Chamber and committees

I do not think so. Brodie Wilson has just pointed out to me something that I should probably have read out. A statutory requirement to “have regard” to something is understood as being a requirement to consider it. If there is a requirement for NatureScot to consider the code of practice, that goes back to what we said earlier about its duties as a public body and what it must bear in mind in any future consideration. If you look at all that in the round, that should give confidence that people will have a good enough working relationship with NatureScot to be able to develop the practices that we want to be delivered.

NatureScot’s inclusion was part of the deer working group’s advice—that is who recommended it. I disagree that there would be a conflict of interest. This line of questioning makes it feel as though the purpose of the bill is to come in with a big stick—it is not; it is about our ability to work collaboratively.

There is no way that the Government, NatureScot or any other individual body will immediately be able to tackle the challenges of deer management on its own. It will have to be collaborative. There can be someone from NatureScot with particular expertise sitting on a panel, but they will not necessarily have to sit on every panel. In fact, I am not even sure how many panels we have at the moment. I think that one was set out in 2018 for a deer management group in lowland Scotland.

I do not see having expertise on a panel as a conflict of interest; I see it as enabling us to get the best decisions that we can on how to manage deer.

That is a good point. We can take a further look at that.

It is important to remember that NatureScot will not just turn up at the door one day and give a five-day notice; there will have been plenty of engagement beforehand. The current notice period sits at 14 calendar days, and the proposal in the bill is five working days. The period has been shortened, because there is a general understanding that although there is a process to go through, if something needs to be done, and quickly, a five-day period will be adequate, particularly as NatureScot will have tried to engage with whoever it is has the problem on their land.

NatureScot can do that anyway. It can de-escalate a control order if it believes that things are being done in the appropriate manner.

The venison dealer licence was not about food safety; it was to prevent poaching. If venison is being sold, it will be sold with the same rigour as any other game. Building confidence is more about us marketing the product. There was some confusion about Food Standards Scotland’s position, but it is quite comfortable about us moving the venison dealer licence because there will still be the rigour that there would be for any food product that goes into the human food chain.

There is a far bigger issue about how we market that product as something that we want people to eat. Removing an extra 50,000 head of deer a year is one thing, but we should see that as an opportunity rather than as a problem and we should be saying that venison is another iconic Scottish food that we can celebrate. I will do everything that I can to ensure that we get to that position.

Work is also being done on getting national health service boards to use venison. The good food nation plan, under the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act 2022, will set out how people should engage with food in their local areas. I encourage local authorities to see venison as a product that is, as the convener said, healthy, that we should be proud of and that we should promote to our schools, colleges and as many other places as possible.

I am seeing far more venison on supermarket shelves than I did previously and I regularly buy venison burgers for my dad, who has a new-found love for them. The more that we, as consumers, consume the product, the more it will become part of our national diet, so that is something that we should all be trying to do.

Every local authority will be producing a good food nation plan, so we can all encourage our local authorities to look at how venison can fit into those plans.

That would be my hope, yes, but we would have the ability to go further if we needed to.

I do not think that we will be doing that in secondary legislation. The term “public interest” is widely used in legislation and, particularly in the context of the bill that we are looking at, the public interest might be one thing in a Highlands setting and completely different in a lowland setting. We will not be defining public interest in secondary legislation. We do not think that that is needed, and it could have unintended consequences, because you could define public interest and it could then turn out that you need a different definition for something else.

I suggest that, at this stage, we are looking at a general understanding of what the public interest is, and we should trust NatureScot, when it is having those conversations with people who are relevant to the public-interest test, to find common ground.