I welcome the press and public to the 13th meeting of the Finance Committee in session 2. I remind members and everyone else that all pagers and mobile phones should be switched off.
Scottish Natural Heritage warmly welcomes the bill and its objectives of securing better protection of nature conservation assets and wider public support for biodiversity conservation.
I want to relay one or two comments on the financial memorandum that have been made by RSPB Scotland and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. Those organisations welcome the bill but they have asked about the move from the negative management of SSSIs—which basically means that we pay people not to do things—to a system of positive management, whereby people are paid to manage SSSIs in a beneficial fashion. The organisations felt that the funding streams were not absolutely clear. The suspicion was that a financial burden would be associated with the move. It was not quite clear how much would come from the natural care programme, how much would come from the rural stewardship scheme and how the budget streams that are to be associated with positive management are to be identified.
We have identified a forward programme under the natural care strategy that will reach the predetermined target of about £7.5 million from the SNH budget by about 2008-09. That is in our forward projections. We also hope that, as well as other contributions to natural care, there will be an increasing contribution from the rural stewardship scheme and the Scottish forestry grants scheme. However, we are confident that the moneys that will come from our contribution are accounted for in the budget.
As a matter of interest, will you advise us what percentage of SSSIs are farmed and what percentage are not farmed?
I cannot give a clear answer on that today. Large areas of upland are farmed to a low intensity because of sheep management. Obviously, there are large areas of deer cover that are not farmed. I am afraid that I cannot give an immediate answer to your question, but I could come back to you on it.
From a financial point of view, many of the bill's provisions appear either to be relatively cost neutral or to involve increases that are not particularly significant. However, I am interested in the paragraph in the financial memorandum about compensatory management agreements. The memorandum states:
Those figures are for compensatory management agreement payments. It is our intention that, as agreements come to an end, we should encourage people to enter into the positive management schemes that are available under the natural care scheme. In so far as the bill deals with established management and provides the opportunity for people to continue with compensatory arrangements, that is clearly something that would need to be considered at the time. However, as we hope that the majority of people will move into the positive management schemes, the amount of money that is set aside for compensation will drop as current agreements come to an end.
I remember the rather famous case of a landowner—in Lochaber or somewhere like that—who had an SSSI in his grounds and who was paid large sums of public money to protect a particular wildlife species. Are you saying that, because agreements are coming to an end, such cases will be less likely in the future?
Absolutely. As I understand it, the intention is that the availability of compensatory management agreements will be much more circumscribed under the bill than under the current arrangements.
I want to ask about the extra responsibilities for the police under the bill and about the remit and work load of wildlife liaison officers. Is Alan Stewart content that what is required can be met within the costs that have been identified for the bill?
I think that the bill will have little financial implication for us either on the practical enforcement side or on the training side. We are very much going down the road of trying to ensure that people comply with the law. Many of our activities are directed at training, giving talks and ensuring that people are aware of the law and understand it. If such preventive measures are successful, I hope that we will have relatively little enforcement to do. That is the road that wildlife crime officers take to try to prevent crime.
Your submission indicates that police officers take on a lot of the work without any remuneration—they get days off and that kind of thing, but little overtime is involved. That is creditable and I am impressed. However, it is suggested that, under the bill, you will also have responsibilities for policing the trade in eggs and the theft of eggs in relation to non-European Union countries. If you investigate cases that arise outside the United Kingdom, will that require extra expenditure?
That is always an unknown quantity. I think that such cases will be relatively uncommon, although they could happen. If we are investigating a case involving eggs that are taken from other countries, the chances are that those eggs will have been recovered in this country. Some inquiries abroad might be required, but we have good links through the national wildlife crime and intelligence unit, which can facilitate most of those inquiries. It is always difficult to foresee what expense might be involved, but I cannot think of any cases that would cost a lot of money.
Paragraph 356 in the financial memorandum states:
I would start from the policy intention of "The Nature of Scotland", which discusses the need to make the current, bureaucratic system of SSSIs more user friendly and, by so doing, to secure a wider public commitment to the protection of nature, particularly from the people who live and work on the sites. The mechanism that we envisage being used will reduce the number of occasions on which people require consultation with SNH and the length of the list. That is a significant piece of work for us, but we believe that it will enable us to measure greater support for the SSSI system from owners and occupiers and more positive management of the sites, including greater uptake of the natural care programme.
Beyond those surveys, who else should we look to for corroboration of that information after the event?
