Seòmar agus comataidhean

I call Bob Doris to speak to amendment 16 and any other amendments in the group.

Amendment 310, in the name of Ariane Burgess, is grouped with amendments 339, 342, 348, 427, 433, 150, 151, 158, 174 to 174B, 364, 459 and 460. Ariane Burgess is at another committee meeting, so Mark Ruskell is going to speak to and move amendment 310, and speak to the other amendments, on her behalf.

I call the deputy convener, Michael Matheson, to speak to amendment 150. I will refer to you as “deputy convener” only once—you will get to speak lots of times, but we all know who you are.

Do you wish to press or seek to withdraw amendment 310?

I thank the member for that. Just for clarity, I should say that, in relation to the accessibility of land management plans, Forestry and Land Scotland probably provides a perfect example when we talk about having a website where you can go straight to a map and find out what is happening in a particular area and when all the felling is going to happen. If you can find that, please tell me where it is, because I cannot. I just think that this could grow arms and legs and become incredibly expensive, and I would like to know more about those issues before I can support the amendment.

My other slight amusement relates to the amendments lodged by Ariane Burgess. The member can correct me if I am wrong, but I think that one of those amendments provides that the purchaser of an estate will have to adopt the plan of the previous owner. That made me smile, because if that were the case, it would mean that the Scottish Government would be letting grouse shooting happen at Glen Prosen.

Is that what you intend, Ariane? It might well be that a purchaser adopting the plan of the previous owner is not what you intended. Do you want to intervene?

I call Tim Eagle to wind up and to press or withdraw amendment 10.

The evidence that the committee heard identified that there are quite a few landowners with holdings smaller than 1,000 hectares that are not contiguous, which is the point that you made. It is quite arbitrary to define “contiguous” as being “within 250 metres of”. Would the cabinet secretary consider amending that definition at stage 3 to include holdings that share the same machinery, management and labour? It is what the Scottish Government has done before in relation to agricultural subsidies, in order to identify whether there are two separate holdings rather than two holdings working together. Would you consider that?

Does any other member want to say anything? If not, I will say a few things, because I started a trend. I will try to keep my remarks as short as possible.

I am mindful of the fact that land reform in Scotland was looked at in 2003 and 2016. The deputy convener brought up the fact that urban areas have avoided land reform. I have some sympathy with his desire to include sites of community interest in the bill, and I would like his proposal to be developed more. I am sad to say that, as amendment 11 stands, I am unable to support it. However, I hope that the cabinet secretary and perhaps a wider group can discuss how the idea can be progressed, because the bill represents a missed opportunity to take account of sites of community interest. That is an issue that more people in urban areas are affected by than is the case in rural areas, so the proposal is worthy of further consideration.

As far as ownership is concerned, I am not sure that the cabinet secretary satisfied me that the ownership issues would be resolved in a situation in which we were talking about a marginally different group of owners rather than the same owner. I am not sure what the solution is, but maybe the cabinet secretary could look at that a bit more.

The other issue is to do with the contiguousness of holdings. A distance of 250m is wildly different from a distance of 10 miles in the areas that we are talking about, whether in a remote area in the Highlands, a rural area or a semi-rural area. My concern is that we have not got the provision right, but it cannot be so broad that it applies anywhere in Scotland. For example, there are many people in the Highlands who have upland farming interests, where they keep their sheep during the summer, and they might have winter grazing elsewhere, such as in the south of Scotland, where the weather is more hospitable in the winter.

I am not sure what the solution is. I would be grateful for the opportunity to work with the cabinet secretary, if an offer was made, to look at how we could provide for that through an arrangement along the lines that I suggested—dare I repeat myself—so that, in a situation in which there was shared ownership, shared labour, shared machinery and shared livestock, two holdings could be drawn together in a management plan, rather than being treated as different holdings. I will leave my comments there.

The cabinet secretary did not jump in to say that she would be happy to discuss that suggestion with me.

Thank you very much, Mercedes. I call Douglas Lumsden to speak to amendment 364 and other amendments in the group.

Thank you. I am afraid that I disagree with you. Let me give you an example, if I may. A fairly large brewing company that owns land just south of Aviemore took millions of pounds from this Government to plant trees, which then all failed. There is no accountability, locally, in relation to those people, who made five people redundant when they took over the estate and created a bit of a desert in the process of managing the land. There was no process to feed in to that management plan.

I do not believe that it is where you live that matters; what matters is what you do with the land, which I think can be controlled by regulation rather than on the basis of ownership.

I am going to move on, but this is a great conversation that I would love to continue elsewhere.

I have huge concerns about environmental groups that own more than 500 hectares of land, because I do not think that such groups are paragons of good land management across Scotland. I can think of some groups that have taken millions of pounds to increase certain species, such as the capercaillie, and have overseen the decline of that species on the land. Just owning more than 500 acres does not make an environmental group a good land manager—it does not work that way.

With regard to the proposed provision on compulsory purchase, there was no definition of how a compulsory purchase would be done and whether it would be done under the compulsory purchase legislation. Further, how would the value of the land be assessed? Would that be based on the value of the public interest or would it be the open market value of the land? I think that there are various problems in relation to that.