Seòmar agus comataidhean

I was struck by your initial comments, Richard, about the big challenges in making sure that there is a climate change plan that delivers for Scotland’s potential role under the proposed natural environment bill and around unanswered questions about environmental governance. However, there is a whole range of other issues as well. You mentioned seal scarers in fish farms, and the whole raft of regulatory reform analysis that Environmental Standards Scotland performs.

How challenging is that landscape at the moment? Week in, week out, I come across demands for reform of regulation and questions about enforcement. Most recently, we heard about the treatment of battery waste at recycling centres, which is an issue that raises questions about whether the regulations are adequate.

In a landscape in which there is such a strong demand for ESS’s services, how do you equip the organisation to deal with the breadth of that demand, to analyse whether regulations are being enforced appropriately and to consider whether they are fit for purpose in the first place?

I have a final question. The committee has been looking at the bill for quite some time, during which other legislation has been progressing through Parliament, including the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024. Is the bill also an opportunity to address some loopholes and issues in other acts that relate to land use? In particular, there are concerns about a loophole in the aforementioned act in relation to the area that is subject to grouse moor licensing. Clearly, some such issues were not foreseen when the bill was drafted. Given that we are in the last year of the parliamentary session, is the cabinet secretary considering whether the bill would be an appropriate vehicle to try and tidy up anything that exists in that space? [Laughter.]

Okay.

Do we fully understand the impact of damage caused by game? I am thinking about avian flu. Would a mass release of pheasants in the countryside have an impact on the spread of avian flu and disease? Is that seen as damage? It feels as though we do not have a full grasp of some of the impacts of game. That came up in some of the committee’s private discussions with stakeholders.

Thanks for the useful detail.

My last question is about deer. If tenants have a limited right to control deer on their land, does that preclude them from claiming compensation for deer damage?

I think that that is me on the technical stuff.

I have a concern about the process that the new regulations have gone through. As I understand it, we are signed up to an international convention on these “forever chemicals”. That convention is meeting again in April for a conference of parties to decide which chemicals will be exempted from the regime. The parties will come up with a technical formal wording, which signatories can adopt.

It seems a bit odd that the UK Government is laying the regulations in March—three weeks ahead of the international convention meeting, which may end up requiring rewriting of some of the terms that the Government is introducing on exempt chemicals. I do not understand that thinking. Does it relate to a notification at the beginning of last year, which set a particular timeline running? I am not sure. However, if we sign up to an international convention, and we want to stick with it and its rule-making process, it is odd for the UK Government to lay regulations in advance of that. It does not feel right in terms of process. It would be ideal if this regulation were brought forward in May, after the meeting in April.

I ask you to consider what the bill looks like to communities where there is a significant or powerful landowner. They will see that the bill will not change the concentration of land ownership overnight, because that depends on many factors, including an eventual sale of land, lotting and everything else. The bill might deliver transparency but, at the moment, it does not apply to very significant landholdings—I go back to the example of Taymouth Castle. Communities will look at the bill and ask how it provides transparency that will benefit them. They will ask how they can be sure of what the future is, and how they can understand major landowners’ plans for their communities. At the moment, the bill does not seem to apply to those communities.

The setting of a threshold seems to be quite arbitrary anyway. Setting it at 3,000 hectares clearly excludes a number of very significant landholdings in Scotland.

We have taken evidence from a range of communities that have developed local place plans. It is clear that there is a relationship between what is in the wider land management plan, what could be in the local place plan and what is actually taking place in that surrounding community, particularly in the built environment. Do you see a role for local place plans in the bill, and should they be specifically mentioned in relation to LMPs? We would not want a situation in which a land management plan that is not really binding on the landowner is developed in one space and a local place plan is developed in another space and for those not to meet up.

I am struggling to see how that can be enforced. You are saying that it is, in effect, a public interest test, but it is not applied to the owner of the land. How would the public interest be carried through to future plans for an estate? Would that be done through land management plans? I am struggling to see how the public interest would be considered if the test is to be applied retrospectively, at the point of sale, on the person who is selling the land.