’s proposed punitive tax on EVs. It singles those vehicles out and discriminates against them. To answer Jamie Halcro Johnston’s question, I do not know whether that represents a wider approach from the Treasury on demand management. However, if it does, it is starting at the wrong end. It should be starting with sport utility vehicles—SUVs—and not EVs.

The Treasury’s assumption is that driving an EV is low cost. It is low cost, but only if people are able to charge their EVs at home and get access to a low-cost tariff. When I charge my EV at home, I am paying about 8.5p per kilowatt hour at night, which means that my mileage costs are about 2p a mile. However, if I go to a public charger such as those provided by Perth and Kinross Council, I am paying 55p per kilowatt hour. We cannot get into a situation where the cost of EV use starts to creep up above the cost of petrol and diesel. That would absolutely stall the transition to EVs, and it would blow a hole in the Government’s climate plan. The cost of electricity is clearly a political issue, including in relation to the roll-out of heat pumps and the general electrification of our entire society, but it is a critical issue that we need to get right.

Members mentioned all sorts of projects during the debate, and many projects are mentioned in the motion and the amendments. However, I am disappointed that not a single member has mentioned the A83. All the projects that have been discussed are partly about safety, and they are also about making the roads faster, but people in Argyll are completely and utterly cut off when the Rest and Be Thankful is closed. We need to get serious about investment in climate adaptation, because a lot of our roads are simply going to crumble away as we start to go beyond 1.5°. We are seeing more extreme weather events, and the Rest and Be Thankful is a classic example of what can happen.

We need to get real about the economic impact and the cost of road-building programmes. I am seeing an increasing proportion of Government revenue going on servicing the private finance initiative and other models that were used to procure roads in the first place. We do not want to get to a situation where the entire transport budget is eaten up by more and more projects that become harder and harder to maintain and build. There is no magic money tree here.

I go back to the exchange that I had with Finlay Carson. Let us consider the costs of projects that have being named in the debate—£3.7 billion for the A9 from Perth to Inverness, up to £5 billion for the A96 from Inverness to Aberdeen, £64 million for the A77, and £50 million for the A75. That £9 billion of spending on four major road-building projects in Scotland is an exorbitant amount. It is the equivalent of 200 years of the Scottish Government’s budget for all road safety interventions on all roads.

Jamie Greene talked about a moral imperative. There is absolutely a moral imperative to invest in all roads in Scotland. Over the summer, very sadly, I attended a fatal road traffic accident on the A85. Wherever such deaths occur, there are too many. We need to be cutting casualties and making our roads safer—and I am referring to all roads. There is a need to invest here. I accept that there is a need to invest in the A9. There is a need to invest in junctions and a need to invest in parts of the A9 that are currently dualled but where there have still been accidents. However, that needs to be investment in what works, and it needs to drive down the casualty rate.

I want a national transport strategy that is reasonable, sensible and evidence based and that starts to push some Government funding towards projects that will work—ones that will improve safety, keep us connected and, ultimately, get us to a better place as a nation.