Official Report 571KB pdf
Our main business today is to take evidence on “Getting the best from our land—A draft land use strategy for Scotland”, on which the Government is currently consulting. Under the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, a concluded strategy must be published by March. This morning we will hear from two panels of stakeholders.
In broad terms, the three objectives—economic, environmental and social—are focused on sustainable development and are fine as they stand. However, they are very broadly written. Scottish Environment LINK’s real concern about the objectives and what will flow from them is that they are not specific, action orientated and time bound. The 2009 act sets some clear requirements for what the land use strategy must deliver and states that there must be clear objectives, policies and proposals that flow from them and a timescale for how those policies and proposals will achieve something on the ground. Broadly, there is nothing wrong with having three objectives that relate to economic, social and environmental issues, but they need to be much more detailed and to make clear commitments to Government action in all the areas.
I agree with Vicki Swales. Without some sort of prioritisation of the three objectives, the strategy is trying to be all things to all men. It is questionable how much use that will be in directing policy decision making, because it can be argued that each objective is more important than the others. In our view, economic stability and sustainability must be the primary consideration. The social and environmental objectives will be able to flow from that. Our concern is with rural areas, although the strategy relates to both rural and urban areas.
I agree entirely with Jackie McCreery’s perspective and almost entirely with Vicki Swales’s take on the issue. It would be very difficult for anyone to disagree with the land use strategy’s laudable aims and objectives; it is difficult to knock those ambitions. Our concern extends a bit beyond the strategy and touches on some of the implementation, timing and delivery issues that Vicki Swales raised. That begs the question, when does a strategy become an implementation plan and become about policy actions and measures that will make a difference on the ground? That is the wee bit that is still missing from the process.
I would like to respond to a couple of points that Jonny Hall and Jackie McCreery have made. In Scottish Environment LINK’s view, economic objectives should not have primacy over social or environmental objectives. For us, the land use strategy is about promoting sustainable development; the 2009 act is clear about that. There are three legs to the stool, as it were. Although the stated purpose of the Scottish Government is to promote sustainable economic growth, it is incredibly important that we should not lose sight of the fact that environmental protection and enhancement and viable rural communities are critical and that—as well as their being important for their intrinsic value—economic growth can flow from them. It is not about setting one objective against the others. All are equally important, and the land use strategy must help us to deliver on all fronts.
We agree that the environmental and social objectives are critical, but we take the view that they will best be achieved if we have profitable land-based businesses, in line with the old adage that you cannot go green if you are in the red. We are not pitching one objective against the others—all are critical—but we will best achieve all of them if we have profitable businesses at the heart of the strategy.
I agree. It is not about exclusivity or saying that one priority is more important than others, but there is a need to prioritise in some way if we are to maximise the use of our land resource.
You touched on sustainable economic growth. There is another big strategy document around on the planning system and the national planning framework. A comment that I have heard about the land use strategy document is that people are surprised that there is not a stronger connection between it and the national planning framework, physical planning and spatial planning per se. Can you comment on that?
We feel the draft strategy is lacking in detail in that regard. It indicates that it may be taken into account in planning and in development planning, but it does not indicate how that will happen or whether it is already aligned with NPF2, for example. A bit more work needs to be done on that matter. We understand that the Government has had a relatively tight timescale within which to produce a draft strategy in accordance with the timescales laid out in the 2009 act and that the strategy will evolve over the years, but we certainly think that this first version of it needs to be tighter on that.
To take it down another level, the planning system is clearly vital in driving land use decision making and so on in practice, but so are a whole raft of other policy instruments. If we look at the “Successful land-based businesses” objective in the draft strategy, there are questions as to whether the policy measures and instruments that guide land-use decision making are working together.
I think that Scottish Environment LINK would support those comments. We have made the point that we see the land use strategy sitting alongside the national planning framework and planning policy. The two approaches need to speak to each other, and the land use strategy has to state clearly its scope and status in relation to other strategies and programmes.
You will all be aware that in the past—the practice is probably still current—indicative forestry strategies have been used by planning authorities to provide a spatial concept of where forestry is appropriate. Those strategies date back 15 or 20 years. Is the relationship that exists between indicative forestry strategies and the planning system more like the relationship that you would like to see between the land use strategy and the planning system? Is there a close parallel?
We think that there are helpful lessons to learn from things such as indicative forestry strategies. To us, that is where you start to move from having a national, broad, overarching strategy to translating it into what it means on the ground at a regional and spatial level. We suggested that it would be helpful if the land use strategy included, at least in the first stage, some spatial perspectives, perhaps based around regions, and made a commitment to move towards regional land use strategies, which would flow from that.
I do not disagree with anything that Vicki Swales said, but I have a reservation about extending the concept of indicative forestry strategies and landscape-scale planning into other sectors. I think it would be a bit of a nightmare if there were indicative farming strategies for regions that began to plan out farmland use. At the end of the day, farmland use should be driven more by the marketplace, what the land is capable of producing and getting an adequate economic return. In the current climate, obviously, it is also driven by agricultural policy.
I agree. I do not think that it is appropriate for a land use strategy to be a spatial plan. That would not be appropriate when we have the national planning framework. However, I take Vicki Swales’s point that the strategy could set out in a bit more detail how we might implement its objectives at a local level. A bit more could be done there.
I will come back on a point that Jonny Hall made. He is right that there are issues around the market determining what happens on the land and around productive land uses such as producing food or timber. However, many of the goods and services that we are interested in getting from the land are non-market goods and services. It is about carbon storage, delivering biodiversity and considering water quality and protection. Land has an important role in delivering those things. The idea of looking regionally and spatially at what land can contribute in those broader terms is really important, and the land use strategy could help with that. We sometimes get a bit too hung up on the economic products and the market-driven aspects of what land provides, and the land use strategy is an opportunity for us to take the ecosystem services approach, if I can call it that, and think much more broadly.
The challenge is in developing and constructing income streams from those ecosystem services. Individual land managers who make the decisions on the ground might act on the delivery of those things, particularly in terms of carbon and carbon markets. At the end of the day, those land managers need to stay afloat, so they are driven by policy and market signals, and we have to get the alignment of those signals right. If the policy signals say that we want more to be delivered by way of ecosystem services, land managers will respond and react. However, fundamentally, we want to see as much as possible—and more than we do now—coming from the marketplace.
There are physical planning strategies and frameworks, but there is also a list of other strategies for agriculture, for which we also have policies: forestry, food, deer management, biodiversity, freshwater fisheries, river basin management plans, flood risk plans—I could go on, I am quite sure. How will the land use strategy fit with those? Will it help to pull them all together, or are its application and potential use quite discrete?
I would like the land use strategy to pull those strategies together. For far too long, not just in Scotland but in all policy environments, we have tended to pigeonhole sectors such as farming, forestry, water management, climate change and renewable energy generation. We have a national food policy, which I think you missed off your list. We have tended to operate in exclusive silos and not make those cross-connections, yet when we consider Scotland’s land use in practice, many of the day-to-day activities on any parcel of land combine those sectors. Farmland does not exclude public access and recreation. It does not exclude catchment management or some element of woodland. The list is endless. There are multiple outcomes—or outputs—from any parcel of land. We need to ensure that all those separate strategies are a bit more coherent and work together more.
