Official Report 599KB pdf
Welcome back. We move to the second evidence session of the morning, in which we will hear from stakeholders from the peatlands sector. We have around an hour and 15 minutes for discussion and, as always, I would be grateful if questions and answers could be kept as concise as possible. As with the previous agenda item, the purposes of this session are to support the committee in the development of its work programme and to consider important issues relating to the priorities of the Scottish Government and its budget.
Before we move to members’ questions, I will introduce our witnesses. I welcome Professor Roxane Andersen, senior research fellow at the University of Highlands and Islands north, west and Hebrides, and Richard Lindsay, senior research adviser at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, UK peatland programme, both of whom join us online; and Andy Ford, director of nature and climate change at the Cairngorms National Park Authority, and Peter Hutchinson, head of peatland programme and strategy at NatureScot, who join us in the room. Before we begin, I remind our witnesses that they do not need to operate their microphones, as our broadcasting team will do that.
I now invite questions from members. Finlay Carson has the first question.
I remember clearly when the former cabinet secretary, Roseanna Cunningham, trumpeted the huge investment that would go into peatland restoration and what we would be doing in Scotland over several years. However, we know that current restoration rates are well below what was required to meet not only the Scottish Government’s ambitions but Scotland’s long-term ambitions on climate change. Is the primary failure to reach those restoration rates due to a lack of funding, a lack of capacity or a combination of both?
Who would like to go first?
I would be pleased to answer that question. I think that it was in 2020 that Ms Cunningham held a summit on peatland, at which she set out the targets and the various constraints. Since 2020, we have had real success in delivering restoration. For example, in 2020, we were delivering around 5,000 hectares a year; now we are delivering about 15,000 hectares a year. Also in 2020, Ms Cunningham identified constraints on operating throughout the year. We have introduced bird breeding protocols, and we developed the previously limited workforce. So, there has been huge success since 2020.
The question that I think you are asking, though, is whether that success is good enough. Our current rate of increase in restoration will not see us making the initial target of 250,000 hectares by 2030. That is why the climate change plan not only reframed that target, setting its longer term to 2040, but increased it, in recognition of the fact that delivering peatland restoration is quite complex. Indeed, we have to design the projects, develop the workforce, and bring in private finance as well.
I am sorry. That was quite a long answer to a simple question.
Thank you very much for inviting me. We have seen quite a lot of progress in recent years. We now have a fully equipped pipeline. There are constraints, absolutely—at the moment, they are primarily budgetary.
One of the other constraints is that we need longer-term commitment in the programme in order for us to build agent-led capacity in the private sector. We do a blend of park authority-led projects and agent-led ones. The commitment for 2030 is a good one, and we very much welcome the budgets that have been outlined for that target. However, in the private sector, longer-term commitments out to 2040, for example, would enable us to build capacity in that sector and therefore scale up delivery again.
It is important to understand that the scale of the ambition was really large. At the beginning, the rate of delivery was perhaps not as high as it could have been but, as Peter Hutchinson has articulated, we have had huge success in delivering at large scale. Instead of looking only at the hectares, we need to measure success in terms of what those restoration projects look like. Increasingly, it will not be about the hectares but about the quality of delivery, the connectivity between the areas that are being restored and the more strategic implementation of that restoration to really build in the resilience at the landscape scale that we need. Looking at the hectares is perhaps misleading with regard to the success of delivery when we consider the wide range of benefits that all those interventions are delivering and will continue to deliver in the future.
To pick up on something that Roxane said about restoration at the landscape scale, it is important to understand that it is about restoring not only peatland but the other elements of the landscape, brought together. For example, by bringing back temperate rainforest on the slopes of our hills, we get emergent properties that give us more benefits than those that arise simply from the individual elements.
I want to highlight that the IUCN UK peatland programme also runs the peatland code, which is the means by which private sector funding is used to bring about peatland restoration. At the moment, 424 projects are registered with the code, which accounts for 60,000 hectares. However, there is a big learning curve for estates, which need to undertake a lot of baseline monitoring and need the expertise to do so. All those factors have meant that the peatland code is establishing itself as another means of restoration. The peatland action project is a globally admired system for peatland restoration—other countries are quite envious of it—but it takes time to train up estates and the workforce to get them up and running.
Thanks for those answers. I am pleased that Roxane touched on the fact that we need to look not only at hectares but at other benefits of peatland, which previous committees certainly heard about. They also heard about the concerns and the length of time that it would take to develop, approve and deliver those projects. I know that the peatland action project has stepped up to the mark. At what stage of the processes are delays most likely to occur at the moment? What practical changes could we implement right now that would have the greatest impact on speeding up those projects?
You are right to highlight that it takes about two years to develop a project and deliver it on the ground. That is because we have to design the work—for example, we need to decide how we will block the drains and re-establish vegetation. Ramping up our delivery from 2030, which I think we will need to do, will mean that we need forward design and planning and to design projects now for delivery in two years’ time.
