Chamber and committees

The National Plan for Industrial Biotechnology, first published in 2013 and refreshed in 2019, notes the progress that has been made and the variety of funding streams that contribute to the success of the sector. This includes the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre, funded by Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Funding Council, investment of over £50m for innovation and £25m of private investment. In addition, there are a number of partner organisations including Zero Waste Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands & Islands Enterprise, and the Forestry Commission who provide expertise and knowledge transfer.

Realising the full economic potential of this sector requires collaboration, knowledge transfer and partnerships across the public and private sectors. The Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre was established with funding from Scottish Government (through Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Funding Council) and has a specific remit to deliver knowledge and expertise between industry and academia. It currently has an active portfolio of eighteen industry-led projects. Through its SMART Scotland, Regional Selective Assistance and Research & Development grants, Scottish Enterprise has provided support to seven projects in the last three years, with a total value of £2.2m.

The Biorefining Potential for Scotland report published in 2017 by Zero Waste Scotland highlights the scale of the opportunity for the Scottish biorefinery sector.

There are at least 27 million tonnes of bioresources arising every year in Scotland which could be turned into high value chemicals, biofuels and other renewable products across many industries.

The largest current use of Scotland’s “waste” biomass is for anaerobic digestion into “bio-gas”, a natural gas alternative, which was calculated to have a value of around £60 million in 2015. The second largest current use of “waste” bio-mass is the bio-diesel plant run by Argent Energy with an estimated 2015 sales value of £26 million. Other potential opportunities are in development.

Zero Waste Scotland undertook a review of bioresource arisings (waste, by-product and agricultural residues) and their availability across Scotland. The findings are published in the Biorefining Potential for Scotland report 2017. This maps materials and their characteristics (e.g. protein, carbohydrate) arising in Local Authority area on a weight basis. The work was undertaken to help deliver the Biorefinery Roadmap for Scotland to inform future investment opportunities.

Alongside this report, a dataset was created to provide data (the Scottish Bioresource Mapping Tool) managed by the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre.

While there is no specific criminal offence of “pet theft”, the existing common law offence of theft offers robust protection against those who engage in this type of offending behaviour, with the court retaining a wide judicial discretion in sentencing decisions to reflect the individual facts and circumstances of each case.

The Scottish Government has no plans to introduce a new specific criminal offence of “pet theft”. However, we keep the criminal law under review.

Dog theft is dealt with under the common law of theft. In any given case, courts have discretion in sentencing decisions to reflect the individual facts and circumstances of each case, with maximum penalties available all the way up to life imprisonment. In 2016 the Scottish Government made it compulsory for all dogs to be microchipped and for contact details to be kept up to date. This was to ensure the swift return of lost and stolen dogs. It is standard practice for enforcement agencies to scan dogs coming into their care.

In 2018, SEPA officials attended 26 agriculture-focused events to provide advice on a range of issues related to environment and farming. While these events were not generally focused on farm plastics specifically, SEPA officials were available to provide support and information on a range of issues facing the sector.

There is no national monitoring or management scheme for feral cats in Scotland. In strict terms, the term “feral” applies only to formerly domesticated animals and their offspring living completely independently of humans rather than stray individuals or colonies that are not owned by anyone but are fed by or otherwise rely on humans. True feral cats are relatively rare in Scotland.

Scottish Wildcat Action, which runs until 2020, conducts a programme of Trap, Neuter, Vaccinate and Return (TNVR) of feral, unowned domestic cats and hybrids within five wildcat priority areas. To-date, over 200 cats have been trapped as part of this TNVR programme. Outside the five priority areas, unowned domestic cat management is conducted by dedicated volunteers working for organisations such as Cats Protection.

Scotland’s Circular Economy Strategy “Making Things Last”, published in February 2016, commits Scotland to moving towards a mandatory electronic waste tracking system. Since 2014 we have been working with DEFRA, the Environment Agency, SEPA, and the other Devolved Administrations to develop the basis for the specifications for such a system. This development work includes a review of all aspects of waste data collection and management. The latest stage of of this project is the award of contracts to 5 companies to work with the partner administrations to develop this new system.

The award of these contracts was announced on 19 February: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/smart-tracking-of-waste-across-the-uk-govtech-catalyst-competition-winners-announced .

The Scottish Government does not have the legal powers to retain the Feed-in Tariff Scheme (FITS) once it closes to new applicants on
‎31 March 2019, as financial incentives and subsidies such as FITS are reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government did not agree with the closure of the FITS. However, we will continue to provide funding to communities and locally overall projects through our flagship Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES), our Resource Efficient Scotland programme, and Home Energy Loan scheme to ensure there is a market for small scale renewables in Scotland as we move towards a post-subsidy environment.

As we have made clear, to UK ministers, we are very disappointed that the UK Government has arrived at the decision to close FITS, particularly as the closure of the scheme will have a disproportionately high impact on community and small scale renewables projects across Scotland – and we have reiterated our position to the UK Government on a number of occasions that the closure of the scheme could lead to investor uncertainty and, ultimately, have implications for jobs and supply chains across Scotland as well as the rest of the UK.

We will continue to push for the UK Government to take Scotland’s interests fully into account during the consultation and development of the proposed successor to FITS: the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG). The latter proposed scheme was not designed in partnerships with Scottish Ministers and, indeed, we were not provided with advance knowledge of SEG.