I totally agree with that. It is critical that that is the role of the land use strategy. The strategy needs to set out a timetable for the review and, if necessary, revision of the other plans, programmes and strategies that are relevant to land use, to which Peter Peacock referred. Some of them have been around for a number of years—some might be considered slightly out of date—but some are more recent. The question is, are they all aligned, and are they all moving us towards meeting the objectives that are set out in the land use strategy? I am not sure that that is the case at the moment, so unless we have a clear commitment to action and to moving forward in that way, the land use strategy will fail and will not change anything. In five years’ time, we will say, “Well, what did it deliver? We’re not sure. It didn’t deliver anything. It was full of fine words but no concrete action.”
That is right. The other point is that the silo mentality that we are talking about tends to happen in central and local government. On the ground, land managers have been practising integrated land use for years. Many of them have integrated land use plans, multipurpose functions for their land and so on. The strategy talks about picking up on and sharing best practice. An important element of the delivery of the strategy is about not only getting the integration right in policy terms but rolling that out throughout the sector.
If I have picked you up correctly, you are saying that the current draft of the strategy does not tie all of that together sufficiently. As it stands, it is deficient. That is perhaps putting it too strongly, but am I right in saying that there is a good bit to go?
Definitely. The land use strategy highlights many issues that we want to see in there; the problem is to do with concrete actions and timescales, and what will flow from the strategy. Even the actions that are in the strategy are rather broadly written. They say “we will explore” or “we will consider” something within a five-year timeframe. Who is going to do that, though? When will that happen? How will it be taken forward?
If you look at the actions that are listed underneath the heading “Successful land-based businesses in a low-carbon economy”, you will see that they include things such as the review and implementation of the SRDP, and explicit reference is made to common agricultural policy reform. However, we will be doing those things anyway, regardless of the land use strategy. What we need to see in the strategy is how we can make more of the opportunities in doing the things that we already plan to do.
The other thing that is missing is how the strategy filters down to all levels of government and public agencies. It contains some good statements about how regulation
The clear implication is that the level of detail in the document is not sufficient. However, Jonny Hall and Jackie McCreery have argued that they do not want it to be too detailed, in terms of containing a spatial set of plans and maps to say that wind farms are fine in one place and forestry in another, and that another area is for flood plain management. They do not want that level of detail; they want more co-ordinating detail rather than any spatial concepts. Am I right about that?
I think so. A land use strategy should not be the decision maker, but it should enable decision making in some sense. That should involve pulling together the Scottish Government’s existing strategies and objectives for sustainable economic growth, and linking them with the individual objectives of managers of land in all shapes, sizes and forms: planning departments, farmers, estates, environmental interests and so on.
I do not underestimate the difficulty of the task that the Government has set itself in producing an integrated land use strategy. The objectives and statements need to be clear enough for people to hang their hats on in making a decision, and not so vague that they are meaningless and allow people to make almost any decision and justify it through the strategy. The Government is trying to achieve a hugely difficult task.
It is also trying to resolve conflict between land users; that is where the strategy essentially comes from. It addresses things such as flooding, food production, forestry, wind farms, leisure use and wild land, which clearly all come into conflict at times.
It has to move towards being more directive. In an ideal world, if Scotland was five times bigger, we might be able to deliver everything that we wanted. If we set all the targets and objectives, we would need much more land to deliver everything, but we are not in that situation.
I agree entirely with that, although there is a real challenge. Vicki Swales talked about decision making. Scotland has a finite—in fact, shrinking—amount of utilisable land, and most of it is not of very good productive potential. Fifty per cent or more of it is of agricultural class 6 or worse, which is very rough grazing. So we are expecting an awful lot from less and less land in hoping to deliver all the outcomes that we want from it.
Do you want to ask your question now, John?
I think that the subject has been largely covered, but this is the right time to ask it. Multifunctional land use has been talked about for 20 years, and we have been practising it for 20 years. I appreciate that we have an obligation under the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 to deliver the land use strategy, but how different will it be from the current practical realities?
I covered that earlier, possibly. There is a sense that policy making is catching up with the practice. You are correct to say that integrated land use has been happening on many farms and estates around the country, but we are looking for integration in policy development. The strategy has a purpose in creating an ethos among land managers. A single vision that everyone is signed up to is a useful thing in creating an ethos of social and environmental responsibility that goes along with property rights. If we can achieve greater integration in policy making, the strategy will be of benefit.
The question is whether it is right that that is coming from the Government. Should it come from independent land managers? As a farmer, I know what I want to do with each little section of land on my farm, within the policy frameworks and objectives that are already established. Therefore, given all the targets that we have—such as for 25 per cent forestry cover by 2050 and for 50 per cent of electricity and 11 per cent of heat to come from renewables by 2020—and all the rules and regulations, how much value is there in the strategy? Somewhere in the evidence, although I cannot find it, somebody describes it as an “aspirational” wish list. That is fine by me and I am happy to subscribe to the broad policy objectives, but where is the real value in the strategy?
You have described the nature of the problem. We have large numbers of individual land managers and landowners who decide what to do on their property and who are guided by policy, but also by market forces.
Should not that remain so?
There is an element of that, but at issue is whether the actions of those individuals add up to meeting the objectives that we have set and the commitments that the Government has made on biodiversity and climate change. The problem is that their actions do not add up to that because there is no unified view or coherent approach. For example, you as a farmer do not necessarily collaborate with your neighbour to deal with flood risk in a particular area.
Would not it, in that case, be the ultimate act of folly to try to impose Government targets on land and land managers that they are not capable of delivering, even though the Government has dreamed up something that they must do?
Collectively, we are capable of delivering the targets.
Oh, right. I am sorry, but there is a contradiction there, because a moment ago you said that we are not capable of delivering and meeting all the targets that have been set.
No—I said that if we leave it to the decisions of individual land managers, we are in danger of not meeting the targets or fulfilling our obligations, nationally or internationally, because individuals make decisions that are in their interests and are for their businesses but which are not necessarily for the wider public good. For example, we need 90 per cent of farmers to undertake the actions in the climate change initiative in order to meet our climate change targets. There are real concerns that we simply will not get that level of uptake and buy-in voluntarily from farmers.
I agree entirely with Vicki Swales. The key is that, no matter what the land use strategy says, it is about what is implemented by way of policy measures that incentivise, regulate or advise individuals to change their land management behaviour. Targets in their own right are hostages to fortune, in many senses. Governments can set targets on all sorts of things, but unless they are followed up with actions that move the situation on from the status quo, the targets will never be achieved, otherwise the changes would already have been driven by existing forces.
That is right. The strategy mentions equipping people to make good decisions and better decisions as regards land management. It also states that the majority of land use decisions should continue to be made locally by those who are close to the land. That is right. We have to recognise that those who are on the land often know best what the most productive use of that land will be. That should not be forgotten.
I am not sure. I think that there is an inherent contradiction between what you are saying and what Vicki Swales has said. You are representing your argument, but Vicki Swales is definitely saying that the overarching Government strategy is more important from the point of view of biodiversity and environmental enhancement. That is a reasonable point of view, but she is making the point that that should be the direction of travel and that farmers should be incentivised—I think that that is the word she used—through the SRDP and other methods to deliver Government objectives and targets. There is an inherent contradiction between your perspective and hers.