Similarly, we need to develop the workforce to work in 2030. We have done really well to develop the workforce for the current amount of restoration, but if we want to ramp up delivery through those new design projects, we must develop the workforce and, of course, get the finance to fund those projects as well.
11:15
I agree with the timeline and the fact that it is necessary to do this. Going back to the point about longevity—this reflects Roxane Andersen’s point—ideally, we would like to move towards a space where we are considering the issue on a landscape scale. If we can get multiyear and long-term commitments and build a programme of, say, upper catchment restoration, and can tie our activity in with other landscape-scale stuff so as to build resilience, we can increase efficiencies. Looking at having longer-term programmes of three, four or five years, rather than picking off hundreds of hectares here and there, as we do at the moment, might help with efficiency in the system. Our current approach still delivers multiple benefits, but it is taking a landscape-scale approach that will bring efficiencies.
How does that work within the national park, where you have different objectives and landscape-scale restoration projects that all have to work together?
I would say that that is where the national park and the national park authority bring a great deal of added value. We have the national park partnership plan, which is the regional spatial land use strategy. Within that, we identify where the key restoration areas would be and where you would invest to get the most bang for your buck in terms of combined effort on landscape resilience. We have ambitious targets for woodland, river restoration and peatland restoration. Peatland restoration is just one crucial aspect of that whole landscape resilience. Through the national park partnership plan, that is where we can focus and target our efforts.
If I might add, the other part of that equation is the land manager, who can sometimes be pulled in lots of different directions by various policies and incentives, regulations and so on. In such a situation, the park authority takes a place-based approach. We speak to the land manager in terms of their landholding and not just in terms of peatland restoration, hectares or carbon—you get my point: it is crucial to look at the issue from a catchment point of view and a land manager’s point of view, and not to come at it from the single perspective of hectares, carbon and peatland.
This is an important issue, which I have discussed with another committee. Regional land-use partnerships are important with regard to enabling de-implementation. They are often organisations in regions or areas that are trusted and have built long-standing, trusted relationships with a range of landowners and land-owning organisations, and they can facilitate the uptake of peatland restoration or other landscape-scale initiatives and provide steering on the more strategic implementation. Supporting, enabling or leveraging the authority or the power that organisations such as rural or regional land use partnerships have will be critical to ramping up and speeding up delivery.
In the north of Scotland, where I am based, the Flow Country Partnership is one of those organisations. It has been supporting the large-scale implementation of initiatives and has developed a more strategic vision for where and how they should be implemented, working collaboratively with a range of organisations. Such organisations need to be enabled to support implementation more widely across Scotland.
One of the issues, of course, is the question of demand. If the demand side is strong and vigorous, it is easier to have things put in place. One of the challenges for peatlands remains that, although there is funding for restoration, there is no current way of monetising peatland that is in good condition. Therefore, once you have restored the peatland, there is no economic incentive to maintain it like that. So, if an estate owner or a crofter has peatland that is in good condition, they cannot get an income from it.
We need to find the key to unlock ways of, in effect, monetising peatland in a way that does not involve exploiting it, which has been the traditional way—to some extent, it is still the current way—of generating income from it. That is a land use support question. We need to consider ways of encouraging the demand side.
You have talked about the demand side and not being able to monetise peatland once it has been restored. There is a recognition that we need more private investment in peatland restoration. Is that a key barrier? What can be done to encourage more private investment?
The only vehicle that we have at the moment is the peatland code. One of the issues with the code is that it focuses entirely on restoration. As I said, once an area has been restored, there is no incentive to maintain it over the long term. That also means that the code does not help with areas that are already in good condition, so private investment has no interest in that. At the moment, private investment is more geared to, for example, wind farm development and forestry—things that involve destructive actions when it comes to peatland, unless we are talking about the restoration of temperate rainforest.
One issue, particularly in some remote and rural regions, is that much of the peatland that has been used for crofting or has been part of a common grazing area might not be eligible for restoration. Even if it is eligible, it is very complicated for crofters to get an income through the peatland code. There are projects that are looking at that, but access to private finance is currently relatively limited to people who already have the means to undertake peatland restoration. There is not much alignment with a just transition, so progress is needed in that regard.
In relation to what Richard Lindsay said about the demand side, one of the reasons why it has taken a bit of time for the peatland code to take off is that there is a lot of hesitancy about the market for carbon emission reductions. The emission reductions do not involve a net gain of carbon; rather, they come from a reduction in emissions, and that is not seen as a real carbon credit. For that reason, in the market, people have been hesitant to get into the peatland code. We should consider anything that can support an increase in demand and in confidence in the carbon units from peatland restoration.
