Seòmar agus comataidhean

Absolutely. When—if—community engagement becomes mandatory, we are going to consult widely on the issue and the good practice that is associated with it. However, the issue that you have just described, of people not seeing community benefit, is the cause of the problem of communities not buying into these developments.

I am almost becoming like a broken record, but we are no longer in the realms of painting the scout hut or buying football strips for the school team. There has to be a substantial and meaningful community benefit that will improve that community. I believe very strongly that it should be the community that decides how the money is spent.

I will give you an example from my constituency. Vattenfall had a process in which it worked directly with all the associated communities around its Aberdeen offshore wind farm, including community councils and community groups, to see where its community benefit should go. The process was quite wide ranging, and there are communities in the west of Aberdeenshire that cannot see the sea that got community benefit from it while some coastal communities that bid for money did not get any. It is all about balance. Again, spreading the community benefit too thin is a problem.

I am not currying favour with you, convener, but I would say that it is a bit disappointing that you only got a park bench out of it. However, what a great dog walk Whitelee is. I have family in the area, and we often go up there to walk our dogs.

Yes, that has been put to us. We said that we were going to consult on the issue, and I think that the time is right to do it.

I am not here to answer for Ed Miliband. Upgrading the grid infrastructure has actually been the policy of successive UK Governments—it was the previous Government that put in place grid infrastructure upgrades. I take the point that everything like this takes a very long time, but the time to start is now.

I welcome your views, Mr Russell. You asked me what my view is. The consultation is out there, and I look forward to seeing what you put in by way of a submission to that effect, and the arguments with which you back up what I imagine is your opinion on the matter. Others will have the same view as you.

10:30

In the consultation that we have put out, I want to hear feedback from people so that we can see what the general view is. It is also important to hear the views of those who will be making the decisions. If councils and councillors overwhelmingly want to make all the decisions that are associated with energy developments, we need to take those views into account. However, there will be some—or perhaps many—councils and councillors who do not hold that view, and there might also be communities that do not hold that view. That is why we are doing the consultation.

No, it would not be fair to say that at all. You talked about flash cars and flash suits—I assume that it was the developers that you were talking about.

You have asked me about particular instances in your constituency in the chamber before, and I remember you putting it to me that representatives from various developments had been disrespectful to your constituents. Frankly, I think that that is completely out of order. However, it also lends weight to the need to make community engagement mandatory, and to the point that that must have a code of practice associated with it. At the moment, that does not exist.

However, what does exist at the moment is the reporter, who is completely and utterly independent of anyone. Ministers do not get involved in that process—and for very good reason. The reporter is deployed when there is an objection of the type that you have mentioned, in order to make a dispassionate assessment.

To go back to what Fergus Ewing said, there is an opportunity for constrained power to be used to produce green hydrogen, although the potential for that has not yet been exploited at scale. As you rightly said, in your constituency, the H100 Fife project is leading the way in proving the point that hydrogen could be safely used for heating homes. There are different views on whether that is feasible from a cost point of view, but the H100 project is seeking to prove the concept. I was delighted to be able to visit it to see what it is doing.

Water usage, whether for hydrogen or anything else, is continually assessed by Scottish Water and SEPA. Hydrogen would not be the only high water usage industry. There are many high water usage industries in Scotland, including breweries and distilleries, and hydrogen would be another one. We would need to ensure that we had the volume and the capacity to allow that. Anyone who required to use a great deal of water would have to engage with SEPA and Scottish Water on their plans before they could implement them, because their business case would depend on that water being available. They would need to assess whether they had the volumes that they needed before they put in a planning application associated with what they wanted to do.

In general, water scarcity is becoming a more pressing issue in Scotland. Last year, we had record water scarcity, and river levels were very low. That started a lot earlier in the year than is usually the case. SEPA issues licences for water abstraction from watercourses, and quite a number of people who would ordinarily apply for such licences, such as farmers, were told that they could not take water from watercourses over a period of several months.

Scottish Water monitors the volumes in its reservoirs. Until fairly recently—up until the past few months—Scottish Water’s reservoirs were back at their normal levels, except in Dundee. People think that “sunny Dundee” is just something that a Dundonian came up with for a laugh, but it is genuinely true—rainfall levels in the Dundee area are a lot lower than those in the rest of Scotland. That is why Scottish Water has implemented a household usage pilot in Dundee.

Given the more general concerns that exist, Scottish Water, SEPA and the Scottish Government are working together to produce water scarcity reports and assessments of where water is needed. Consideration needs to be given to the availability of water, whether to produce hydrogen or for anything else. For example, a lot of the beer that Brewdog makes is made in my constituency, which is where the company’s headquarters is. Brewdog had to engage with Scottish Water, because it wanted to expand and it required more water. At the same time, planning applications for new housing developments were going through the council.

