Chamber and committees

Yes.

Well, I am not going to get through all the other things that I was going to talk about, but I will take Paul Sweeney’s intervention.

I cannot give the reassurance that the panel will accept the franchise unless the people who are pulling the franchise together do it in such a robust way that it will not be rejected. There is something here about the psyche of SPT. I have met representatives of SPT on a couple of occasions and we have had this conversation. It is very well aware of the robustness that it will have to put into its process, which would give me confidence to say that it will get its franchise through, because it knows that every i has to be dotted and every t has to be crossed as a result of having the panel there in the first place.

If nobody else wants to intervene, I will continue. I have absolutely no idea where I am in my speech now. What I will say is that I very much welcome Get Glasgow Moving to the public gallery. The work that it has done has been phenomenal. I have met members of the group at least once—one unofficially and one officially.

I will try to go back to my speech. We want more people travelling by public transport for work, study and leisure, and I am encouraged that authorities across Scotland are already exploring that.

We are investing more than £2.6 billion in 2025-26 to support public transport and make the transport system affordable and more available and accessible for all. We are increasing our funding for bus services and concessionary travel from £430 million in 2024-25 to £465 million. Over the coming year, we will provide almost £50 million to support bus services, so that operators can continue to provide access to affordable transport.

The LTAs have a duty under the Transport Act 1985 to identify where there are social needs for particular services, which they can subsidise at their discretion. To help them with that, we provide funding through the general revenue grant. In 2023-24, the LTAs spent £56 million subsidising essential services.

Several members have already congratulated Get Glasgow Moving, and I add my congratulations. I met members of that group recently, and I encourage their commitment to engaging with local communities, to go back to the point that Clare Haughey made. Further, engagement with the bus services is absolutely essential. I understand that they are private companies, but they serve the public. In addition, as I have said, I have met SPT on a couple of occasions.

I am going to ditch my speech altogether, Presiding Officer.

I share the frustration of the members who are in the chamber that so much public funding is put into bus services and yet we do not have a say over when services are cut or what the routes will be, nor control over any of the other things that we would genuinely hope that a public transport provider would have. It is a deregulated market. Nonetheless, we have given powers to local authorities and there are a number of examples of where things are beginning to turn around.

I give a guarantee that, as long as I am the minister for buses, I will do everything in my power to make bus services work for the people who are trying to use them.

At this moment, I do not accept that. When I have definitive proof that it is the case, I will be more than happy to look at it. Indeed, I am more than happy to look at it.

When Rachael Hamilton raised the issue last week, I was absolutely appalled to hear that it had been suggested that dogs should be used on roofs. I made an inquiry to NatureScot. The response that has come back says:

“We have not suggested or provided instructions that dogs should be used on rooftops to scare gulls and prevent nesting. Dogs can be an effective tool to disturb ground-nesting gulls and dogs are used in every licence application response as a possible means of deterrent.”

NatureScot gives people across-the-board deterrents, not just deterrents for use in a specific instance.

I genuinely thank Patrick Harvie for bringing the debate to the chamber and for allowing us to discuss the opportunity that we have in front of us. I apologise for expressing my frustration to Monica Lennon—it is late in this session of Parliament and late in the day—but I think that the Scottish Government has done, and is continuing to do, a lot. We are absolutely committed to doing as much as we can.

We are all, across the chamber, in agreement that buses are an essential service not only in providing people with access to the services and facilities that they need, but in tackling the climate emergency. Bus services play a vital role in delivering on the First Minister’s four priorities of eradicating child poverty, growing the economy, tackling the climate emergency and improving Scotland’s public services.

Since January 2022, more than 225 million bus journeys have been made across Scotland by children and young people using their under-22 free bus entitlement cards. That is helping them and their families to cut the costs of essential and leisure travel. In December 2024, the Child Poverty Action Group reported that free bus travel could save a child in Scotland up to £2,836 annually.

I take the points that have been made by members across the chamber—

Patrick Harvie makes a couple of points there. He says that that approach adds nothing. Actually, it does add something—it adds robustness to the franchising process. Clare Haughey talked earlier about whether passengers can have a say in what is happening to their services—franchising gives us that, too. In the franchising process, the final robust step is that the panel makes sure that everything has been done.

On the processes that have been carried out in England that have not worked or that were refused—the ones that I assume Mr Harvie is talking about—that was on the basis of a financial issue only. The processes did not look at the entirety of the service. The process that members agreed to in this chamber in 2019 put that robustness in place, and it is now in the primary legislation. That is why a panel is required and why we are where we are.

Do I have time to take the intervention, Presiding Officer?

We have not had any engagement with local stakeholders on that issue. It is for Oxygen Conservation Ltd, as the landowner, to consider how any reduction in the wild goat population should be achieved in practice. It has produced a question and answer document that has been circulated to all local residents, and it has published updates in a quarterly newsletter on its website. NatureScot has also provided several members of the community, the Wild Goat Conservation Group, local political representatives, councillors, MSPs and the MP with advice and information on the legal status of feral goats.

I understand the sentiment with which Rachael Hamilton has asked the question. As I said, however, this is an issue for Oxygen Conservation Ltd. It is its land and it is for it to decide what it will do in order to achieve the restoration targets that it has set out.