Chamber and committees

Cabinet secretary, I appreciate your offer for anyone to come and talk to you at any time. I am sure that we will all work on amendments for stage 2, but, ahead of that, what are we learning? As a Government, what are you seeing in some of the ENGOs and others’ responses about the powers as they are laid out in the bill?

There has been quite a lot of talk about non-regression. The Scottish Parliament information centre quite helpfully pointed out that there is something called the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals regulations. I do not know if you are familiar with those changes to chemical regulations.

I have a final question, because I know that we need to move on.

I accept that point but, as I said in connection with the REACH example, which SPICe helpfully pointed out, there are other methods of doing that that do not specifically involve non-regression.

That takes me back to the question that I asked a second ago. It will be unhelpful if we do not talk about this again until all the amendments come flying in at stage 2. I presume that, over the coming weeks, you will have a discussion with your team about how you can widen the approach—I do not know whether you have had that conversation yet. I think that, based on the evidence that we have taken, that is what we are generally looking for. If you can come back to the committee with information about what you could do, that would be useful, because it would give us time to think about it.

Good morning, minister. I have a quick question on reviews of compliance with the code of practice. As I understand it, the bill sets out that the Scottish Government can request a review at any point. In what circumstances do you foresee that happening?

Good morning. I want to go back to Evelyn Tweed’s point about the duty on public bodies. Something that was just expressed and which has been picked up on a lot in evidence is that the duty has just not worked—it has not been taken forward in the way that we wanted.

I am conscious—I think that this is hot off the press—that the Environment (Principles, Governance and Biodiversity Targets) (Wales) Bill has recently been introduced. That bill has some interesting ideas about how—I have written it down—the Welsh Government will create a statement that will inform public bodies how they have to comply with the duty. The bill will give the Welsh Government the power to designate a public body to meet a particular target, impact, or whatever it might be. Did you have any cross-Government discussions with the Welsh Government on what it is doing? Are those things that you might consider doing here, in Scotland?

Is the intention to feed that into the code of practice?

I am thinking about the risk.

You talked earlier about good will—and I will come back to that, because I think that you do have good will—but there is a risk that things such as nature restoration or vague terms such as “have regard to” risk undermining it.

I fear that I will take longer than Bob Doris, but I will be quicker than the cabinet secretary. I will try my best.

I appreciate the cabinet secretary’s thoughts on my amendments 398 and 402. However, I see a significant difference between an estate with multiple portfolios and an agricultural holding, which might be just an upland sheep farm. I have a genuine concern about the potential consequences for those who are purely in the agricultural sector, for whom the burden of a land management plan would be too much.

My amendments 399 and 403 seek to address concerns relating to the thresholds of land. The thresholds seem a bit arbitrary as they are not based on evidence of particular outcomes or dependent on a particular scale. For community engagement, there should be additional criteria that are markers for what success looks like—in effect, there should be a threshold-plus test. Amendment 403 would add the additional criteria that

“there is not a disclosure statement or management plan in relation to the land”

and that

“the owner has not engaged with a community body in the vicinity of the land in relation to the management of the land within the last 5 years.”

Amendment 37 is consequential to amendment 41. On amendments 41 and 44, I note that the bill says that obligations may be imposed on land that is either a single holding or a composite holding. A composite holding is one that consists of any number of single holdings. I do not believe that it is rational to include composite holdings. We are concerned that they could include holdings that are located nowhere near each other and have widely different land management requirements. Amendment 41 therefore seeks to delete “composite holding”, and amendment 44 seeks to delete all references to composite holdings in the section.

NFUS gave the example that, if a landowner is selling or transferring an area of land in the Highlands, it has no relevance to another landholding in East Lothian. It will not impact the same community and it should therefore not be included.

In my speech in the stage 1 debate on the bill, I asked why size rather than value had been chosen as a key measure for who will be impacted by the bill. In my mind, there is a huge difference between 3,000 hectares of moorland and 3,000 hectares of prime agricultural land. Although I am not sure that I fully understand the rationale for using size as the measure, my amendment 39 seeks to remedy the issue by increasing the threshold from 3,000 hectares to 5,000 hectares.

Scottish Land & Estates has also disputed the idea of using the size of an estate as an indicator of adverse impacts on Scotland. It said:

“There appears to be no evidence that there is detrimental impact on Scotland due to the scale of land holdings. The Scottish Land Commission’s own evidence points to the issue being potentially one of concentrated land ownership in specific areas, rather than scale itself.”

In addition, NFU Scotland believes that the bill could have “significant implications” for Scottish agriculture. It expressed concern about the delivery of the bill, saying that the

“proposals around land market regulation have the potential to severely compromise farming. Economies of scale have meant that farms have to get bigger to survive.”

I am seriously alarmed by and absolutely opposed to the cabinet secretary’s and Ariane Burgess’s amendments that seek to reduce the threshold figure. This is the very heart of the bill, and to lower the threshold at stage 2 with, as far as I am aware, no prior consultation with stakeholders such as SLE and NFU Scotland is bad law making. Dropping the figure to below 1,000 hectares will catch too many farms and landholdings that, although large in acreage, are not large in income terms.

One farm that would be caught by the new threshold is Tardoes farm, which is a sheep farm in the Muirkirk uplands in east Ayrshire. Cora Cooper, who runs the farm, recently briefed us on the challenges that the farm faces. The farmers are first-generation farmers with 2,023 hectares, and they have a peatland restoration plan to restore 800 hectares of damaged peatland. Cora told me that they are already facing increased costs from Labour’s national insurance rise, that they have a business loan to pay off and that the SNP Government is now planning to impose on the farm a £15,000 administrative burden for a land management plan every five years. They feel that they are doing everything right. Why would we want to penalise them?

That is a good point. I do not know whether you have spoken to Cora—she is very keen to speak to people. My understanding is that she and the whole unit are already very actively involved in the local community. However, they asked us why they are being drawn into the bill’s provisions when they feel that they are already doing everything that the Government is asking them to do, and they made the point that feel that they do not yet have the detail of what the land management plan will include. If it will literally involve a process of bringing together the plans that they already have, you are right that that might not be overly burdensome, but they are not clear about that, which is what they expressed to us. I hope that, over the next few weeks, we will learn that and that we can move forward.

I was not going to make much of a closing statement, other than to thank the cabinet secretary for her responses and to say that I will take them on board. In light of what she has said about working with me as we move towards stage 3, I will not press amendment 10.

Amendment 10, by agreement, withdrawn.