Another part of the solution involves supporting mechanisms that enable crofters and smaller landholders to access the benefits allied to planting, including private and public finance. Richard Lindsay made a good point about landowners or land managers who have provided good stewardship of their peatland, because, at the moment, there is no way of getting a financial benefit from maintaining peatland in good condition. They cannot access peatland code funding, because that requires intervention. We need to consider how that work can be valued and how payment can be given to people who continue to provide good stewardship of peatland. There should not be incentives for further degradation—the incentives should not be based only on restoration interventions on degraded peatland.
It is more the protection of the peatland that we need to consider and how people who have demonstrated good stewardship can also benefit, not only people who have peatlands that require intervention to bring them up to a better condition.
To support the encouragement of private finance through the peatland code and carbon units, we are piloting carbon contracts. We guarantee a price for people to sell their carbon contracts after five years, which for many private investors takes away the risk of investing in peatland restoration. The idea is that we guarantee the price of the carbon units in return for a greater contribution from the landowner. I wanted to flag that up.
Private investment is a tricky subject. I am sure that we could talk a lot more about it. I have said twice that budget, and in particular long-term security of budget, is a key part of securing the restoration, but I am sure that almost everybody who comes to give evidence tries to convince the Parliament of that. There is no question that we need to find other finance models, including blended ones.
The word “investment” is a bit of a red herring, because it implies a return for investment and I am not sure that I have seen that yet in the peatland restoration market. There are some interesting models coming through that we are particularly keen to explore, which are not about a return for investment but about a company investing in its business supply chain. For example, where water—clean or cool water, or regular supplies of water—is an important part of a business’s risk-management processes or its supply chain, such a business is not looking for a return on investment from peatland restoration; it is looking to protect and secure a part of its business. Those models are interesting and we will probably put a bit of effort into seeing whether there is mileage in them.
As land managers in upper catchments, we are paying for ecosystem services that are realised elsewhere. How we tap into that elsewhere is more of a key question than investment is. However, if I might be slightly cynical, that is still voluntary. It still involves companies saying, “Yes, okay. I’ll do it.” That is a more fundamental point about the system.
Dr Lydia Cole at the University of St Andrews has undertaken valuable research into the barriers to peatland restoration that crofters in the Outer Hebrides face.
Andy Ford just touched on the thorny question of wider society benefiting from actions carried out by individuals. A crofter who maintains peatland in good condition benefits wider society but receives no benefit from it themselves. That is a challenging issue that we need to address somehow.
My question comes off the back of Laura Mitchell’s. How can we balance the peatland ambitions with productive land use and ensuring that a productive rural land-based economy is maintained? There is recognition from the witnesses that peatland ambitions cannot fill that void for many rural communities.
That is a really good question. We need to put our peatland work in the context of other initiatives on the rural environment, so that we are thinking about trees, turbines and peat. We need to ensure that we have the right balance between those different land uses.
To go back to Andy Ford’s point on how we achieve the right balance, we need to look at the success of things such as the national park plans and apply them at a regional level. We need to restore peat in the right places, plant trees in the right places and develop wind farms in the right places.
11:30
I completely agree with Peter Hutchinson, but I also want to highlight that we recently led a review, which was commissioned by NatureScot, of the wider benefits that are delivered by restoration. We looked at the compatibility of peatland restoration with the agriculture sector. One thing that came through really strongly, mostly through anecdotal evidence, was a recognition that most people who have engaged with peatland restoration have seen net benefits for their farming business through the reduction in black loss, which is when sheep are lost on the hill and do not come back when they are gathered because they go into the drains and die—blocking the drains prevents that from happening. We have seen real enthusiasm for the fact that restoration can be compatible with slightly different agriculture, allowing people to reap the benefits of having better agriculture and better peatland and, potentially, income from the peatland code, where applicable.
Perhaps there are still myths about the incompatibility of peatland restoration with agriculture, but better evidence would show that that is not the reality on the ground. The two sectors might be slightly different, but they can go together in many contexts.
I do not really see much conflict. Peatland restoration in the Cairngorms is certainly a win-win. People continue to manage grouse sporting moorland, and people continue to have cattle on the hill. As Roxane Andersen said, there are also downstream benefits in terms of water quality, droughts and floods.
There has been very little resistance to peatland restoration. We are starting to see a lot of benefits. A lot of gamekeepers are now converts and say that it actually benefits grouse due to the invertebrates that become available. Crofters who put their cattle on the hill are converts and are saying, “Actually this is reducing my water costs because they are getting the water off the hill,” and so on.
The one caveat is that although a lot of those different land uses can co-exist with drain blocking, which is fairly straightforward—we have lots of evidence of that—we are not convinced that you can restore erosion features with high densities of herbivores, including red deer and possibly others.
Define “productive”.
Or “highly productive”.
What do we mean by something that is “productive”?
