Chamber and committees

The minister will be aware that Sight Scotland has concerns about how blind and partially sighted people will be able to access and take part in the deposit return scheme. Just last week, Sight Scotland received a letter from the minister’s officials, but it failed to address the issues that the organisation has raised. Will the minister take the concerns of Sight Scotland and others seriously and use the delay to the deposit return scheme to ensure that blind and partially sighted people can take part in the scheme?

I thank the minister for the advance sight of her statement.

The minister will be aware that, on 20 January this year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced that Wales’s deposit return scheme would include glass bottles and make use of existing kerbside collection. Can she confirm when she last met her counterparts in the Labour Government in Wales, what discussions she has had with them on Wales’s plans for glass deposit returns and what our nations’ Governments can learn from each other as we seek to develop deposit return schemes to improve recycling rates across the whole country?

It is clear that we need to make changes to support our agricultural sector. Our current direct payments system is deeply unequal. The top 20 per cent of claimants receive 62 per cent of the direct payments budget, while the bottom 40 per cent receive just 5 per cent.

We have heard today how the current direct payments system rewards intensive farming, often incentivising the least environmentally friendly land management choices. In effect, the current system penalises those who are working hardest to serve the public good. Our new payments system must incentivise high nature value farming and end area-based payments that reward ownership at the expense of the public good.

The system must also provide as much certainty as possible for our food producers, because farming requires plans that are made years ahead, and our nature targets require the same forward thinking, neither of which is possible without clearer, longer-term strategies to meet those goals.

In 2019, more than three quarters of the farming payment budget was paid exclusively on the amount of farmable land owned. That is a regressive system, which rewards land hoarding and often acts as a payment for the farmers who need it least. However, instead of ensuring that those large landholdings are being held and managed for the public good, with responsible whole-farm plans that demonstrate sustainable practices, we have payments that reward practices that are detrimental in the long term.

We need our agricultural strategies to encompass the principles of land justice, in order to diversify our land ownership and tenancy and allow more people to live and work on our land, because the barrier for entry into agriculture is currently too high for too many, and land monopolies lead only to agricultural production monopolies, which harm us all.

Just last week, we spoke in this chamber about food insecurity, not just as a nation but as individuals, because more people than ever are forced to rely on food banks. However, we cannot begin to tackle long-term food insecurity without a system that recognises the natural symbiosis between sustainable farming and nature management.

Extreme weather costs farmers—and, by extension, the public—hundreds of millions each year, and farmers are often the first to be affected by the loss of soil quality and water scarcity, which go on to affect us all.

The empty shelves in supermarkets show us not just the food that we cannot buy but the food that our farmers cannot supply under our current system. It should not be the responsibility of farmers to slash prices in order to inflate supermarket profit margins, and nor should the public be expected to pay ever-increasing food prices, while supermarket share prices soar. Both farmers and consumers need a fairer approach to pricing and distribution.

For any Government that is hoping to get by on the status quo, I am afraid that the message is clear: we need Government intervention, we need a national industrial strategy and—yes—we need price controls.

In conclusion, we have heard today about the deep flaws in our current payment system, the lack of a long-term strategy to meet biodiversity and emission goals, and the regressive rewards for concentrated patterns of land ownership. However, despite those challenges, we know that many farmers and crofters are going above and beyond to meet environmental targets and provide our food, and that the public are more interested than ever in eating local to support our producers and protect our planet. Let us use the power of this Parliament to support local and nutritious food production, fair pay for workers, fair prices for consumers and a universal right to food for us all.

The minister will be aware that a key demand from offshore workers in the “Our Power” report is that the Scottish Government create an offshore training passport that aligns standards across the energy industry. That passport has already been delayed by the Government and, just today, the general secretary of the STUC warned the Government to “get to grips” with the transition.

Can the minister reassure offshore workers and their trade unions that the energy skills passport will align offshore basic safety, sea survival and firefighting standards? I am looking for a cast-iron guarantee from the Government on this point. Will those standards be aligned—yes or no?

To ask the Scottish Government what discussions the energy minister has had with ministerial colleagues regarding the recommendations to the Scottish Government contained in the report, “Our Power: Offshore Workers’ Demands for a Just Energy Transition”. (S6O-02263)

I would like to move us on to sections 16 and 17 of the bill, which relate to trustees’ powers of investment. The committee heard suggestions from the Law Society of Scotland and the academic Yvonne Evans that, in view of Scotland’s increasing emphasis on net zero goals, sections 16 and 17 should be amended to explicitly allow trusts to adopt environmentally friendly investment policies, particularly when those might underperform compared with other investments.

We are interested to hear from everyone on that proposal. Would an amendment to the bill in that regard help to reassure trustees that that kind of investment is allowed, or is the current wording satisfactory? It would also be helpful to hear about any experience that you have had in relation to investment decisions.

I move us on to sections 65 and 66 of the bill, which relate to expenses of litigation.

The committee has heard from the Law Society of Scotland and some other legal stakeholders, who are concerned about the current policy underpinning section 65. This section provides principles to determine how legal bills are paid for in trust cases. Specifically, it provides that trustees will be “personally liable” for those expenses in certain situations, including when the trust fund does not have enough resources to cover them.

The Law Society thinks that section 65 will deter people from becoming trustees and may lead trustees to unfavourably settle or abandon legal proceedings for fear of personal liability.

We are keen to hear whether you share those concerns, or whether you can offer the committee any reassurance. As a follow-up, do you think that the availability of insurance helps to mitigate the risks that the Law Society has identified?

Scotland’s natural environment is not just the envy of the world; it is vital to our health. Therefore, it is no surprise that reports of more than 14,000 sewage spills have prompted protests across the country, including one this Saturday in Stonehaven, which is in my region. In December 2021, Scottish Water vowed to increase the number of storm drain monitors to more than 1,000 by the end of 2024. However, according to a freedom of information response obtained by the i newspaper, as of 1 March this year, not a single new device had been installed. Can the First Minister tell us exactly how many of those 1,000 storm drain monitors he expects to be installed by the end of this year?

It is telling that the intervention from the SNP back bencher focuses on Westminster politics. It demonstrates that the SNP knows that, at the next election, there is a choice between only two parties and it can continue to support the rotten Tory Government or get behind Labour and give Scotland the Government that it needs.

We heard from Rachael Hamilton that our food security issues are entirely the fault of events elsewhere—never mind the Tory Government’s decimation of the economy, its unwillingness to tackle the gross inequalities that are at the heart of our economic system and its overseeing of the rising food bank use that shames us all.

Food producers, agriculture workers and every single one of our friends and neighbours who are donating to and accessing food banks weekly have one thing in common—failed Tory economics that allow supermarket profits to soar unchecked while children go hungry, and which allow our food producers to be undercut by the party’s disastrous post-Brexit trade agreements. Tories then have the audacity to stand up in Parliament and claim to advocate for rural mental health and rural repopulation and livelihoods. Whether it is denial or delusion, that is utterly shameful.

We welcome the Scottish Government coming behind Labour on our call for that increase.

As I was saying before that intervention, we cannot call ourselves a good food nation until no child in Scotland is hungry and no food banks are needed. That is why Labour is calling for the right to food to be enshrined in law and empowered through the food commission, and why the next Labour Government will end use of the zero-hour contracts that so blight our food supply chains and economy.

Labour would see every child fed, every worker heard and every flower bloom.