Chamber and committees

I heard that word, so I thought that I would jump in quickly.

I understand that the intention behind the amendments is to increase the fines. I have listened carefully to what Bob Doris said about the fact that the proposal is not about going straight to a £40,000 fine but is about working with landowners to make sure that they comply with what they are meant to do. Does he agree that there should be guidance on the fines, so that everyone is clear that multiple breaches will result in them going up, and what the fines could be for repeated non-compliance with the land management plan?

Just to correct you there, convener, it is Tracey Smith. [Laughter.]

I am happy to help in any way that I can, convener. I thank you, and the committee, for giving me the opportunity to speak to the petition today.

The petition is of huge importance to not just the north-east but the whole of Scotland. In the rush to net zero, our electricity system is changing, in relation to not just offshore and onshore wind but the associated network infrastructure, whether that is pylons, substations or even the dreaded solar battery storage that we see appearing all over the country. A lot of that is appearing without much thought as to capacity and what we need, and little in the way of regulation.

In all those developments, the local communities seem to be ignored. It does not seem to matter how many objections there are to a proposal; there is a feeling that, if the Government wants something to happen, it is going to happen anyway. That is turning the consultation process into a tick-box exercise, especially when we consider the amount of effort and time that our communities have to put into responding to such consultations.

We are moving to a position in which communities think, “Why should we bother?” That happened at the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. When we put out a call for views on the proposed changes to the consenting process that were mentioned earlier, the community groups that we went to responded by saying that they were not going to waste their time, as they would just be ignored, as they always are.

Looking at the specifics of the petition involving SSEN, I think that part of the problem is that there is so much work planned that people are genuinely confused as to whether or not it affects them. The campaign groups have been doing an excellent job of finding their own money to compete with companies that have very deep pockets; we really are going down the road of a David-versus-Goliath situation.

We need meaningful consultation, and the Government needs to start listening to communities. The Government will claim, no doubt, that the pre-application changes that are being proposed, which were mentioned earlier, will fix everything, but the truth is that most developers are undertaking such pre-consultation anyway, as per the “Good Practice Guidance”.

I note that the minister’s May 2024 response to the petition states that new pre-application guidance for electricity lines would be brought forward. It is interesting to hear that that process is only just starting now.

The key change that is being proposed is the removal of the automatic public inquiry, so we are now in a position in which we are weakening, rather than improving, the consultation process. Changes to that guidance are urgently required, and I urge the committee to keep the petition open to try to force the Government to come forward with new guidance, because it is sorely needed.

That is not the intention, but however large or small a community group is, it should be listened to. I do not think that we could say that a group should be ignored because it is just a small community group—such a group could be impacted the most. If developers could work with even those small communities better, I am sure that many of the issues that we see across Scotland would not be happening.

On amendment 174, in the name of Mercedes Villalba, I asked whether the fact that somebody was not resident in this country for tax purposes would rule them out of making a purchase. I was not clear about the answer to the intervention. That is probably a dangerous line to go down without clarification, and I do not feel that we have that clarity.

For example, we heard from Gresham House, where sites were managed as one but there were multiple owners within that one site. Will what you are bringing forward address that situation?

I will leave my comments on amendments 400 and 404 at that, convener.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?

Does the cabinet secretary agree that the public interest and the community interest are not always the same thing? There is often a conflict between community interests and what might be considered to be the public interest. For example, with a wind farm, there might be conflict between the two. How do we address that?

Will the member take an intervention?

I agree with a lot of what the deputy convener has said about urban Scotland, where much more needs to be done to get derelict sites out of being derelict and back into use. As we took evidence during the past few months, we never took evidence on urban Scotland and some of these issues, because they were not really part of the scope of the bill. Would it be right for us to open that up now, when we have not taken any evidence? In hindsight—we all have 20:20 hindsight—was it a mistake that those issues in urban Scotland were not part of the bill that was introduced?