Land where there is a clear, tangible economic benefit coming off it.
Yes, but who benefits economically?
Good point.
If you have good-condition peatland, the water quality is better, so your water treatment costs are reduced, and better flood resilience, so you have fewer flood mitigation costs.
However, how do you define “productive” and how do you define “economic benefit”?
Jamie, do you have any follow-up questions?
I do not want to take us down a rabbit hole. I appreciate that we could probably talk about what economic productivity is for more than the 50 minutes that we have left, so I am happy for other people to jump in.
I will ask a follow-up question. Peter Hutchinson, you talked about turbines, trees and peat. I am interested in hearing witnesses’ thinking about the state of the peatland code in relation to renewable energy development and where you see good practice needing to go in terms of wind farm development. Are we there at the moment? Is what the industry is doing right now perfect, or is there a need to evolve that good practice?
I do not think that we are there in terms of the balance at the moment. NatureScot objected to a number of renewable energy developments because they were going to impact on peatlands, so we still have that tension between certain developments and peatlands—we are restoring them on one hand, but we may be damaging them on the other.
To try to address that, NatureScot provides a lot of guidance on getting the right development in the right location. One of the key things that we are developing at the moment is a peatland standard, which will apply to the restoration sector and the development sector, so that everybody is working to the same standard and has the same commitment to looking after our peatlands when they are developing on them, managing them, restoring them and doing all the technical activity. That is an exciting piece of work. We consulted on it over the summer and are analysing the responses at the moment. We aim to publish a peatland standard by Christmas.
That is good to know. Roxane Andersen, you were nodding there. Have you worked on the peatland standard or do you have an awareness of how that is working?
Yes, a little bit. I think that what Peter Hutchinson mentioned represents a really important opportunity.
I currently have a knowledge-transfer partnership with one of the renewable energy companies. The reason why we had to develop that project was because there is very little embedded peatland expertise within the various companies and contractors in the renewable energy sector, which means that the standard of restoration is not always as good as it could be. The sector as a whole is crying out for that expertise and is asking for the standard, but it is also seeking to embed expertise much more firmly, so that, where developments are consented that have to disrupt peatland, they can be done in a more sensitive way that maximises the restoration outcomes.
A lot definitely needs to happen in terms of the whole planning framework to ensure that the peatland that needs to be protected is protected, but also to ensure that, where developments are consented, the restoration can be achieved to the highest standards—that is, the same standards that we expect of peatland action. Similarly, compensation areas that are developed alongside restoration that is undertaken by renewable energy developers need to be of the same quality and standard that is achieved by public sector restoration. There is a need to embed much more expertise from the peatland sector in the renewable energy sector to make sure that we do not miss that opportunity.
Is this an opportunity to lever more funds into landscape-scale approaches, so that, alongside the mitigation of any impact of an individual development on an area, there are other opportunities for investment? I see that Andy Ford is nodding.
I agree with what you were saying. The landscape-scale approach is important. There needs to be a regional approach to where investment is targeted, so you get the biggest bang for your buck. The fact that a development is happening in one part of Scotland does not necessarily mean that the investment from that should be in that part of Scotland. We need to think about how we tackle the overall issue of our green infrastructure rather than localising the investment. I agree with everything that has been said, but I would just stress that point about the landscape-scale approach.
I agree. There is an opportunity to use regional planning to enable us to increase our ability to build a resilient landscape, and we need to take advantage of that.
We have moved on from the question that I was going to ask, which was about the effectiveness of restoration beyond the success measure that Mr Hutchinson pointed out, which concerned the sheer hectare numbers. Professor Andersen and Mr Ford gave examples of how we can look at the effectiveness beyond that measure.
I am particularly interested in what happens beyond restoration. I would like to know how we are monitoring those restored sites and for how long we are doing that, and whether we can assess the proportion of those restored sites that have perhaps failed to achieve the expected outcomes.
That is a very good question. NatureScot has a monitoring strategy for our restoration projects; we go back afterwards and look at a sample of projects to see whether they are delivering the benefits. For example, we look at whether they have raised the water table and whether the area is getting wetter—we have hydrology loggers for that. We look at whether they are actually reducing emissions—we have a network of flux towers around Scotland that look at emissions. We also look at the biodiversity benefits—for example, whether the habitat has improved.
That is a really good start. On your point about whether that work is long term, that links in with the question of funding, which we talked about. We need to ensure that we are monitoring over the long term, because we need to be learning. The industry has been going for the past decade, and we need to learn from those experiences and apply them in our future work. We are doing some monitoring, therefore, and we are looking at benefits beyond hectares, but we need to ensure that that monitoring is long term.
We are also developing a wider network of monitoring, because it is not just about the peatland action projects. The renewables industry is doing restoration, too, and we need to see whether that is successful. We are working with the forestry industry on forested bog restoration, as we need to make sure that that is working.