In relation to SSSIs, we will be under scrutiny from organisations that have a particular interest in nature conservation, whether those be non-governmental organisations or parts of the Executive. Questions will undoubtedly be asked of us from time to time about how effectively we are looking after the sites and about the incidence of damage on the sites—if the incidence of damage is reducing, that will be another positive measure.
You mentioned damage, which is tangible, but public perception of SNH is very much more intangible. Is that as far is it goes in terms of producing improved results?
No. We must look at the issue from both perspectives. We must ensure that we have adequate ways of measuring the benefits for nature and the nature conservation interest directly as a result of the intervention, in particular as a result of the natural care management scheme, because that involves significant sums of money. We are also aware that one of the difficulties that we face is that, as a result of the complexity of the existing system, there is a lack of public support. Although that is intangible, it represents a constraint in delivering the appropriate management.
What mechanisms do you have for measuring public support?
We have undertaken one comprehensive survey of owners and occupiers. That has been revealing. Although it indicated a positive outcome across the board, it showed that there are areas of difficulty, which we are looking to address. People have indicated how they would like us to relate to them. As a result of that, we have, in anticipation of the bill, produced site management statements, which are a means of articulating the best management for the site. We are now looking to agree those statements with owners and occupiers. Rather than leave everything to chance and waiting for people to contact us, we are being more proactive.
My question is about the implications of part 3 of the bill, which concerns wildlife crime. The policy memorandum mentions the additional functions that you mention, including objectives to
It is down to each chief constable to decide whether to have more police officers specially trained. There are more than 1,000 officers in Tayside and there are considerably more than that in a force such as Strathclyde. All those officers have the knowledge, through their general training, to deal more or less with any type of crime that they encounter, with a wee bit of specialist help. In the Northern constabulary, for example, the wildlife crime officers seldom deal with such cases alone; they offer assistance to other officers who might have arrived on the scene first. It is not always the wildlife crime officers who deal with a particular offence. They offer assistance and advice to their colleagues and they know where to get other specialist help from, for example, RSPB Scotland, SNH or a museum.
I take the point that it is for chief constables to allocate their resources appropriately. However, I am slightly uncomfortable with the fact—I will probably leave the issue on the table, because it may not be a matter for you—that the financial memorandum does not state that the police will need, within current resources, to find more time to train their officers, especially as the range of functions mentioned implies a slightly larger volume of work that will involve a slightly greater number of people.
On that note, I thank the witnesses for their written and oral evidence, which has been helpful to us in considering the financial memorandum. We need to deal with the bill quickly and get our report through the system to the Environment and Rural Development Committee.
We are happy to proceed straight to questions.
Will you pick up on the point that Wendy Alexander has just made?
We appreciate Wendy Alexander's point and I refer members to Alan Stewart's answer. Relatively minimal additional work will be required to produce significant additional results. As Alan Stewart said, the additional work that police officers will be asked to carry out will, in essence, be the work that they carry out at present but with mechanisms through which they can make a difference. For example, police officers are aware of incidents involving harassment of cetaceans, but at present they can do relatively little formally to address such situations. However, as a result of the bill, they will be able to take more concrete action.
The bill will introduce a new exceptional mechanism—the land management order. You have calculated the costs of those orders on the basis that they are expected to be extremely rare and be made only once every five years. Given that the mechanism will be new, on what basis did you estimate the costs and the frequency of use?
The estimated costs are based on the experience of nature conservation orders. While LMOs are a new mechanism, we see them as being akin to the current NCOs. In particular, LMOs will have to be registered and a certain amount of administrative work will be involved. It is difficult to estimate how often LMOs will be required. Our estimate that there will be one LMO every five years balances our knowledge of NCOs, which, until now, have occurred on average once a year—that figure will drop as a result of the bill to perhaps once every two or three years—and the much more unlikely scenario of compulsory purchase orders, which, for the purposes of the financial memorandum, we estimated as occurring once every 10 years. We assumed that the frequency of LMOs will sit somewhere in between, at once every five years. We hope that they will in reality be required even less frequently than that, but that was our assumption for the purposes of the financial memorandum.
The written evidence from COSLA states:
That is a fair point from COSLA because, obviously, it would be helpful to have the Scottish biodiversity strategy in a more finalised form. However, COSLA is fully involved in the on-going consultation on the strategy. Under the strategy, the participants will sign up to activities in which they will be involved through the implementation plans that will accompany the strategy. The strategy will be used to develop work on biodiversity, but that will be done voluntarily—the bill will not compel organisations to do such work.
