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Mr Stewart, with respect, you have made your point, which you have got on the record. I actually do not think that it is appropriate and I am not going to allow—

Welcome back. Our fifth item of business is an evidence session on the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill with the member in charge, Monica Lennon. I welcome Monica’s committee substitute, Sarah Boyack, to the meeting.

This will be our final evidence session before the committee reports on the bill’s general principles early in the new year. No stage 1 deadline has been set by the Parliamentary Bureau yet, but the committee has proposed a deadline of the end of January. I believe that we are close to agreeing on a timeline, and will hopefully do so this week.

I welcome to the meeting Monica Lennon MSP and her supporting officials: Roz Thomson, the principal clerk in the non-government bills unit and Ailidh Callander, a senior solicitor from the legal services office. Both are from the Scottish Parliament.

Monica, as is often the way, I will start with some easy questions, but before I do, you get to make an opening statement.

I always feel that I am in the hot seat when we get short of time, but the clock never stops, so short answers and short questions will help me. However, I do not want to stifle debate, especially on a member’s bill that that has been introduced by a member of this committee.

Yes.

All my amendments in the group—amendments 152 to 155—are to do with the requirement to be fit and competent to shoot deer. There are significant concerns in the sector about the firearms licensing implications arising from section 28. I understand that the Scottish Association for Country Sports has written to and spoken with the Minister for Agriculture and Connectivity about it. The bill as drafted would require anyone who is shooting deer in Scotland to be entered on a new register of authorised persons once they have been assessed by NatureScot to be “fit and competent” to shoot deer. Although paragraph 182 of the explanatory notes describes it as a straightforward process for applicants, many issues remain unresolved, including the criteria for satisfaction and how the new test would interact with the existing firearms licensing law.

Self-regulation has served the sector effectively for many years and has maintained high standards voluntarily. There is no scientific or peer-reviewed evidence to support claims that mandatory training is needed for deer welfare. The deer working group said that wounding rates might be 6 to 17 per cent, rather than explicitly confirming whether that was the official evidence. There is no official study into the wounding rates or second shot data that would suggest that mandatory training is required. In fact, I recently submitted an FOI request to Forestry and Land Scotland, asking about its wounding rates. It responded to say that it does not record mis-shots or wounded deer, which I find amazing. Therefore, I wonder on what evidence the Scottish Government is basing the apparent need for mandatory training. The imposition of mandatory training would deter entrants to the sector and reduce the pool of active stalkers at a time when higher culls are being expected and are called for. There is no consideration of grandfather rights for practitioners in the bill—the fact that I have 50 years’ experience does not absolve me from having to be trained by someone who may have only days of experience.

Firearms licensing is wholly reserved to the UK Parliament. Under section 27 of the Firearms Act 1968, police forces must be satisfied that an applicant has good reason for keeping each firearm that they seek to possess. For deer stalking rifles, the good reason is normally demonstrated by a person’s intent and lawful ability to take deer. However, the bill would make it unlawful to shoot deer without being on the authorised register, which would create a direct dependency. If an individual is not on the register, they cannot lawfully shoot deer and, therefore, they may no longer meet the good reason test for possessing a suitable firearm. Therefore, the bill risks undermining the established Great Britain-wide firearms licensing framework, which has just been reviewed by the current UK Government. We would be left with the inevitable chicken-and-egg situation of what comes first, the firearms certificate or being found to be fit and competent? You cannot have one without the other. The two pieces of legislation do not work together, and that will place an unnecessary burden on the chief of police. Police Scotland processes around 9,000 firearms and shotgun certificates annually. Without a robust, streamlined information-sharing mechanism, the proposed system would require up to 8,000 additional checks with NatureScot each year to verify whether an applicant’s status is authorised on the register.

The impact, of course, would not be limited to Scotland. Many certificate holders in England and Wales regularly stalk deer in Scotland, but the 43 police forces in England and Wales currently have no information-sharing protocol with NatureScot. Each case, therefore, would require direct verification of an applicant’s authorised status on a Scottish register, which would place an unsustainable burden on both sides. I do not know how the imposition of those regulations would impact on foreign deer stalkers.