Monitoring is really important, but we need to ensure that we monitor the whole sector that is looking at peatlands, not just the peatland action projects.
On private sector investment and the peatland code, it is worth pointing out that the average length of peatland code projects is 80 years, so there is a requirement for those adopting such projects to commit to long-term monitoring. It is important to recognise that, if we were talking about the restoration of ancient woodland, for example, we would not have a problem in recognising that recovery is going to take a long time. I often see comments about whether a restoration programme has succeeded, when the restoration intervention took place only three, four or five years ago. We would never ask that if an intervention was related to woodland.
It is good that people are thinking longer term in recognising the benefits. However, with regard to putting peatland on the road to recovery, we can see the beginnings of the effects within two or three years.
Again, I point to the wider review that was just published, which looks in depth at a range of benefits, in terms of not only carbon but the recovery of all the functions that underpin the delivery of these ecosystem services. We find that there is currently a good evidence base that demonstrates that, with most of the peatland, once an intervention has been done, there is progress towards the functioning of a near-natural peatland. However, those benefits take time to realise, and the timescales over which different types of benefits are realised differ. Often, the water table will recover somewhat more rapidly than, for example, the full suite of organisms that are associated with functioning peatland.
As Richard Lindsay said, we need to accept that some of those benefits will take longer to realise, but the sooner we can make the interventions, the more resilient those peatlands will be when the full force of climate change comes to bear. We need to accept that there is a period of transition between the moment of intervention and the point at which a peatland site is fully functional. At present, I do not think that we have a clear, robust evidence base as to which sites will still be on the restoration and recovery trajectory in the next 10, 20 or 30 years, and which sites might not.
Andy Ford touched on an important point. We know that we might be able to give those sites the best chance if we can reduce important pressures such as grazing or trampling from herbivores such as deer. It will be important, as we move forward, to manage those other pressures in order to maximise the delivery of benefits. There is a good evidence base to suggest that the wide range of benefits that are associated with restored peatlands start to be realised relatively quickly, but they may take a very long time to be fully realised. As more evidence becomes available, we can constrain those timescales and understand where success is more likely, and where failure might be likely and repeated intervention may be necessary.
11:45
Longevity is a key point, as is the measurement of multiple benefits. If we were to start looking at reductions in peak flow, for example, peatland might take a little bit off it, but peatland, woodland and rivers, and water storage elsewhere, would do more. Looking at peatland in isolation will not give us the amplitude of effects that we might otherwise see.
To go back to the point about private investment—I am using the word “ investment”, despite having said that I do not like it—it depends on what we are selling. If it is a distillery, for example, we are probably selling cooler water and water storage, so we need to start measuring the impacts of what we are doing in those terms, because that is what we are trying to sell. We are not selling restoration; we are selling water stored. We can develop something on what it is that we are actually measuring.
To go back to the longevity point, none of these sites are locked in. We pay for restoration and they are restored—actually, my team would say that they are under restoration management, because it is a long-term game—but they are not locked in in any way. There is no obligation, as it were, for a long-term benefit. We may have important habitats and species and parts of our landscape that are delivering important public services, but there is no obligation associated with that. It is not under a designation system or anything else.
It might be that the nature30 approach and that type of stuff can bring that in, but where is the long-term security for our investment? That ties in with the question, “What have we paid for, and are we getting it?”
If long-term monitoring is so important, do you believe that Scottish Government ministers in particular recognise its importance and the need to fund it? Is there any risk that NatureScot’s long-term monitoring work will be restricted, or even threatened, because you are dealing with year-to-year funding settlements rather than longer multi-year funding settlements?
To date, we are doing well from the Scottish Government. It recognises the importance of monitoring and is supporting us in the monitoring work that we are doing.
We would, of course, like to have certainty on the future. Looking at the budget projections, we know that there are going to be some difficult years. We want to try to protect monitoring, because it informs the standards and the skills that we need to develop.
At present, the Scottish Government is supporting NatureScot to do that monitoring to ensure that we have evidence of the benefits. However, we, like everyone, think that it would be great if we could have a longer-term commitment, because we could then put in a longer-term programme of monitoring.
Again, long-term security is key. As a scientist who writes bids competitively for things like UK Research and Innovation funding, I know that it is a hard sell to UKRI to say, “We’re just going to do exactly the same thing that we’ve been doing for the past 10 years with exactly the same method.” It is not a particularly good sell for innovation.
Of course there is a space for innovation and new monitoring techniques, but the value of long-term monitoring is in being able to repeat the same measurements over many years to see how things are progressing. Having support from the Scottish Government is fundamental to that, because such support is much less likely to come from other sources of funding to which scientists and academics have access.
