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That, of course, Mr Hepburn, could be one of the failings of the report. If members read the report in detail, as I did, they will see that the number of shell bills or skeletal bills in the United Kingdom Parliament has gone up threefold in the past seven years, and that the number in the Welsh Parliament has gone up by 43 per cent. What we have not seen is a figure for the Scottish Parliament; that is one of the failures of the report, and I wish that we had seen that. Perhaps the committee has details on that which were not included in the report.

I have to ask myself why we have these bills. The committee identified that they are used when there is a need for flexibility and the ability for co-design, and when there is a lack of policy development in the subject area when the bills are developed. It seems to have come on the back of a lot of the Covid legislation, which was fairly wide ranging.

My response to that is the example of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. There has been a lot of criticism that the lead committee is being asked to design the bill as it goes through the committee stage. We will have to see what happens at stage 2. If policy development has not been carried out before legislation is introduced to the Parliament, that is a failure in the legislation. We ask too much of committees, which are heavily committed, especially in the final year of a parliamentary session, to get all the legislation through.

As I have said, I believe that those bills need to be much more tightly drafted. It shows weakness on the part of Governments to argue that they need to co-design legislation as it is going through the Parliament. To me, that shows that there is a lack of detail in the information that they put forward. Frankly, it is bad for parliamentary scrutiny

We have little time to carry out that scrutiny. I am grateful to Lorna Slater for highlighting the time and trouble that I took to go through the deer management consultation, but it should not have come to that. That should have been discussed long before the secondary legislation was introduced to the Parliament. When the issue was debated, I think that I was entitled to a three-minute slot. It was hardly enough time for something that I considered so important and in which I had invested so much time.

Also, when we talk about the scrutiny of legislation after it has been introduced, we talk about the super-affirmative procedure. I think that we should say the super-affirmative procedures, because the procedure that is laid out in legislation can be considered for up to 60, 90 or 120 days. Does it require consultation? Does it require to come back to the Parliament to be approved? Can it be approved by the committee? There is no standard way of doing it, which makes it really difficult for committees to understand and to get those levels of super-affirmative scrutiny detailed out.

My belief is simple. If we are going to have these skeletal, framework or jellyfish bills—whatever people want to call them—they should have a mandatory sunset clause, and they should allow a super-affirmative procedure that requires the legislation to go back out to consultation to all those who will be affected by it. We should make it as difficult as possible for the Government to introduce such bills, so that the detail is there in the first place. If we get that detail right, we will not face the problems that we had with the deposit return scheme.

I thank the committee, its clerks and all the people who gave evidence, because the report is excellent.

Having been used as a role model by Lorna Slater, I am nervous now; if my parliamentary career was not coming to an end next year, it would have been ended by those remarks.

Let us see whether I can build on some of the comments that have been made. Developing legislation is rather like a journey that someone goes on with their family: they work out why they are doing it, where they are going, how they will get there, what they will do when they get there and what the costs will be. It is exactly the same when setting out to do something in business: the person works out why they are doing it, what they are going to do, when they will do it and how they will deliver it. It is the same for legislation.

I do not agree with the Minister for Parliamentary Business that there has not been a proliferation of bills with little detail in them; I believe that there has been. In the eight years in which I have been a committee convener, I have seen more bills come through with less detail in them.

Jamie Hepburn: [Made a request to intervene.]

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I am afraid that I could not connect to the app. If I had connected, I would have voted yes.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I am sorry, but I could not connect to the app. I would have voted yes.

I may struggle, Presiding Officer, but I will do my best.

I am pleased to close the debate on behalf of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. I thank members of both committees and the other speakers for their contributions.

As we have heard, the Aarhus convention is an important international agreement to protect environmental rights, and a key pillar of the convention is access to justice in environmental matters. Let us be honest that, as we have heard, Scotland has been found to be lacking in that respect. We are just not compliant with the convention, as access to environmental justice in Scotland is prohibitively expensive.

I am aware of the availability of legal aid in the area. The Scottish Government has committed to reviewing that, and the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee has been considering the matter. However, to address our non-compliance with the Aarhus convention, a more fundamental suggestion that has been raised with my committee is to create an environmental court. Many members have spoken about the potential benefits of such a court. Stakeholders have suggested that it could result in greater efficiency, quicker decision making and, ultimately, lower costs. It is considered that there is something of a gap in expertise in environmental cases, which can be very complex. A specialist court might reduce the time that is needed to establish and understand the facts in a case and thus, in turn, reduce the cost.

At the moment, the only route for an environmental case is a judicial review in the Court of Session. Let us be clear that that is complex and, indeed, very costly. We have heard concerns that a judicial review does not adequately allow the merits of an action to be assessed—only the process that was followed in reaching a decision. Thus, the creation of an environmental court was raised with the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee when we looked at the Scottish Government’s review of environmental governance arrangements.

