Chamber and committees

Thank you for that, Patricia.

I welcome Laura Moodie to the committee. Do you have any interests to declare?

Thank you—that is helpful.

Do we agree to invite the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Culture and Gaelic to give evidence, once the programme for government has been announced?

Members indicated agreement.

Do members have any further points? No.

That was a lot—we heard some fantastic ideas. As I said, I can see ways in which we can join up many of these thoughts and develop a thread running through our work. We will discuss that further at our business planning day in August.

Thank you for your comments—they have been really useful. As I said, we will have detailed discussions at the business planning day, with a view to formally agreeing our initial work programme in September.

Do we agree to holding a business planning day and to delegate sign-off of the programme to me?

Members indicated agreement.

I welcome the cabinet secretary to his new post. It is great to see him in the Parliament.

When we talk about the economy, it can sometimes feel like we are talking about something that is quite abstract—something that is separate from people’s everyday lives. It sounds technical and distant, full of forecasts and figures and a language that does not always mean that much to the people who live with the dire consequences of disastrous economic decisions. The word “economy” has its roots in the management of resources, and that is a useful reminder. Having an economy should never be just about producing more wealth somewhere for someone; it should be about how we use Scotland’s resources, develop our skills, support our industries and ensure that our communities benefit from it all. That is the question that I come back to: who is this growth for?

When I think about economic growth in Banffshire and Buchan Coast, I do not think first about a graph or a statistic; I think about the young folk in Buckie who wonder whether there will be a good job for them if they stay in their home town. I think about the folk across the constituency who are deciding what skills they want to build at North East Scotland College, whether that takes them into fishing, engineering, offshore renewables, construction, care, education or local business and enterprise. I think about the folk who want to raise their families in the towns that they grew up in, because they can see opportunity, stability, a decent standard of living and a future for those who come after them. That is what economic growth has to mean in real life.

In my constituency, I see that potential everywhere. Fraserburgh harbour has a master plan that looks to future proof one of Scotland’s key fishing ports. Peterhead port, with links to fishing, energy and trade, is already a massive asset for Scotland. In Buckie, Macduff, Fraserburgh, Peterhead and right along the coastline, our harbours, ports and communities all have a part to play in Scotland’s economic future, and we must protect it.

If we want that growth to be meaningful, we need to connect the dots. We cannot look at economic cases and business plans in silos, which is why, for example, the Campaign for North East Rail’s economic case really matters. Peterhead and Fraserburgh are two of Scotland’s largest towns without a rail link—that is not only a transport issue but an economic issue. It affects access to education, work, freight, business confidence and how quickly and cleanly produce from one of Europe’s most important fishing ports can reach the market. Addressing that is what sustainable and inclusive growth should look like: not only growth that appears in national figures but growth that reaches the communities, workers and businesses that helped to create it.

I am sorry, but I will make headway and come back to the member.

The north-east has its own mix of industries, pressures and opportunities, which deserves focused attention. The north-east is not waiting for somebody to come and fix everything. The people, businesses, ideas and work ethic are already in place. They need the right support, connections and doors opened. If we are serious about removing barriers to success, we have to listen to the people, businesses and communities who know what those barriers are.

There are limits to what Scotland can do while key powers remain at Westminster, such as those relating to energy policy and immigration, as well as major fiscal levers and big parts of economic decision making. That matters when energy-rich communities still face fuel poverty, when local businesses struggle to recruit, when care services need staff, when schools need teachers and when rural and coastal communities need policy that reflects the reality. That is why independence matters in this debate. There is a practical question of whether Scotland has the powers to build an economy around Scotland’s needs.

However, we have responsibilities now, and we should use every power that we have to support enterprise, investment, innovation and trade. Growth cannot just be about numbers on paper; it must mean better lives, fewer children in poverty, stronger public services, healthier towns, better jobs and communities where people feel proud to stay, work, raise families and build something lasting.

What Banffshire and Buchan Coast needs is support to turn its potential into prosperity that is seen and felt locally. That is the kind of economic growth that I want for Scotland—growth with purpose, growth that reaches people and growth that strengthens the places that we all call home.

16:46

I thank the member for that intervention because it gives me the opportunity to say that I have already opened conversations and will discuss what next steps the campaign is asking for. The SNP manifesto said that there would be support for the campaign, and I look forward to working cross-party to see whether we can help to get that work delivered.

The north-east needs a stronger and more bespoke economic focus. We have Highlands and Islands Enterprise, South of Scotland Enterprise and Scottish Enterprise working nationally.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I welcome you to your role.