In being supported by the peatland action monitoring programme, we have been able to roll out some really nice monitoring pieces on some of the sites in the flow country. Without that support, it would be impossible to do that. The longevity of that funding is therefore important in enabling us to maintain the monitoring networks and build up the expertise that is needed to analyse the data and look at the evidence in the future as well.
Roxane Andersen makes an important point about the difficulty of maintaining funding for established monitoring techniques. UKRI has famously said that it is interested only in innovative blue-sky research, so it is almost impossible to obtain research funding from it to continue monitoring using an established technique. Therefore, where do you find funding to maintain long-term monitoring? One advantage of the peatland code is that the private investor is contractually committed to long-term monitoring. However, who covers the wider scheme of monitoring?
I want to go back to one of my original questions. We have talked about targets and covered the point that Roseanna Cunningham received £250 million to meet a target of restoring 250,000 hectares by 2030. That was mostly based on the ability of peat to sequester carbon. However, as we have heard, over the past few years, we have found that there is a lot more to the benefits of peatland restoration, whether that is net biodiversity gain or flood or wildfire prevention.
In a meeting in the previous session of Parliament, Emily Taylor from the Crichton Carbon Centre said that we need to look at the biggest bang for our buck, and Andy Ford touched on that. In the good old days—or, if you like, the bad old days—the biggest bang for our buck was getting the maximum number of hectares for the minimum amount of money. Therefore, many projects were focused on the Highlands, where there are big landowners and big stretches of peatland. However, ultimately, as Roxane Andersen has set out, that is not the biggest bang for the buck—there is now more focus on other benefits.
Has the approach of the peatland action programme addressed that, so that smaller projects in terms of hectares get the priority that they should get over what was, in the bad old days, the biggest bang for our buck—the maximum number of hectares that we could get for the money? Has the approach changed?
Have we have got the balance right on scale, in other words?
That is a good question. You are right that we have been chasing hectares over the past decade—that is what we have been driving. However, as we have talked about, there are other benefits. That links to the point that I made about designing projects. If we want projects that provide good drinking water, we need to design projects in drinking water catchment areas. I illustrate that by pointing to the great work that Scottish Water is doing at Loch Katrine with the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs national park. That approach is more targeted at the benefits, which is the direction that we want to go. We want to take control.
On your point about small projects, I agree that some valuable projects were priced out. We have a competitive process, and we were funding projects that would deliver the most hectares for the pound, so some community and crofting projects were priced out. We now make sure that certain elements of our budget are secured for crofting projects and that, when community projects come in, we do not compare them with projects from large landowners.
We are developing a more sophisticated approach to prioritising. The Government’s five-year peatland partnership plan, which we are all working to, sets out the range of benefits. We need to be more targeted and prioritise more to deliver those broader benefits.
And you need Opposition parties to lay off from bashing the Government for not hitting its hectare target.
I like the pressure—I love the scrutiny that you are doing.
We have developed a really successful industry, but we are now maturing as an industry, so we need to be more sophisticated and prioritise more. We need to bring down the costs. We are moving into a different period of peatland restoration work.
Another reason for the situation is that, at the beginning of the peatland action programme, there was almost always more money available than people wanting to get into the scheme—there was more money than demand. More recently, demand for peatland restoration has exceeded the annual budgets and, because of that, the restoration can be implemented much more strategically. That is exactly what Peter Hutchinson has articulated.
The sector is maturing, and there is a much better understanding of not only how the techniques can be rolled out at scale and more cost effectively but how different parts of society might benefit differently from the restoration intervention. The enabling of more strategic intervention by securing or ring fencing some funding for crofters or community projects is a good example of how the approach is changing. That is happening because the demand has changed, and because the understanding of the benefit delivery has evolved over the past 10 years.
Fundamentally, it is about the metrics by which we measure success, and those metrics have undoubtedly changed so that they are not just about hectares. We have heard quite a lot about the multiple benefits of peatland restoration.
We have done a lot of the low-hanging fruit so, as we proceed with the programme, what is left will be more expensive. We will not get as many hectares for our pounds, and it will take more time and be more challenging. If we judge the programme purely on value for money and hectares delivered per pound, that value return for investment will seem to decrease, but it will not. As we have heard—I think that I see everyone nodding—it is much more about multiple benefit delivery.
We are working hand in hand with NatureScot on this. We have five delivery partners in Scotland, each of which works to its strengths. Some will be much better at focusing on getting the hectares under the belt, and others will be much better placed to look at the challenging issues. I mentioned deer. If we are to restore 400,000 hectares across Scotland, we will have to find ways of either reducing deer throughout Scotland or doing peatland restoration in the presence of herbivores, which goes back to the point about multiple policy crossover.