They are not necessarily contradictory. I appreciate your point, and in some cases you might be right, but there is a case for land managers in some situations to be better equipped to make decisions. In the light of the strategy, with information, incentives, the whole idea of best practice and all that kind of thing, existing land managers might make slightly different decisions. That is not to say that the decisions that farmers are making are wrong, but the Government’s strategy might shift them slightly in a direction in which they might not otherwise have gone.
It might be helpful to look back. Before the land use strategy, there was a series of studies under the rural land use study. I was involved in one of those, which looked at the role of the public sector in realising benefits or public goods from land use. That report sets out clearly the role for Government in intervening in land use decisions. It is clear that it is quite right for private individuals to make decisions in relation to their businesses, but the Government has a role in seeking to influence those decisions in a number of different ways in order to deliver public goods. It might regulate, it might advise—as Jonny Hall said—and in some cases it might want to incentivise behaviour.
I add that the strategy should not and must not be another layer of regulation.
That is the danger that we are sleepwalking into, as it were, by suggesting that this is a good idea. It will just be a further layer of guidance and requirements that will have to be met for some level of support to be provided. I appreciate that we are obliged to do it under climate change legislation, but we have to be careful about the direction and about the enthusiasm with which we embrace yet another piece of regulation.
I agree with that, but we know where the policy framework is right now, and we know the expectations that are being placed on agriculture in particular to do more to tackle climate change, and to tackle water quality and diffuse pollution issues in particular. There is a window right now for agriculture to change tack slightly and to start to play a more positive role in tackling those issues. That expectation will come on even stronger through CAP reform, future pillar II support payments and so on, but a crunch point will come, although I do not like to say this, at which Governments of all sorts—European Governments, the United Kingdom Government and the Scottish Government—will say, “Well, actually, we’re just going to have use the stick a bit more and start to ensure that agriculture and land managers more generally deliver against the objectives.” We will then tie ourselves up even further in regulatory issues, and there will be more obligations in managing the land.
I would like to pick up on the theme that John Scott has pursued. Is not it the case that, by and large, agricultural enterprises currently follow the incentives that Governments have created? If there is an incentive to create more forests or wind farms, to farm peat for carbon sequestration purposes, or to farm flood plains for flood management, they will do that. We must have a food policy that meets our food needs, but incentives can be consistent with that. There does not have to be regulation. For example, if the land use strategy set out sufficient details that informed the SRDP to incentivise certain types of activity, those things could be made compatible without any further regulation.
I agree entirely. Farmers are fantastic at adapting to policy signals. They have a long history of doing so. If the right incentive is put in place, farmers will adapt. They have certainly done that since the post-war era right through the CAP in the 1950s, and from even further back than that.
I see your point.
I will follow the same theme in a slightly different direction. Will the strategy lead farmers in the right direction? Jonny Hall talked about how much regulation there is.
That will depend on the policy signals that farmers and land managers, more generally, are given. As things stand, a farmer will not pick up the land use strategy and decide to change the way in which they farm because of all the strategy’s fine words about delivering ecosystem services, environmental management and all the rest of it. Governments have a role to play in directing farmers through a combination of policy instruments. They can intervene in different ways and have a range of tools at their disposal. They can use the stick—they can regulate to set a minimum level of environmental protection or of public health and safety. We can advise farmers and ensure that they get the right information about what they can do that is good and what is best practice. In some cases, we can incentivise them through various mechanisms of the SRDP and the common agricultural policy as a whole.
The point that I was trying to make is that landowners, small farmers and land managers are extremely busy, as Jonny Hall mentioned. They have the strategy, which we hope will guide them in the right direction but, as has been said, they also have other documentation, such as indicative forestry strategies and river basin management plans, which are all supposed to work together. Is it fair to expect small farmers and land managers to look at all those documents?
No; that is why we all said that the land use strategy has an important role to play in integrating and bringing together the various strategies so that they all point in the same direction, say the same things and lead us towards objectives that we all agree are important. I think that the multiplexity—if that is a word in the English language—of strategies, programmes and policies is confusing not just for individual farmers, but for the delivery bodies, local government and the agencies. What we are looking for from the land use strategy is co-ordination and integration. That is what it could provide, but that is where it is failing because, at the moment, it is too broad and too general. It does not set out concrete actions to take us in that direction or mechanisms that will enable us to achieve that integration over time.
The point is that individual land managers, whether they are foresters, conservationists or farmers, have limited interaction with central Government. They interact with government at local level. The strategy is an overarching collection of ambitions or aspirations that needs to be brought down to local level, where the hands-on land manager interacts. That could be done by dovetailing the strategy with the SRDP. The strategy must dovetail with the funding streams, because it is where the incentives are provided that the individual will interact with the public agencies. That is the point.
I agree entirely with Jackie McCreery and Vicki Swales. On a more general and slightly flippant point, the title of the consultation document is “Getting the best from our land”. I know that I have said it a number of times this morning, but the real challenge is to get farmers to ask themselves how they can get the best from their land. How can they get the best from their businesses and from what they manage? Such an approach would be entirely complementary to other broader-brush policies, targets, strategies—call them what you will—and will move us in the right direction.
So, if we can get the land strategy document and whatever directives might be issued to meet up with climate change, environmental and other policies, then there might well be a drip effect on landowners and small farmers. After all, you are quite right; busy people do not pick up every document that comes their way and instead need to see results. I know that this is just a strategy document at the moment, but it needs to have more in it. Those are just my thoughts. I am not looking for an answer.
Hold on a minute, Sandra—I would like to come in here.
You have raised quite a few issues. Personally, I do not see the sense of having a national 25 per cent tree cover target because it can never be applied uniformly. In Loch Lomond and Trossachs national park, there is already 30-something per cent tree cover whereas, in other areas, it will never reach even 10 per cent. We should not be seeking uniformity in that regard.
Following on from what Jonny Hall said, I think that this is about how we decide what goes where and what is the primacy of different kinds of land use and about the potential conflict between them. To some extent, we already have a policy process that helps us to decide that. We have national policy, such as the national forestry strategy, which sets out in broad terms what kind of forestry we want to see and where it is and is not good to plant trees. That translates into indicative forestry strategies at a more regional level, which go into more detail and say, for example, that it is a bad idea to plant on deep peat and not a good idea to plant in the prime biodiversity areas where we are trying to protect open space for example.
I will make a couple of small points in that context. The strategy makes a broad statement on primary use of land, but it is not of enormous value in directing decisions. It says:
We need to move on.
I am interested in the fact that urban land is mentioned in the strategy. The witnesses can hear from my accent that I am from Glasgow, which is pretty urban.
Obviously, representing a farming interest, the NFUS does not spend too much time thinking about urban planning issues. However, I make the general statement that we would like existing urban land to be used better—brownfield development and reuse of derelict sites for all sorts of development—rather than existing settlements expanding into the fringes of, generally, good agricultural land. As I said, we have little such land and, once it is under concrete, it is pretty much gone for ever.
Many Scottish Environment LINK members would like the land use strategy to say more about sustainable urban development and green space in urban areas—in our cities and towns, for example. It makes references to that, but I do not think that it goes far enough.
As Jonny Hall said, because the strategy was born out of a rural land use study, it has tended to focus primarily on rural areas. Vicki Swales is correct in saying that it could say more about green spaces and land use in urban areas.
