Chamber and committees

I will briefly pick up on a point that Tim Eagle made. When we think about landowners, we might think of huge estates, but with the bill we are seeing more and more agricultural holdings being brought in that will have to produce a land management plan. If things had stayed as initially intended, only 285 agricultural holdings would have had to produce a land management plan. However, with the amendments that have been made, that will increase to 874 agricultural holdings across Scotland. Given what is happening in the farming industry just now, I think that that goes a bit too far and will have a huge impact on many of our farmers. I completely support what Tim Eagle has been saying and doing. The changes that we have made to the bill have gone much further than was intended, which I think is a negative.

No.

I will go back to the point that the convener raised about potential sale. If you ask any landowner, they will say that everything is potentially for sale if the price is right. How do you see that working? Would it be about whether the land is up for sale?

I congratulate Karen Adam on securing the motion for debate and thank her for educating us more about Thomas Blake Glover.

Today’s debate gives us an opportunity to celebrate someone from the north-east who is probably more famous outside the area than in it, as Jackie Dunbar noted. It also gives us an opportunity to celebrate Scotland’s strong links with Japan, which I witnessed at first hand when I was leader of Aberdeen City Council. Aberdeen signed a memorandum of understanding with Kobe in Japan in 2019, strengthening the links between the cities. Today, I am wearing my Kobe tartan tie, which is a gift that I received when a delegation visited Aberdeen to sign the agreement. It is not just tartan that we have in common; I also learned about our shared love of whisky.

When I was a councillor, I became aware of Thomas Blake Glover, his impact and the important role that he played in the industrialisation of Japan. I also learned that the council owned Glover house, which, as we have heard, was the Glover family’s home in Bridge of Don. I remember my conversations with Richard Sweetnam, a council officer who was sadly taken from us too young, about how big a deal Glover was and how, as a city, we should make more of a deal of him and celebrate him, which would be an opportunity for tourism. That view was shared by all parties in Aberdeen City Council. We did not often agree, but we did agree on Glover.

The then Lord Provost, Barney Crockett, was heavily involved with Mitsubishi to see whether we could take a partnership approach to utilising Glover house in Bridge of Don. I seem to remember that Martin Gilbert and Aberdeen Asset Management were also involved in that process.

Regrettably, in my time as a councillor, we could not come up with a sustainable plan on what to do with Glover house. We worked with the University of Aberdeen and Mitsubishi on a plan to use part of Glover house as a museum celebrating Glover, and part of it for Japanese students attending the University of Aberdeen to live in. However, that plan fell through when Covid struck, and I do not believe that any plan has come forward since then, which is a real shame.

I visited Glover house with a delegation from Kobe in 2019. It would be sad to see the house fall into further disrepair. It is part of the history of the north-east, and it should be protected. I hope that a sustainable future can be found for the house. My lasting memory of that visit was the friendliness of our Japanese guests. Their warmth and kindness, and their interest in Glover, will stay with me and made me determined to visit Japan in the near future. When I am there, I hope that I will visit the Thomas Blake Glover statue in Nagasaki to pay my respects to the man from the north-east who made such a huge impact in Japan.

I wish the organisers of the Thomas Blake Glover festival every success for the upcoming event.

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.

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide further detail regarding the reasons why it is not planning a broader review of the statutory grounds for fatal accident inquiries, in light of the previous review of statutory grounds being undertaken nearly a decade ago and reports of growing public concern over preventable deaths outside of custody settings. (S6O-04748)

The question concerned deaths outside of custody settings. In 2019, Aberdeen father and good Samaritan Alan Geddes was murdered by a man who had been released from prison just hours earlier. In 2023, the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland released its damning report, which highlighted a list of failures in the run-up to the release of Stuart Quinn. If Government agencies had acted differently, the outcome could have been different. Alan’s sister, Sandra, continues to fight for answers, and the case is crying out for a fatal accident inquiry.

Does the cabinet secretary agree that, when someone commits murder just hours after release from prison, there have obviously been failures and that the criteria for a statutory FAI must be widened to cover such situations?

Does Mark Ruskell accept that there is often a conflict between public interest and community interest? A wind farm, for example, may be in the public interest in relation to a just transition to net zero, but it might not be what a community wants. How would he balance those two interests?

We have heard that having a threshold of 1,000 hectares would not bring in huge amounts of farmland—I think that the cabinet secretary said that it would be 1.3 per cent. If the threshold was reduced to 500 hectares, for what percentage of farmland would land management plans be required?