It is important to have spatial targeting and to use the delivery partners to do what they do best. The national parks know about upland land management and upland land managers, and about multiple benefit delivery et cetera. We can do the difficult stuff and we can move at speed. We can be a test bed and trial things, because we are national parks and we are different. The way to tackle the issue is definitely to use the delivery partners to do different things and to look at the programme in the round rather than just focus on hectares.
The question of small scale versus large scale addresses two sorts of landscape. At the small scale, we are talking about lowland raised bogs and individual peatland units. Surprisingly, the richest area in the UK for those raised bogs is the central belt between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
On the increase in demand, the IUCN has initiated a programme called eyes on the bog, which is a citizen engagement programme in which local communities are encouraged to start monitoring their local bogs. I believe that that has helped to drive the demand for small-scale site recovery. In the uplands, we are talking about large-scale landscape recovery. The IUCN programme is keen to emphasise that we need to look at whole landscape recovery, and that means considering the complex of bogs, fens, temperate rainforest, watercourses and river systems as an integrated system, because that will give us the maximum range of benefits. As I mentioned, by combining those components, we get emergent properties that we would not get if we addressed them individually.
12:00
Peter Hutchinson, you talked about developing the workforce. Unsurprisingly, there was a similar theme in our earlier round-table session with the forestry witnesses. NatureScot has done some work on that. What progress are we making in ensuring that we have the staff that we need? How can we fill the skills shortages when there are workforce challenges across all sectors in many rural communities?
That is a big question. We are in a good place in developing the workforce for peatland restoration. There are no projects that are failing or not progressing because of workforce issues. We have been developing the workforce in restoration and in the design of projects. We have one eye on the future, because our future workforce is still at school, so we are going into schools to raise awareness of peatlands and to encourage people to take an interest in the industry. Therefore, we are in a good place, with one eye on the future.
I come back to the point about certainty, with the amount of restoration that we want to do in the future being linked to the targets. If people can see work on the horizon, they will be keen to develop the skills to do that work. We do not want to develop people’s skills if there will be no work, because we have had examples of people being trained and then struggling to get into the sector.
Our skills development is very much about consolidation. We are providing continuous professional development—sorry, that is a real mouthful—to ensure that people are up to date on modern techniques. We are also looking to the future because, if we are to reach the target of 400,000 hectares, there will need to be a big step change in the amount of restoration that we undertake. We need to develop the skills to allow that step change to happen.
I want to go back to an earlier point—I am sorry, but I cannot remember who made it—about training for other sectors. NatureScot provides people with training on peatland restoration, and we find that a lot of renewables companies want to send people on our training courses, so that they follow best practice when developing renewables schemes. A lot of foresters also come on our training courses, because they see the benefits of combining peatland restoration with forestry. I wanted to take the chance to go back to that point. Our training courses are in huge demand. We are taking stock, and our target is to publish, by Christmas, a new skills plan, which will look to the future.
That is great. The committee will always be interested in receiving more evidence of skills plans as they are produced.
National park peatland restoration provides a good opportunity for a fair and just transition. Quite a few people have moved from being gamekeepers or stalkers to being peatland restorers—if that is the term. There have been quite a lot of opportunities for that.
The national park has run a new entrants scheme in which we give smaller companies the opportunity to start out in peatland restoration through smaller and simpler projects. Eight new companies have come through the new entrants scheme, and one of them is now one of Scotland’s biggest restoration companies. There has been a really positive story in the national park.
As Peter Hutchinson said, the private sector is there. Things have not been straightforward to date—I expect there to be ups and downs—but the problems are entirely surmountable. If we can provide security on the scale of the pipeline, there are more jobs to come.
I would like to comment on this question. I deliver these courses—UHI is one of the delivery partners—and over the past two years, we have trained more than 100 people in a range of skills. Something that has come through really strongly is that, when we put a course up on our webpage, it is sold out in less than a day; we have a waiting list of 50 people, so we need to run it again—and once again, it gets filled up in a day, so we have another waiting list.
There is a huge demand for the kinds of skills that are relevant to peatland restoration, but the people on the training courses are not all machinery operators—they come from everywhere—and it is really important to articulate the point that peatland restoration, as a sector, provides a whole range of job opportunities for those designing the restoration plan, which requires lots of geographic information system skills, all the way to those delivering it on the ground, who do the monitoring, validate the site and interface with the different programmes. A whole range of jobs is available, and the people who come on the training course that we deliver include planners, people in the renewable energy sector and forestry sector and so on.
That is really important, because it shows that peatland restoration is not an isolated sector. It covers a range of land-based sectors, and people with those skills can pivot from peatland restoration to, say, renewable energy and forestry. If we can consolidate the training and work together with other industries to understand what the gaps are and how can we fill them, we will have an immense impact on not just the peatland restoration workforce, but the workforce that will be needed to deliver a whole range of land-based changes.