We have talked about whether there is a need for the strategy. I now want to deal with the strategy’s three strategic directions, the first of which is “towards a low-carbon economy”. A strategy is pointless unless it has an outcome and delivers something meaningful. How can we get there? As has been said, unless land managers have an element of prosperity, they cannot achieve any of what is in the strategy. How can land-based businesses become more prosperous or sufficiently well-off given the current economic climate? How can they do that as well as reduce carbon emissions? What contribution should land managers make towards cutting carbon emissions?
As we all said at the start, successful land-based businesses are fundamentally important. I also hinted quite strongly that I have an issue with the approach being all about attaining a low-carbon economy. A low-carbon economy is a laudable aim, but I am concerned that we are in danger of ditching the sustainable economic growth argument. How do we interpret “low-carbon economy”? Do we produce as much as we did before, if not more, but use fewer inputs thereby producing less carbon and reducing our climate change impact? We could look at it in that way. However, if we are to drive for a low-carbon economy, we are looking at lower-input and lower-output systems. That would be a short-term answer to achieving a low-carbon economy that, in the end, would probably start to pull the rug from beneath our own feet, as the economy relies on a number of businesses that require inputs to produce outputs.
I agree with Jonny Hall. We are concerned that there has been no adequate economic impact assessment of what is proposed. An in-depth and substantial environmental impact assessment of the whole strategy has been done, so an economic impact assessment would be appropriate, too. That will be central to achieving the aims. To pick up on what Jonny Hall said, in the actions for Government, we need to put more work into valuing the goods and producing markets for services so that markets can be activated in areas where currently there is no market.
Bill Wilson has questions about the ecosystems approach.
That is the essence of the question. Will the panel give their views on implementing an ecosystems approach to land use in Scotland? What are the implications of that in accounting terms or for land use decisions?
That relates to some of the things that I have talked about. Basically, the ecosystem services approach recognises that land delivers a wide range of goods and services. Some of those are what we think of as provisioning services, such as food and timber production, but they extend to supporting services such as biodiversity, regulation and cultural services, which relate to our aesthetic appreciation of the environment. The ecosystem services approach means that, in thinking about land use, policy and the funding streams that flow from it, we take account of that broad suite of goods and services that land provides. We are not taking just a narrow view, as perhaps we have done in the past, that is about certain productive uses and economic outputs from land.
It may be too early to talk about embedding the ecosystems approach in policy. I agree that work needs to be done to value the services and goods. We have traditionally looked at the income that someone forgoes when they leave a field margin or carry out some environmental activity. I agree that we need to look at other ways of valuing the services and what is being done, but it may be too soon to embed that in policy. The Government’s approach in making a commitment in that direction may be the right one.
I will add only the point that we require some management or intervention, driven by policy and the right signals, advice and incentives, to make the most of ecosystem services. If we walk away and think that everything will happen by itself, we will be in big trouble quite quickly. To make the most of the ecosystem services, someone is required to manage the land in the most constructive fashion, particularly considering catchment management and habitats. We will get the connectivity that Vicki Swales referred to only if land managers, collectively on a landscape scale, start to act in a cohesive and coherent fashion.
The point was made that we need to look more at developing markets for ecosystem services and not necessarily rely totally on incentives and public funding.
We have choices about how we act. Flooding offers a practical example. We will probably experience more extreme weather events and a greater incidence of flooding in Scotland as a result of climate change. We can tackle the problem in two ways: we can build hard concrete defences to keep the water out and build sea defences to protect ourselves from a rise in sea levels, which is the approach that we have taken in the past; or we can take a wider and different approach, including natural flood management. We can look at how we manage land and use it to alleviate flood risk and deliver other benefits on the back of that—for example, creating new wetland areas to store water will have biodiversity benefits. We can think about managed coastal realignment, rather than trying to maintain sea defences, which will become increasingly costly and are probably untenable in the long term. Part of the ecosystem services approach and framework involves thinking differently about how we use land and address some of the challenges that climate change and other things will bring us.
I have to come back quickly on that and refer to my mantra of considering the opportunity cost of anything that we do. If we are considering natural flood management—which is what we have to do—we must ask about the opportunity cost of going down the route of using flood plains, for example, as they tend to be our most agriculturally productive pieces of land. We must trade off those factors carefully.
It occurs to me that part of the reason why much of the flood plain is prime land is that it has experienced floods and alluvial deposits. A potential ecosystem benefit of returning land to its more natural circumstance of a flood plain would be an improvement in the natural fertility of the soil—or do you not think that that is the case?
If we are experiencing an increasing number of flood events and an individual’s income relies on an annual crop from the land that we want to use, I am not sure that they will necessarily take the same view. We have always lived with flood risk management, and you are right that flood plains have built up naturally and are productive land but, ultimately, if we decide to take an annual crop away from it, we need some measure in place—although I hate to use this phrase—to compensate the owner for the income forgone on a long-term basis. That is when policy has to step in. If we simply say that we will allow flooding to occur in a particular location, we will diminish the land’s capital value and remove an individual’s income stream. If that is for public benefit but comes at a private cost, there is a big question to be asked.
I do not think that anyone would dispute that point. If it is part of the agreement that there are floods when the crops are in the field, there will have to be compensation. Surely, however, you would accept that there are positives. There is evidence to suggest that there has been a loss of topsoil—a decline in its thickness—over the past 50 years, which has resulted in the decline in fertility. Is it possible to manage the land differently, considering how it can be more sustainable and perhaps reducing inputs or needing fewer of them?
Yes—on a case-by-case, location-by-location basis. Soil erosion and the loss of functionality of soil are indeed a very important matter—we need to improve soil again. However, allowing the floodgates to open—literally—and having natural flood management and seeing what happens, without safeguards being put in place, takes us back to the policy drawing board. I would be very concerned about that.
Vicki Swales referred to coherent networks. There seems to be some concern that setting up coherent networks will result in a loss of development opportunity. Would she care to comment on that?
This is not my area of expertise as such, but I do not necessarily think that that is the case. We have a process that determines where development is appropriate and where safeguards need to be in place. It is feasible to establish corridors and connectivity between important protected sites, but we need to buffer those sites in the countryside. That will not necessarily prevent development—it is a matter of having the right development in the right places, in the same way that it can be a matter of having the right trees in the right places or the right wind farms in the right places in order to protect important areas and ensure resilience for biodiversity and the ability of species to move as the climate changes and as we adapt to that.
As it is not Vicki Swales’s specialist area, might I ask that one of Environment LINK’s specialists send us a written submission on the subject?
We would be happy to provide further evidence on that from the LINK network.
That would be helpful.
I know that LINK has been disappointed, and that there are differences of opinion about the extent to which an ecosystems approach should be applied.
Part of the process of making such decisions is to take some wider considerations and to factor in other issues. It is not just a choice between having prime agricultural land or not, or between allowing development or not. The point is to look at land differently, and to recognise that there is an opportunity to do things in a such a way as to deliver multiple benefits. How many of the provisioning, regulating, cultural and support services can we provide through the choice that we make about how we use land? It is a matter of changing the way we think about things and looking for a wider range of benefits in the decisions that we make. Too often in the past, stark choices have been made between one thing and another without seeing the wider framework and the wider context.
Even in that context, would there not have to be some sort of hierarchy of benefits?