An assessment is made at local level of what water is required in particular areas, and that would be the case in relation to hydrogen production.

More generally, your question gives me the opportunity to mention a hobby-horse of mine. We must start treating our water as a precious resource. The fact that it is rainy in Scotland does not mean that we have an abundance of water. We have the best water in the UK when it comes to water quality. However, the supply is not infinite, and we should not take its availability for granted. Scottish Water puts millions of pounds into upgrading its facilities to stop leakages and to bring down the emissions associated with processing our water, and SEPA constantly monitors our river sources and our watercourses.

If a hydrogen producer wanted to invest an awful lot of money in a way that involved counting on water coming from a particular watercourse, that would have to be bottomed out with SEPA well before it put in a planning application.

If someone is in danger of being told by SEPA in the months between April and September that they might not get a licence to take water, that is a pretty precarious position for their business to be in. A combination of all those things applies not just to hydrogen but to anyone who needs a water supply to run their business or housing development, or whatever it is.

SEPA is doing a bit of work on that at the moment. I was interested to see the petition come through, so I reached out to SEPA, which has a working group that is dedicated to pump storage hydro. It is exploring all the challenges that are associated with pump storage hydro and the interaction with watercourses and whether there would be loss or whatever. The group is also looking at the cumulative impacts and at the lack of formal co-ordination agreements for developers who are working on the same body of water. It is also looking at the impact of pump storage hydro on fish more generally, which includes the subject of the petition.

SEPA is developing guidance on the consideration of the cumulative impacts, and I believe that it will consult externally on that. I do not know whether it is doing that yet, but I can find out when it will. That will give the people who lodged the petition and people who are interested in the issue an opportunity to engage in the consultation and to provide their knowledge of the impacts that pump storage hydro is having.

The process that SEPA is undertaking is on-going, and I do not have the results of it. I also cannot talk about live applications, as members know, so I am not going to.

However, SEPA is taking an active look at some of the issues that were brought up in the petition and those that Fergus Ewing mentioned to do with the potential cumulative effect of multiple pump storage hydro developments. We will find out more about that from SEPA, including when it is due to do its consultation.

I guess that proceeding an indictment is the available option if a higher fine is what would be sufficient for the crime that has been committed. That is why I have set out our position in the way that I have. I absolutely recognise and sympathise with the fact that, as you mentioned in relation to previous amendments, people have gone to court and had to pay a lesser fine. In this case, however, the option of an indictment, which can lead to an unlimited fine, is available as well. I understand why you lodged amendment 299, but I hope that I have been able to set out that the level is not limited to £40,000, because an unlimited fine is possible.

Amendment 300, which is also in the name of Ross Greer, would introduce a requirement on the Scottish ministers to amend section 40 of the Regulatory Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 to

“replicate the penalties in EU Directive 2024/1203”

and set

“maximum levels of fines as a percentage of the total worldwide turnover”.

There are a couple of issues with the amendment. First, I am concerned that it is not entirely clear what is meant by “replicate the penalties”. To see why that is the case, we need to consider the nature of the EU environmental crime directive, which places requirements on member states to introduce criminal sanctions for causing environmental harm of different scales for a wide range of activities.

In our transposition of the earlier environmental crime directive, which was conducted while we were still in the EU through sectoral environmental regulation of different activities, the section 40 offence was not included. The new directive introduced a requirement for higher levels of sanction for qualified offences for certain activities where environmental damage is particularly severe and long lasting. That is described in the preamble to the directive as “damage equivalent to ecocide”. There is no offence in the directive that is directly comparable to section 40 of the 2014 act.

Members will be aware that the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee is considering Monica Lennon’s Ecocide (Scotland) Bill at stage 1, and I have put on record my support for its general principles. That bill seeks to establish a new offence of ecocide with higher penalties—I believe that the proposition is to have unlimited penalties—that would apply to events that are more serious in nature than those covered by the section 40 offence. As such, amendment 300 would create uncertainty and confusion as the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill progresses.

I am on record as saying that, before I agreed to support the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill, I offered the option of an amendment to the Regulatory Reform (Scotland) Act 2014, but Monica Lennon has pressed forward and has given Parliament the opportunity to vote for the Ecocide (Scotland) Bill, albeit that there are issues with it and it needs to be tidied up at stage 2, should it get to that stage. That bill would bring us more into line with what is happening in the EU. The campaign for ecocide law across the whole world is gaining momentum, and Monica Lennon has given us an opportunity to consider that in a Scottish context.