The Government’s review accepted that there was a need for improvement to access to justice, but stakeholders were highly critical that it did not sufficiently engage with the question of creating an environmental court. A separate briefing paper on the topic was later produced, but it did little, as far as I can see, to alleviate stakeholders’ concerns. Having been described by Dr Richard Dixon, the chair of Environmental Standards Scotland, as “shoddy”, stakeholders thought overall that the Government’s review was a missed opportunity to look at the new environmental governance arrangements in Scotland that had been established post-Brexit.

The Scottish Government’s review highlighted its proposed human rights bill as a fix for the lack of access to justice. We were told that that would include recognition of a human right to a healthy environment. We were also told that that would be underpinned by international frameworks such as the Aarhus convention. We were told that it could strengthen routes to seek redress, and could potentially develop both judicial and non-judicial routes. Where is that bill? That commitment has, sadly, fallen by the wayside, leaving stakeholders frustrated at the continued lack of action to strengthen those rights.

There is now continued non-compliance with the Aarhus convention, without any clear plan to correct that. The Scottish Government has suggested that Environmental Standards Scotland is the answer to those problems. In the Government’s statement following its review, it asked ESS to consider the role that it might play in investigating individual cases.

Dr Richard Dixon, when he recently gave evidence to the committee, described the Government passing a “poisoned chalice” to ESS, as it gives the impression that ESS is going to fix the problem of the lack of access to justice. The Scottish Government is trying to pass to ESS the challenge, and therefore people’s expectations, which Dr Dixon said was unsatisfactory.

Although ESS fills an important role in environmental governance in Scotland, its functions are limited to what this Parliament authorised when we passed the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2021. ESS cannot give itself powers that the Parliament did not grant. We did not give ESS the power to investigate individual cases. Indeed, that was not an oversight, because amendments were debated at stages 2 and 3 that would have given ESS those broader powers, but the Parliament did not agree to those amendments.

The issues in this area go beyond what ESS has power to address; those are issues for the Scottish Government. It must be for the Scottish Government to reflect on our continued non-compliance with Aarhus. It is the Scottish Government that must act to ensure that environmental rights are meaningfully protected in a way that provides a clear and accessible route to justice.

In closing, I urge ministers to reflect on the issues that have been raised in this important debate and to establish a route forward to ensure that everyone in this country with a legitimate case to raise has access to environmental justice. We have heard a lot about such people in the debate, including groups relating to the development of pylon lines and groups in urban areas. I believe that the Government has a lot of work to do on the issue, and I urge it to take time to consider what has been heard in the debate.

I thank Liz Smith for bringing this members’ business debate to the chamber today.

I am slightly nervous standing here, because my ex-brigade commander, Brigadier Garry Barnett, is sitting up in the public gallery. I would just like to say to him that I have spent time in the Parliament trying to convince everyone that I was a good soldier. Brigadier, your memories of all the good things that happened in your brigade were, of course, down to me—I do not know who was responsible for the bad things. It is delightful to see you all here today and to look back on the Black Watch.

It is probably quite odd for a Household Cavalry man and for somebody who represents the Highlands to be standing here paying tribute to the Black Watch. We are now joined as one, but maybe there is a certain amount of rivalry, as there was before. There is no doubt that, as an ex-soldier, I have a huge amount of respect for all the work that the Black Watch has done during our long history, including our recent history, especially in Korea, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq. Huge areas of our history have relied on the Black Watch.

I would like to talk about one particular member of the Black Watch who I find quite interesting. I am sure that I am going to get this story wrong, but I did as much research as I could on William Speakman-Pitt, who served in Korea in 1951. He was a Victoria cross winner and, I think, a worthy one. Let us look at his history.

On 4 November 1951, when things were particularly difficult, he filled his pockets with grenades and charged the Chinese, hurling his grenades until they ran out. He then ran back to his lines, collected more grenades and some of his colleagues, and charged back to the Chinese lines, throwing more hand grenades to break up their charge. Sadly, that did not work, so they had to resort to throwing anything they had, which appeared to be mess tins, cans and a large amount of beer bottles. I am reliably informed by the record that those beer bottles came to be in the Black Watch lines purely to be filled with water so that they could cool the machine guns—how they were emptied was not actually clear in the dispatches. William was obviously a worthy VC winner.

I have seen other acts of bravery in the Black Watch history, and that is one that I like. I have heard that William was represented as beer-bottle Bill, the VC winner. I do not know whether that is right, but I am sure that the brigadier will correct me afterwards. He was a worthy winner. People like him typify the valiant soldiers who have served in the Black Watch. When I was a soldier in the British Army, which I was for 12 years, I would have liked to have had the Black Watch at my side, but not always to have had a brigade commander from the Black Watch in charge of me.

I think that I am short of time, but I would like to give way.

Has the member thought of a way of resolving that? If the landholding is not contiguous, should its inclusion be based on a commonality of machinery, management and staff that makes it contiguous as far as land management plans are concerned? If one landholding is in Orkney and one is in Lewis, they should not be seen as being contiguous.

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

It seems as though there is going to be a long list of amendments to the bill. How is the cabinet secretary going to ensure that the committee has enough time in which to consider those before we go into what is bound to be a fairly lengthy amendment period?