I agree with that. I agree with everything that Vicki Swales has just said, in the sense that we are not talking about exclusive use—we never are, as land use is never about exclusivity. Nor are we saying that everything is on an equal footing, and that we must deliver absolutely everything on a given parcel of land.
In a way, that is part of the problem. I am not sure how we can do what Jonny Hall suggests. In the past, we have given primacy to certain uses—we have just discussed the example of flood risk management versus agricultural production—and have said that agricultural production is sacrosanct. However, issues such as climate change are forcing us to rethink that approach and to say that the primary purpose of land is to prevent Perth, for example, from being flooded, because the implications of that are more costly than trying to protect the land for agriculture.
We know all those arguments from consideration of the Flood Risk Management (Scotland) Bill. We are really pushed for time.
I have a question about reconnecting with the land. Connecting people to the land is part of the third objective. In what ways are we most likely to do that? How do you see the process working? In my experience, one thing that has reconnected people with the land is, extraordinarily, farmers markets; I declare an interest in that regard. Farmers markets have connected people with food, food production and food security. Do you see other ways in which town can be connected with country?
I touched on that point when I spoke about the urban-rural issue. It is vital that the land use strategy makes inroads into reconnecting people in rural areas and settlements and urban areas to an understanding of what Scotland’s land delivers for all of us, in many senses. The concept of farmers markets is a stand-out example of how that link can be made and local produce can be got into settlements, communities, urban areas and all sorts of other places, but we can do a great deal more.
The actions for Government in section 5 of the strategy are quite weak and could be added to. I see no mention of the role of education or even health policy.
I endorse that point. The land use strategy does not say much about local food production, farmers markets, green space in urban areas—which has been mentioned—and ensuring that there are opportunities for access and recreation. Education is mentioned earlier in the text, but not as an action. The strategy could be much more positive and concrete about such actions, which are critical, and how they will be taken forward.
I probably want just a yes or no answer to my next question, which is for the sake of the record. The strategy does not say much about land tenure, although section 5 mentions vibrant communities and the community right to buy under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. Should the land use strategy address land tenure and, if so, what should the objective be?
No.
No.
No.
We are about land management.
That is good. I wish that every answer was as succinct as that.
I wondered whether we might have got support for Mr Mugabe’s approach to land reform, but clearly not. Perhaps we will return to that later.
Setting indicators is difficult, but we have concerns about the so-called monitoring arrangements. They are supposed to be set out in the land use strategy, but they are non-existent. The strategy does not really say how we will judge and monitor whether the strategy has had any effect. Scottish Environment LINK would like a national stakeholder forum to be established, to follow the implementation process and to hear reports from the Government about what has happened year by year in the five years of the strategy. Establishing more concrete, specific and time-bound objectives will help us to monitor and measure whether anything has happened.
In the context section at the start of the environmental report, it might have been useful to have more data on matters such as demographics and trends, to direct what we will have to cope with in the future and where land use decisions might be affected.
I disagree with nothing that has been said. On data and information, we always need to set land uses in context. In Scotland, we map land use very well—we can see that. However, that does not translate awfully well into what we get out of the land in terms not of economic production benefits but of other benefits for biodiversity, species and so on. I would like to see reasonably robust data on what we get out of land use. That relates to Vicki Swales’s point about where we set the benchmark that allows us to measure progress five or 10 years down the line.
How would you measure that?
You would have to count only to one. John Scott might be the one.
I have read the strategy and I am none the wiser. That is the problem.
Okay—success would be a farmer having read the strategy and become somewhat wiser.
On that note, we are done. I thank all the witnesses for their evidence and invite them to forward to the clerks any supplementary written evidence.
I welcome the second panel of witnesses today: John Watt, director of strengthening communities, Highlands and Islands Enterprise; Bill Band, head of strategic direction, Scottish Natural Heritage; Mark Aitken, unit manager for operations, Scottish Environment Protection Agency; Professor David Miller, Macaulay Land Use Research Institute; and Charles Strang, Scottish planning policy officer, Royal Town Planning Institute. We also have with us Jamie Farquhar, national manager for Scotland with the Confederation of Forest Industries, who should have been on the first panel but is joining us now.
I will kick off. SNH strongly supports the objectives that the strategy sets out. If you are going to have a strategy for sustainable land use, you have to say what you think sustainable land use is, which the objectives do very well. However, we question in our written evidence whether they are the right way round, with regard to having vibrant and active communities as an objective to support the aim of a low-carbon and prosperous economy.
SEPA fully supports the objectives of the land use strategy and the need for economic, social and environmental pillars. Acknowledgement of the importance of land as a non-renewable resource is essential for a sustainable environment, and that needs to be fully recognised by an overarching land strategy that integrates with other Government policies and strategies.
I agree with the overall objectives. The language that is used in them, however, is a mix of where mitigation and adaptation could be applicable to all three objectives. After all, the strategy relates to climate change. If that is the overall vision, issues of consistency feed through part of the document, which leads us in the direction of mitigation for one of the objectives but not for the others. Apart from those aspects of consistency, it is good to see that urban as well as rural issues are identified in the strategy, and that the three pillars of sustainability are core to it.
I observe that the objectives are rather less measurable than one would wish—they are more aims than objectives.
I echo that, and some of the statements that were made earlier. The social, economic and environmental objectives are laudable and high level, but we had hoped that the strategy would be more precise and detailed about them. To an extent, they are outcomes rather than objectives; it would be better if we saw a link between objectives, activities, impacts and outcomes. The strategy is very general and high level.
We cannot have a strategy that does not address the three pillars. The problem that we have found with the strategy is that it states a great deal about the virtues of many different aspects of land use, but no single purpose drives it. We are concerned that, unless some prioritisation is built into the structure, it will not deliver.
In your view, what should be the priority for land use in Scotland? Perhaps you can each give us one or two sentences on that.
I would put two or three extra words into the vision, so that it would be:
You are asking the ultimate question: what do we want out of the strategy? We had hoped for fairly clear guidance on some land use management decisions, but I am not sure that we are getting that from the strategy. Lots of drivers affect land management decisions. Climate change and environmental sustainability are important drivers, but so is the need to sustain rural communities. We would have liked clearer guidance on how some land use management decisions should be made.
I agree with Mr Watt that integration with the planning system, especially the national planning framework, seems eminently desirable, but the strategy does not mention that convincingly. I would also like to see integration with the blue bits of Scotland—the marine parts—through the marine strategy and marine planning. That, too, would be eminently sensible. In addressing renewable energy issues and coastal planning, land use cannot be considered without looking at both sides of the coast.
That is very helpful. Thank you.
You asked what we want from land use. The question is the extent to which we have an aim in the strategy that is both agreed and specific. If the aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to move to a low-carbon economy, we might want one set of uses for the land. However, because land use change is almost always long term, there will be changes in our demands and expectations of it, which will always be a mix that will depend on the perceived view of societal expectations and how they can be met. From the land manager to the individual who never strays beyond the urban boundary, what we want from the land will vary enormously. If there were one uniform purpose, it would be easy to answer your question, but I do not think that there is one uniform purpose.
Should we be trying to create a hierarchy of outcomes?
If that hierarchy was perceived as being about sustainable development, at the top end that would allow the mix to fit well. If it only related to threats of carbon emissions and climate change, that would direct how we use the land in particular ways. If the outcome is sustainable development, the answer is yes.