Those pressures would, to my mind, inevitably delay licensing processes, reduce capacity and create significant inconsistency across the UK. The Home Office has already been made aware of the bill in its current form, and I believe that the guide on firearms licensing law would require amendments to address the new Scotland-specific requirements.

I would be delighted if the minister could explain to me what engagement has been had with Police Scotland, the Home Office and NatureScot around that issue, whether the three parties have talked together under his guidance and how people will travel to Scotland from the rest of the UK to manage deer, either professionally or recreationally as a country sport, if they are not on the register in Scotland.

My amendments 152 to 155 acknowledge that fitness to hold a firearms certificate is already demonstrated under the Firearms Act 1968. Given that NatureScot recently wrote to the regulatory committee to say that it already has high standards of training and expertise among practitioners, there does not seem to be any need for the insertion of mandatory training in the bill.

My experience tells me that people travelling from overseas who have gone through tests such as the Jagdschein test, which is a mandatory test in Germany to shoot deer, are no better qualified than somebody like me, who has not been tested. Will they be fit and suitable people? If you have a Jagdschein or a European accreditation for shooting deer, will you be considered fit and competent to shoot deer in Scotland? If not, why not? Where would it put us as far as the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act is concerned?

So many questions have not been sufficiently answered. My view is that my amendments should stand and that, if you wish to do something different, minister, you should lodge amendments at stage 3 to prove how you have considered firearms licensing across the UK in relation to the requirement for mandatory training. I find no evidence to show that it is required.

I move amendment 152.

Before we go any further, I will make a brief declaration, which is that I am a partner in a farm in Moray. I will give a fuller declaration when we come on to discuss deer management.

I am interested in the point that the cabinet secretary makes. The cabinet secretary well knows that, while some matters are reserved, the Scottish Government controls the development of power distribution, as it holds the levers of planning.

The cabinet secretary said previously that she is not prepared to separate out individual items, because she cannot see the rationale for it. SSSIs are the underpinning of the legislation that protects Ramsar sites, special protection areas and special areas of conservation. That is fundamental for Scotland, and Scotland does have control over it. The problem is that, if we continue to develop in SSSIs, which are frighteningly small in Scotland, we will probably affect birds and other nature matters in those critical areas. I am unclear in my mind why the cabinet secretary is not prepared to give SSSIs greater protection. They underpin everything that the Government does and can do in Scotland when it comes to nature conservation. Perhaps she could explain that to me.

My point about going back to the days of the DCS is that people who were managing deer felt then that they had a specific organisation that could listen to them and that heard and related to their views. A lot of the members of the Deer Commission for Scotland were stalkers whom the DCS employed. The problem is that that experience has gone since the function has moved to NatureScot or Scottish Natural Heritage. My experience, and the experience of many people across deer management in Scotland, is that NatureScot does not understand the problem.

On that basis, if the minister is not prepared to support the amendment, would he at least support the fact that deer management in NatureScot must be done by people who have taken part in deer management? They must have walked the miles in the boots to be able to tell the boots which direction to go in. Is that not fair?

One of the issues with deer is that, in the winter—especially along the A9, for example—they move down to the road to eat the lush grass on the edges of the roadside and to scavenge for the salt that is there. In addition to controlling deer, therefore, we could identify areas that need additional fencing in order to improve road safety, in the same way that we identify where crash barriers are needed in areas where people could move from one side of the road to the other. Does the member think that that should be considered as well?

The reason that I have come to the committee is because I would like to add to it, and I feel passionately about the subject.

The next-door neighbour who has too many deer is being asked to control them to allow somebody else to achieve an end. What about the next-door neighbour who has far too many sheep, which come across because there is no boundary fence? Will you ask them to remove the sheep from the hill and destroy their farming enterprise? Are you happy to do it just on deer?

I am not doing that.