As Andy Ford has said, this is also part of the just transition. Up here in the north of Scotland, we had a contractor who came to our training course, then secured a contract and got two new people employed, and that meant that one of the schools here did not have to close, because there were suddenly enough pupils on the school roll to maintain it. Therefore, this is important work, and it makes a huge difference to be able to have that skill force, not just for now, but for the future. I completely echo what has been said, but I wanted to give you a more personal example, too.
I have just two questions. They might be very tenuously linked, but I will ask them both at the same time, and the witnesses can choose which to answer.
First of all, the ban on horticultural peat has not progressed through the Parliament, because of the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020. However, the market seems to have moved naturally in that direction anyway, which might have a lot to do with public perceptions of using peat et cetera. I would like to hear your thoughts on that and on whether we need an actual ban to make sure that that happens.
Secondly, when we were talking earlier about the need to find some way of monetising peatland without actually exploiting it—that is the very tenuous link with the previous question—Mr Hutchinson mentioned the carbon contract, and I would be interested to hear more about those contracts and how they are helping.
Richard, shall we start with the ban on horticultural peat? I will then go to Peter Hutchinson for the second question.
I should say that my day job is head of environmental conservation at the University of East London, but back in 1990, when I worked for the Nature Conservancy Council, I was part of the initial peatland campaign to halt the use of peat in horticulture. However, 36 years on, we are still using it.
It is certainly true that, in the retail sector, peat use has diminished substantially, and many commercial interests no longer supply peat—the problem continues to be the professional market. There are companies that have spent several years looking at peat alternatives; Melcourt Industries, for example, has not been using peat for years and still provides professionally grown plant material without needing to use it.
For one reason or another, though, there is still resistance among certain plant groups in the professional horticultural industry to the point where we still do not have a legal ban. Frankly, the only way of ensuring such an action is legislation. Once that is in place, people will find a way. While you are not compelled to find a way, there is no incentive to do so.
I will respond to the first question and then touch on the second, if that is okay.
On the issue of the ban, that matter sits with the Scottish Government, but I should say that, as Richard Lindsay mentioned, the industry is looking at alternatives. Indeed, we have been talking to some of the peatland extractors, and we know that they are looking at alternatives; they want to restore extraction sites, too, so they are very interested in our techniques. It is a strange partnership, but we are working with them.
The other people who are key to this are the customers—that is, the people who are buying the peat products—and that is why we need to tell them about the benefits of peatlands. We need people to want to buy peat-free products. Yes, a ban would be really important, but I cannot comment on where that has got to. I can say, though, that the industry is thinking about the issue. We also need to help the public actually choose products that are peat free, and that comes down to telling them about the benefits of our peatland: clean water, fire resilience, a better approach to climate change and so on.
Shall I move on to your second question?
Yes.
On carbon contracts, the deadline for applications is actually next week, so I will have a better idea of take-up then. However, the principle is that, in return for our guaranteeing a price in those contracts, landowners or people developing projects make a larger contribution themselves. In other words, we are taking the risk out of peatland code carbon unit sales by guaranteeing a price in return for landowners making a higher contribution. It could be a significant tool in our efforts to bring in private finance, just to go back to an issue that was raised by a number of other people in the committee. I will be able to provide you with a better update on the success of the approach after our application deadline next week—I think that it is 29 September.
Roxane, did you want to come in?
I just wanted to reflect on the fact that the peat that goes into the commercial horticultural markets does not all come from the UK—it comes from the Baltic, too, for example. If that peat continues to be used, there is no guarantee that, in those sites in the Baltic where it is extracted, there will be peatland restoration at the end of the process. Therefore, it is important to consider the consequences not just of using peat in the context of our own emissions, but of using peat that comes from elsewhere. I am not going to comment on the ban itself, but I think it important to understand the slightly bigger picture of where the peat that is used in horticultural markets, and by professional growers, comes from.
I have a final question. Peter Hutchinson said earlier that he anticipated some difficult years ahead with regard to the funding for peatland restoration, but is next year’s budget—that is, the 2027-28 budget—sufficient to deliver that year’s peatland restoration target?
The 2027-28 budget has not been confirmed yet, but the indications are that it will support the 10 per cent increase in delivery of restoration that we are planning for. Therefore, although it has not been confirmed, the indicative budget will allow us to continue on that trajectory of a 10 per cent increase each year.
Is the current 2026-27 budget adequate to meet this year’s target?
I think that we are good when it comes to meeting the 10,000 hectares target that was set by the minister at the start of the year. The budget should actually deliver that. The five delivery partners have sufficient projects in place to meet the target, so I think that we are good. We just do not need loads of snow or some other crisis.
I think that that is something that is beyond the gift of ministers to resolve.
I thank our second set of witnesses for attending the meeting and for what has been a great and very informative introductory session for the committee.
That concludes the public part of the meeting. We will now move into private session.
12:15
Meeting continued in private until 12:44.
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