To ensure that an overarching land strategy works at ground level, we must ensure—it is not quite there—that there are regional strategies and plans at a local level that land managers can work on. Also, more clarity is required on how the land use strategy links to land use planning. There is a requirement for urban issues to be addressed more in the strategy.
The whole point of the land use strategy is to underline that we want a lot of things out of our land simultaneously. The issue is how to achieve those multiple benefits. It is wrong to think of land use as a hierarchy, in which one thing is more important than any other. The point is that if we plan it right, we can achieve all those things simultaneously.
Those of you who were here for the earlier panel would have heard a fairly lengthy discussion about the connection—or lack of connection—between the national planning framework and the draft land use strategy. We touched on all the other strategies that are kicking around, such as those for food, forestry, flood plain management, deer management and biodiversity. Judging by your responses to John Scott’s question, you seem to think that part of the purpose of the strategy ought to be to pull all of that together more coherently—or is that not its purpose? In particular, what is the connection between physical planning—land use planning—and the strategy in terms of informing future decision making?
As a planner, I believe that it makes sense to view NPF3 as an opportunity to draw together more of those strategies and the strands of the land use strategy under the umbrella of sustainable development and addressing climate change. That is probably easier said than done, but it would be the sensible approach. You are right—we have an overabundance of strategies, most of which contain the same rhetoric, although occasionally it is put in different ways.
The strategies that you indicated—which I call sectoral strategies—lie below the level of the land use strategy. The land use strategy should be an overarching strategy. We should ensure that those sectoral strategies, as they become recycled or evolved in their next generation, are compatible with that overarching strategy.
You mentioned the point that I was going to come to. You see the strategy as a broad, overarching set of policy statements and directions of travel. Others see it going into a greater level of detail, which will influence outcomes and behaviours on the land. Some people might have started off envisaging the strategy as a zoning document of some kind, which is about physical land use. I am interested to hear the witnesses’ views on whether the level of detail in the land use strategy is so high that it is of little value, whether it is about right, whether it needs to go into less detail, or how much more detailed it needs to be.
We need that high level of detail in the strategy as a whole. However, to ensure that things happen and that specific objectives are achieved and actions are carried out, it also needs to go down to the regional level.
Forestry has lived with local regional planning under regional forestry and woodland strategies for a considerable time. In a way, I agree with Bill Band that, by and large, the land use strategy should remain overarching as long as it has direction. I go back to my previous comments about it needing a basic driver for it to be successful.
It is an interesting point that in the early days, indicative forestry strategies were just that: indicative. They were not definite in that they limited or required action, but they gave a broad indication of the appropriate use of a piece of land. Should the land use strategy go to that level of detail?
The problem is that forestry is a long-term subject. Farming, which is the other predominant land use, is relatively short term and can be influenced to change in a short cycle.
That is interesting, but you could equally argue that carbon sequestration is a long-term activity, or the management of peatlands, or wind farming, which is a 25 or 30-year activity. Would those activities benefit from the spatial planning approach that was pioneered through indicative forestry planning, or would that be too ambitious and a step too far?
I believe that there are possibilities. I am just saying that it would probably be more difficult than in our forestry world.
I would also go for the draft strategy being an overarching, high-level set of principles so that it is distinct and does not clutter the decision-making landscape. There are already well-set-out processes within the planning framework and down the channels. The advantage of the strategy is that it sets out in one document key principles about where things can be brought together.
The strategy is a high-level document that gives guidance. The question is what its purpose is and what it is trying to achieve. Will it affect individual land managers’ decisions? We heard earlier that it is highly unlikely that any land manager will ever read it and that it will probably not affect their decisions, so that is not its purpose—or if it is, it will not be effective. Is its purpose to inform future incentive regimes? Will it affect the upcoming SRDP and incentivise certain activities that will result in the outcomes that have been outlined, or is its purpose to influence regulation and put in place more restrictions on what is done and where? I am not clear what the purpose of the strategy is. Perhaps it is all those things, but I am not sure whether it will achieve them.
Thank you.
We have perhaps heard the answer to the question that I asked earlier about urban land. Mr Watt’s comments were interesting. Perhaps we can go into them later if we have time. How does the panel see the strategy applying to urban land? I will leave my question as open as that.
I think that it should apply to urban land. One criticism of the draft strategy is that urban land is perhaps treated as 6 per cent of the problem. I suspect that, in the context of what I used to describe as a sustainable land use strategy, it is rather more than that, but I do not think that that is reflected in the document. Perhaps it ought to be.
Can I comment on that, as a non-planner? It is important that planning issues are considered. Some work that the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute did for the Scottish Government demonstrated that, in Scotland, we lose approximately 1,400 hectares of land every year. Some developments are essential but, from SEPA’s point of view, we must weigh that against development on flood plains, loss of soil, and the reduction in carbon sequestration and the other many benefits that we get from land and soil. Urban issues relate directly to rural issues, particularly with regard to development.
I agree. We should not differentiate here. The document tends to differentiate, but the principles that are set out relate to people; it does not matter where they live. The section on communities, towards the end of the document, addresses elements of awareness, capacity building and involvement.
The strategy is actually quite good at making the connection between the urban population and rural land use and making it clear that they are strongly interconnected. The principles are as valid in the urban context as they are in the rural context, but the balance of priorities is different. When you are in urban areas or in the green areas around towns, the value of land for the recreational and health and wellbeing opportunities that it provides is much greater than it is deep in the rural countryside.
How can the reconnection of town and country or urban and rural be accomplished in practical terms? I am particularly interested in what has just been said about a more holistic approach. If the issue is about the whole of Scotland, it must include our urban as well as our rural environment.
We have found the phrase, “deepening our connection with the land” to be quite interesting, as that involves a number of dimensions. One is educational and involves the extent to which people understand the use of the land, which can be addressed through farmers markets, school programmes and so on. Another involves people simply using and appreciating the countryside and another relates to people being involved in the decision-making process. That is quite hard just now—there is no obvious way for any rural community to be involved in the decision making that affects its land, except in national parks.
I agree that reconnecting town and country is important. There are many good examples of that already—farmers markets are an obvious example, as is education. We look to organisations such as the Scottish Agricultural College and other colleges and universities to increase awareness. There are industry-led initiatives in Leith that link environment and farming, and I know that a farmer-led organisation held an open day in Fife last year, to which about 1,000 people turned up. That is an excellent way of increasing awareness. The Scottish Agricultural College runs school visits to its farm at Auchincruive and the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute has been good about promoting the value of soil to school children and the general public.
I agree with Bill Band that the strategy is quite good at making the urban-rural link. I point out, though, the need to ensure that rural populations are also connected to the land because, with the reduction in employment in forests, farms and the like, an increasing proportion of the rural population has no such direct connection.
We need to increase the understanding of the interconnectedness of everything. When we think of land in rural areas we might well think of scenery and landscape but we do not necessarily put that together with reform of the CAP post-2013, what the payment mechanisms might mean and how all that might relate to changes in livestock numbers, cropping patterns and, indeed, changes to the landscape. It is a long-term exercise to build in that kind of understanding, which, as John Watt has pointed out, has been lost from rural as much as from urban communities. The curriculum for excellence sits right at the centre of such activity.
Although not necessarily climate change or sustainable development-orientated, management plans for national scenic areas might well be worth looking at. You might well ask, “What management plans are these?” but I think that they are being worked up in one or two places.