We are tasked with considering the bill's financial memorandum. Is it fair to say that the strategy—which will, in effect, implement the bill—could have financial implications and that, because we are unable to scrutinise the strategy, we are in the difficult position of being expected to scrutinise either obligations or non-obligations on local authorities?
It is probably not quite fair to say that because we do not see the strategy as implementing the bill; we see it as standing on its own but guiding public authorities in their implementation of the biodiversity duty under the bill. Public authorities have a choice: they must look at sections 1 and 2 and consider how to implement the biodiversity duty.
Paragraph 389 in the financial memorandum states that respondents from local authorities to the consultation raised the question of resourcing for local projects, but that, because they did not give specific examples, it is difficult to quantify the cost involved. Will you give us a little more information about that? What kind of responses did you get from local authorities on the resources that they felt they needed to implement such projects?
The authorities were keen to have more stable funding for local biodiversity officers, although SNH has been improving its contribution to that for some years. The need for central co-ordination of local work on biodiversity was also raised. We are interested in that issue and want to discuss it in more detail with COSLA, although it does not arise as a direct consequence of the bill. Co-ordination might help to promote the implementation of the bill, but it is not an essential part of the implementation.
Paragraph 388 of the explanatory notes states:
The money already comes from SNH to support them. I think that, in its evidence to the Environment and Rural Development Committee, COSLA said that it expected the bill to be broadly cost neutral. That was the picture that we reflected. We hope that the bill will enshrine current good practice. In an awful lot of local authorities, there are local biodiversity officers who do terrific work. The bill offers a framework for, supports and encourages that work, which we hope will continue.
A recent RSPB report makes the point that a recent study shows that the overall health of many SSSIs is declining and that less than half the sites are in good condition. Will the budgeted costs be sufficient to remedy that?
You heard Jeff Watson talk about SNH's spending on natural care being increased. Over the next couple of years, something in the order of £16 million will be spent on natural care programmes, which encourage land managers—the people responsible for SSSIs—not only to keep sites at the existing standard but to do positive things beyond that. As we discussed in relation to the financial memorandum, the bill also contains a compensatory management component: where, for one reason or another, changes need to be made to something that is being done on a site and those changes affect the established management practice, money will be provided. The existing system and the one that the bill will bring into effect contain quite a lot of money that will allow positive action to be taken.
Are you aware of the criteria that the RSPB applied when reaching its conclusions about many of the SSSIs?
I am afraid that I am not able to answer that. It is more a question for SNH colleagues to respond to.
I will leave you to pass it on to them.
I thank the witnesses for giving evidence. I do not think that we were going to fire any questions at them by e-mail, but we will have to reach a rapid conclusion in our consideration of the financial memorandum.
We have difficulty in scrutinising when we are considering a bill that it is part of an overall strategy or when other work is being done that is crucial to the implementation of a bill that we are considering. Such work inevitably has an impact on the financial memorandum, which we are unable to scrutinise, especially when a large strategy is already being implemented, as is the case with the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Bill. It would have been better if the financial memorandum could have contained more information about the strategy's progress. I expect that we will hear the same about the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill.
That is a fair general point but, as you know, we are in discussion with the Executive about the shape and format of financial memoranda. It would be fair to admit your point as a general issue.
We cannot assume that all chief constables care about wildlife crime and will do the right thing. Therefore, we should flag up the fact that we cannot believe that the bill will be cost neutral if all the functions in it are pursued. That should be noted.
I am content with that.
I do not disagree totally with Wendy Alexander's first point, but my experience suggests that the police are extremely good at allocating resources—particularly in the outlying parts of Scotland—where there is evidence of wild birds' nests being disturbed or rare species' eggs being seized. My experience suggests that they make the personnel available and do not necessarily have to wait until a wildlife specialist comes from Tayside or Inverness. I have been involved in a number of cases in which fairly senior plain-clothes police in the islands have dealt with such matters and have managed to cope with them extremely effectively. Their biggest complaint has always been that they do not have the powers—which, I hope, the bill will give them.
That is useful. Another issue is that we would not want the Finance Committee to be viewed as encouraging witnesses or anyone else to make bids for additional resources that are attached to bills. The committee has been hard on that with previous groups of witnesses, so a balance needs to be struck.