It is an absolute honour to stand here again as the MSP for Banffshire and Buchan Coast. I want to be clear from the very start that, in my constituency, energy is not a theoretical debate. We see it, we work in it and we live beside it, yet still too many people pay through the nose for it. From Buckie to Banff, along the coast of Fraserburgh, St Fergus, Peterhead and Boddam, Banffshire and Buchan Coast is rural, coastal and, in some parts, industrial. It is very skilled and, importantly, it is energy rich.

In my constituency, we have families who have built their lives around oil and gas, and our young people are already training for the renewable and low-carbon industries of tomorrow. It is not a place where the people need energy explained to them from any distance; it is a place that has helped to power this country for decades. During my campaign, I was asked to speak up for constituents and not to shy away from the difficult questions. At almost every single door that I knocked, people raised the issue of energy.

St Fergus regularly supplies around a third of the UK’s natural gas. Peterhead power station provides essential flexibility to the grid. Moray East wind farm, which is operated and maintained from Fraserburgh, and Moray West wind farm, with its operations and maintenance base at Buckie, sit off our coast, generating power on a scale that most countries would envy. The Acorn project at St Fergus shows how carbon capture, utilisation and storage, alongside hydrogen, could help to make the north-east central to the next chapter of Scotland’s energy future.

A few weeks ago, the First Minister visited the Vinery in Banff with me and saw the difference that it makes through its offer of a welcome place where people can build confidence, learn new skills, improve wellbeing and sometimes find a route into work. With the loss of its United Kingdom shared prosperity funding, it now faces closure in a matter of days, which would be devastating for hundreds of local people and families. What steps can the First Minister take to engage with the centre and help to safeguard the services that it provides?

I remind Liam Kerr that I am not a member of the Government, so I do not have the facts to hand. Investment was pledged to the Acorn project to match and support what the UK Government had put into it. However, the UK Government snubbed the Acorn project and left it on the back burner. That was pure politics, because it does not want Scotland having anything.

The question that I bring to the chamber is simple: how can communities that help to power the country still have households that cannot afford to heat their homes? That is not just unfair; it is a failure of how energy is governed. Citizens Advice Scotland’s latest energy briefing lays bare the human cost of that failure. The average energy debt is more than £2,800, which rises to £3,200 in rural areas. That is not just a statistic on a page; it is someone sitting in a cold house, trying to stretch their shopping, worrying about fuelling the car and being able to afford to fill up the heating oil, provide for their bairns and pay all the extra costs that come when someone lives further away from the centre of power. That is why the debate matters.

The range of amendments before us shows exactly why Scotland needs these powers to be in Scotland’s hands. While other parties pull the debate towards delay, denial, dependence or unrealistic simplicity, my constituents need a serious Scottish plan that is rooted in jobs, bills, climate responsibility and, importantly, a community benefit. At one end, there are those who speak as though net zero is the problem and as though Scotland should turn away from the renewables, hydrogen, carbon capture, grid upgrades, apprenticeships and offshore wind developments that young people in my constituency and across the north-east are already preparing for.

I cannot accept that. That would not protect Banffshire and Buchan Coast. It would strand us. It would leave communities with nothing to transition into. We have seen before what happens when industrial communities are told that the market will sort it out—Thatcher did that to the coalfields.

I cannot support the premise that we can simply walk away from domestic oil and gas before the infrastructure, jobs and alternatives are fully in place. We must work at pace.

My constituents are fearful. They consistently raise with me the fact that oil and gas demand has not disappeared. They ask me about whether that energy, which we still use, should be produced domestically by our own skilled workforce, under our standards, while we build the transition properly, or whether we should make ourselves more dependent on imports, global shocks and political decisions made far away from Scotland by people who do not care about our communities. In any energy planning, we must offer reassurance that we are cognisant of that.

For more than 50 years, Scotland’s energy wealth has flowed to the UK Treasury, with hundreds of billions of pounds taken from oil and gas production, yet too many of our communities are still waiting to see the long-term investment that should have followed that.

This debate is not about choosing one energy source over another. In Scotland, we have it all. We need to balance a full energy mix to strategically lead us through to what comes next—and we need to have the power to do it our way. Our offshore workers are not yesterday’s story; they are the people who built the skills base that the future depends on. The offshore energy sector supports 128,400 jobs in Scotland—as far as the stats show—and 90 per cent of offshore workers have transferable skills that are essential for the expansion of renewables. That is the serious path: not shutting down our industrial base, not pretending that climate change is not real and not leaving Scotland dependent on Westminster decisions, unfair taxation, UK market rules, unfair transmission charges or imported energy from other countries. Energy-rich Scotland should mean energy-secure Scots. It should mean skilled jobs, lower bills, stronger communities and a real industrial future with energy resilience.

In Banffshire and Buchan Coast, we help to power this country. It is Scotland’s energy. It should be in Scotland’s hands.