There are three of them.
The plans cover landscape objectives as well as community and other interests, which brings us back to the idea of bringing together and openly discussing different values. In that respect, there are also village design statements, which are perhaps not so common in Scotland, and the transition towns movement. Obviously it would be daft if the movement did not consider its hinterland when going about its long-term activities with regard to energy.
Very good. I point out, though, that as well as the traditional uses of land in rural Scotland that we have been discussing, there is the industrialisation of such land. I hope that you will agree that visits to places such as the pumped storage scheme at Cruachan and the wind farm at Whitelee outside Glasgow should also be added to the educational process of appreciating landscape.
I will kick off by suggesting that one should not start by saying that they are not reconcilable.
I take your point.
We have multiple aims and the strategy does well in setting out their importance. Next, we need to work out what it means at a local level and whether those aims can be achieved at a local level.
We can probably meet them all, but we will meet some more fully than others.
It is probably unhelpful and too late to offer this comment now, but I did make it at the time. When the strategy was being discussed, it would have been helpful if some areas had been thought of in which to run pilots to give examples of the practical issues. Some rather horrid problems would have emerged, but it is in the nature of planning and producing strategies that their implications have to be worked out.
Mr Scott’s comments were interesting, but I do not think that food security would be the highest priority in Ardnamurchan.
I fully accept that.
I suppose that I am making the argument for the regionalisation and localisation of some of the guidance, because it cannot recommend the same approach everywhere. My point is that it is the responsibility of Government to make some of those decisions and, through the democratic process, to give an overarching view. I know that the strategy represents an attempt to go along that track, but I think that it has some way to go in being definitive about which direction we should be taking and what the priorities should be in different areas.
Are you arguing for something like the marine planning area system that was brought in by the Marine (Scotland) Act 2010, whereby each area decides on how best to use the marine landscape in that area, but that plan goes to Marine Scotland, which takes an overarching view of what is happening? It might have to go back to some areas and say that, from the point of view of Scotland’s overall needs, they need to tweak their plans a little to fit into the overall picture.
I believe that that has to be the case. There needs to be a regional approach.
Charles Strang made an interesting point about pilots. We had pilots for the marine planning areas. I am very taken with the concept of a regional approach and an NPF 3, whoever had that idea.
I suggested at the time that the national scenic areas would be good places to run pilots. In one or two areas management plans are being developed, but that work is not strictly related to the present exercise.
An essential requirement when it comes to helping land managers make decisions on whether their priority at farm or forestry level should be food, electricity, flooding or whatever is the provision of good-quality information. Whether we are talking about growing food, sequestering soil carbon, growing trees, developing flood plains or capturing renewables through wind farms and so on, basic information on the suitability of their land for those different objectives is useful. There should not be a requirement on land managers to follow that information, because it is their land.
John Scott’s question was about multiple targets, objectives and aims and whether they could all be achieved simultaneously. In a few places the strategy tends towards the point of view that things can be optimised—that there could be one solution. I realise that that is probably not what was implied, but the question made a connection back to the wording of the strategy.
That is fascinating. I do not wish to set one member of the panel against another, but, with the benefit of hindsight, is an example of an irrevocable error the planting of Sitka spruce in the flow country many years ago?
I surveyed those very bogs when I started my work in the mid-1980s. Since then, policy has changed significantly in respect of our extraction of peat, the building of a wind farm on one of the peat bogs and the reconsideration of planting policy. In 25 years or so, there have been changes in at least three different policy dimensions.
An example of an irrevocable error is the digging away of the peat in the carse of Stirling in the 19th century for agricultural improvement. That was a pretty horrendous decision, judging by our ecosystem values.
I will, with considerable temerity, try to differ slightly from the good and learned professor. I do not see anything wrong with optimising land use. That is what will happen. All the conflicts that have rightly been identified will certainly not be resolved in the first five years of the land use strategy, if it gets on to the books.
The previous panel talked about the strategy giving direction to small farmers and land managers. You have picked up on the fact that there are many other strategies including national park strategies and forestry strategies. Is it right for us to expect small farmers and land managers to go through all the paperwork and read everything? Will the strategy give direction to landowners and small farmers?
I agree with Jonny Hall that if one farmer read the strategy it would be a miracle. I could also substitute the word “forester” for farmer.
We conducted part of one of the underpinning land use studies, and an element of that was land manager decision making. A clear finding was an increasing differentiation between land managers who have access to information—who can professionalise for a variety of reasons, whether that is because they can afford it or because they know how to access the material—and those who do not. One can perceive that divide increasingly opening up. That returns us to the availability of information—the education and training element. Those who are aware of strategies and can keep all that information in their heads may be in the minority, but there are those who can afford to employ someone who knows where to look, to do that for them. That brings a very different perspective. What is the capacity of land managers to bring together information in an effective and affordable way?
You are absolutely right to be concerned about overburdening small farmers with paperwork. In its work on Scotland’s environment and rural services, SEPA has recognised the importance of minimising that burden on farmers. All the different strategies make a complex picture and there is a need for one-to-one independent advice from agricultural advisers who can see the bigger picture and are aware of the economic, environmental and social issues. There have been some successes. For example, there has been Scottish Government funding for the climate change focus farms and the so-called four-point plan. There has also been the work that SEPA is carrying out on priority catchments. Those are all good illustrations of the value of raising awareness among farmers through a trusted independent adviser looking at the bigger picture and giving advice to farmers that is, ultimately, economically suitable for them. It is about the adviser looking for the win-wins and how more efficient use can be made of the resources on the farm, such as fertilisers, manure, slurry, electricity, diesel and so on. There are win-wins that can be identified.
The mechanism for delivery is in tailoring the incentives that are available to land managers. It is not through the farmer reading the strategy document; it is through the strategy having a bearing on the incentive system, which the land manager will respond to.
The question is how to valorise and incentivise public good. Whereas food security or food production would have been a driver for land use decisions in, say, Ardnamurchan, it is less so now that sheep and cattle numbers are dropping. The question now is what public good there is in that area that could produce value to sustain those communities, whether that is carbon sequestration, landscape value or the potential for renewables. That is one of the challenges and it is why the strategy should give more guidance on how to design incentives to produce more balanced land use decisions and sustainable rural communities.
Two of the three members of the previous panel agreed that carbon sequestration, carbon capture or emissions reductions would require some form of enhancement, as it were, and Mr Farquhar alluded to the fact that organisations on the land have to be profitable if they are to deliver environmental benefits. Reducing emissions will not necessarily contribute to profit but, given the need to reduce emissions, what contribution should land managers make towards meeting emissions targets?
Plant more trees.
That is fine and, perhaps predictably, that is your answer.
I make no apology for supporting the concept of the land use strategy; it should enable us to achieve our sector strategy of increasing woodland cover in Scotland, it may introduce other discipline and it could introduce a presumption in favour of forestry against a background of one of the highest forest management standards in the globe—the UK forestry standard and its associated guidelines.
We now have the Scottish Government’s publication “Low Carbon Scotland: The Draft Report on Proposals and Policies”. It is intended to help us to meet the climate change targets, and the section on rural land use gives an interesting insight into the carbon abatement potential of various activities. What strikes me strongly about that section is that the farming for a better climate measures have substantial abatement potential. What is more, many of those measures would have negative cost—in other words, they would lead to farm efficiencies and therefore be profitable for the farmer. One might therefore expect the measures to be taken voluntarily. There is quite a big message there: farming is a significant sector in the carbon abatement process.
As Jonny Hall on the previous panel suggested, reducing emissions should not be communicated as reducing inputs; it should be communicated as optimising inputs and carrying out efficient and effective farming, which is what many farmers are doing already—with considerable benefits. For example, the Scottish Agricultural College’s Crichton farm near Dumfries, which is a highly successful dairy and research farm, uses substantially less fertiliser than farms of equivalent size.
Excellent, thank you.
I will ruin everyone’s day by mentioning two unmentionables: nuclear power and genetic modification. If we really want to cut emissions, we need to rebuild in some nuclear capacity that will, in itself, take pressure off fossil fuel generation and may give renewable energy the opportunity to catch up. If we are trying to maximise or optimise efficient delivery from our prime agricultural land, why are we so blinkered about GM?
Perhaps it is because of the effects in Argentina, where we see increasing problems with glycophosphate damage to people’s health and local areas without any increased yield. That might be one of the reasons why we are not happy with GM.
GM is the wrong term, of course, because it immediately raises everyone’s hackles. However, in forestry, we have been improving tree breeding with great success. Forest Research has done some of the leading work in the world on that. We can now plant a tree that we are confident will, over a 30 or 40-year period, grow at 20 to 22 per cent more than one that we have just cut down.
I suspect that there may be some difference between your improving of trees through breeding and Monsanto’s use of GM crops. That may be where some of the disagreement lies.
I will make an observation on crossing different strategies and policies. The land manager may be the wind farm developer, as small-scale wind turbine development has become prevalent in many parts of the north-east and increasingly down the coast. Equally, they would be the decision maker on aspects of biofuels and energy crops. They may also want to retain the tools, mechanisms and cropping patterns that have been on the land for a goodly number of years.
Therefore, many dimensions of the ability to adapt would probably be better left to ingenuity rather than Government prescription about how it should be done. That would drive us towards a high-level strategy of goals and objectives rather than a prescriptive approach.
I am slightly curious about the biodiversity value of Sitka spruce plantations. I would like to know what it is in comparison with the original ground or native trees. Perhaps the witnesses can provide some interesting comments on that later, because I think that the convener will object if I detour us into that topic now—I can sense her hackles rising even as I speak.
The ecosystems approach brings a wider perspective on biodiversity and is to be welcomed because it addresses the linkages between the biodiversity resource and people—how we benefit from that resource, whether it be from flood risk abatement, from storing carbon or from the cultural provision of nice scenery for us to visit. We place value on all those things.
SEPA strongly supports the benefits of the ecosystem services approach; its inclusion in the strategy is welcome. The approach has the value of demonstrating linkages, as Bill Band said, and can demonstrate the specific value of the different ecosystems that operate on a piece of land. As was said in the previous session, a number of ecosystem services can be provided at the same time; farming can take place alongside the provision of other benefits such as soil carbon sequestration, good water quality and flood risk mitigation. Taking an ecosystems approach and looking more closely at the value of specific ecosystem services would allow policy makers to examine in more detail how to reward land managers appropriately for the ecosystem services that they provide on farms. The information could be used in future policy making in relation to the SRDP, CAP reform and so on.
We were enthused to see that the ecosystems approach has been picked up. We did some work for the biodiversity group in the Scottish Government on the model ecosystems framework, as one means of implementing the approach. It is worth observing that ecosystem services and an ecosystems approach are two different things. In essence, the approach involves putting together planning and services. It is worth reflecting on that difference, so that we do not get confused and trip up.
Maybe the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute.
I am sure that the rural and environment research and analysis directorate would be happy to hear that.
I want to repeat something that I said earlier about value. I support Mark Aitken’s views on this. How do we put a value on ecosystem services and how is that value transmitted to land managers and communities in relation to sustaining those communities? That is the challenge.
You heard our discussion earlier about a coherent network of protected areas. Do you have any comments on that?
A key report on that was done by Professor John Lawton—the Lawton review that was commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was an English study that looked at biodiversity and whether the network of protected areas in England was satisfactory, given what needed to be done. Broadly, Professor Lawton’s conclusion was that the network was not enough and that there needed to be more bigger and joined-up protected areas. That key message probably has some relevance in Scotland, certainly in the more developed parts of Scotland. We need to look at that.
All being well, we will have John Lawton up to speak in the Scottish Parliament soon, so I will let you know when he comes.
Should the land use strategy address the question of land tenure and, if so, what should the objective be? I know that the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 was mentioned in John Watt’s submission.
Unlike the previous panel, my answer is yes. The diversity of land tenures is important. Community land ownership is one of the best ways of bringing people back into contact with the land, in as much as they are making immediate and direct decisions on land management in the community in which they live. We welcome the strategy’s discussion about the role of communities. We would have liked to see it go further than simply being about communities being passive factors that can participate in a decision or be consulted. Communities perhaps have more of a role to play in some of the decisions about local land use. From the efforts that we have undertaken to help communities to acquire and manage land, we have seen significant benefits that fulfil all the objectives in the strategy—on economic growth, environmental benefit and strengthening communities.
I reflected during our earlier discussions on the point that John Watt has just made. I visited the island of Eigg in the summer, and in a sense, what is happening there—I guess it is the same in Assynt ,Gigha and many other places—is a co-ordinated land use strategy. The people have democratic control of the land. On Eigg they have decided—although they might not describe it in these terms—that they want to develop one area for forestry, one for energy production, one for housing, and others for their broadband communications network, allotments, polytunnels and so on.
Yes, I think that you are right. Once communities have acquired land, especially bigger tracts, they create their own land use strategy and priorities. They consider—to return to John Scott’s earlier question—what priorities they have for land use, and what they want to use a particular bit of land for. That obviously varies from place to place, and the communities have developed their own strategies for doing it.
We commissioned some work on that, which we will be looking at in the new year.
We are talking about land use strategy examples. Peter Peacock was talking about a community example in which planning exists, and I think that Mr Farquhar may have been talking about large estate owners having had their own land use strategy for planning purposes, in many cases for generations. Those are two working models that come from a different perspective. Could those models—and others, such as the national park models—be used to inform us in taking up Mr Strang’s suggestion of developing NPF3? As a results-driven person, I want to see, if we are going to do that, how it will work. Is that a way of making the strategy work—using the examples to inform future strategy development?
Before answering that, convener, I would like to come back to your question. You allowed the previous panel only one word in answer to it, so my answer is no, but I will give a reason. We would be in danger of going down the wrong road and losing focus on the land use strategy if it also addressed ownership. The strategy should be about how land and possibly marine interests are managed and, frankly, the ownership should be irrelevant.
On the question of land ownership, I wrote the note to myself that democratically controlled land does not need to be democratically owned. There is a question of how the community is involved. Obviously, some estates have been successful at long-term national objectives, but sooner or later someone will come along and apply a different set of objectives. Equally, it is conceivable that a community could agree a set of objectives that are not in line with the plans to address the problems of climate change. In such a case, we would have to rely on the national incentive arrangements to kick in.
That concludes the evidence session with this panel of witnesses. I thank you all for giving us your evidence. If there is anything that you want to expand on in written supplementary evidence, please send it to the clerks as soon as possible.