Chamber and committees

My amendment 151 refers to issues that are to be taken into account when granting a muirburn licence on peat. The bill states that muirburn can be allowed only if there is no other option for the management of a fuel load. In evidence, we heard that although cutting kills plants, it does not deal with the fuel load and, indeed, decaying vegetation can often be more flammable. Therefore, my amendment would allow muirburn on peatland for managing fuel load.

Amendment 151 aims to ensure that the prevention of wildfires is taken into consideration in considering a muirburn licence application. Alasdair Allan’s amendment 97, which he has just spoken to, seeks to do a similar thing. I believe that both amendments would work well together, and I urge members to support them.

If urban communities are not included in the promised land reform bill, they will have to wait a decade for change and they will continue to be held to ransom by the dead hand of land bankers. Will the minister be bold, deal with those vested interests and empower rural and urban communities in the bill?

The minister has again given a commitment to dual the A96 from Inverness to Nairn, including the Nairn bypass. However, I was surprised to discover through an FOI request that, thus far, only one piece of land, at Milton of Culloden, has been bought and that no other compulsory purchase orders have been made. How much land will the minister require to be purchased for that work, and when will that be completed?

I would like clarification. You talked about consultation that takes place regularly and said that the Scottish Government would normally publish the results of such consultation. Are you committing to doing that in the future, regardless of those amendments?

I absolutely agree. We do not want to halt depopulation by keeping our young people in their communities if that is somehow a lesser opportunity for them. We have to create the opportunities in those communities in the future, so that young people are not forced out. I hope that young people in Dunoon will have choices about where they make their futures, and that making their future in Dunoon will be an excellent opportunity for them.

I add my congratulations to Donald Cameron on securing the debate. I also congratulate Dunoon grammar school, its headteacher, staff and pupils on their huge achievement of winning the award for best school in the world for community collaboration, and I recognise the role of Argyll and Bute Council in supporting the school.

The school has taken part in a number of projects, one of which involved streaming bingo and other games to local care homes during the Covid pandemic. That must have been a lifeline for the people in the care homes, and it will have strengthened the intergenerational bonds in the community.

The school has also launched an app to help its neighbours to reduce food waste. Perhaps most importantly of all, it has a student advisory board for the Dunoon project. The Dunoon project is looking at an awful lot of things that will help to put Dunoon on the map and make it a centre for excellence for outdoor activities and other things.

Being on the advisory board allows students to work closely with the project. That will help Dunoon not only here and now, but in the future. In fact, it is providing a future for those very pupils, because it will provide them with job opportunities in years to come, in addition to the skills that they are learning every day as part of that experience.

Learning in different ways benefits all young people, because they can learn in a way that suits them best. We all learn differently, and take on information in a very different way, but seeing different ways of learning motivates everybody, and means that everyone can take part. If someone is not very good at book learning, they may be very practical instead, and all those skills come into play when there is a rich diversity of ways in which people can learn.

The headteacher says that that sort of approach is about allowing the students

“to take part in activities that actually are real learning experiences.”

They may not feel, or seem, like that, but they are, and they add to people’s knowledge. I congratulate the school on enabling that—everyone wins from that approach.

One issue that I have taken up over a long period of time is rural depopulation. We know that young people are pushed out of their communities because of depopulation; Argyll and Bute has seen a fall in population of 2.4 per cent. It is so important that those young people are part of the future of those communities, and that they build the future for themselves and create opportunities that will allow them to stay at home.

Last week, The Herald ran a major week-long series on the population crisis in the Highlands and Islands. The series was looking at the situation a bit further north than Dunoon—the journalists were based in Fort William, but they saw for themselves what is required to retain young people in such communities. First and foremost, what young people need is a home, but they also need to feel part of their community, and have the same opportunities in that community as they would have if they moved elsewhere.

That is why the work of Dunoon grammar school is so important. Those young people are not only being furnished with the imagination to create opportunities themselves; they are actually being a part of the community as they learn. Other schools could learn from what Dunoon grammar is doing.

The cabinet secretary will be aware of the recruitment challenges in the Highlands and Islands. A quarter of the general practices in the north Highlands are run by the national health service. The cost of living, including food prices, on islands is 20 per cent to 30 per cent higher than it is in the rest of Scotland. Therefore, services are being withdrawn then being provided by very expensive locums. The Scottish Government does not allow NHS boards to pay a premium that takes into account those costs, for fear of causing internal competition. What will the Scottish Government do to ensure that there is equal access to healthcare, regardless of where people live?

I want to follow up on what people were asking about with regard to scrutiny of the support plan. There are two legislative routes, using either an affirmative instrument or a negative instrument. With the first, we would have to vote for it; with the second, we would have to move against it. Given the importance of the plan, should we be asking for a super-affirmative procedure, whereby we ask Government to lay a draft of the instrument first so that the committee can comment and consult more widely on it, and report back to Government before it submits the final instrument? That would allow time for people to feed back. Would people support that?

It seems to me that we are talking about things that should be funded from other budgets that the bill does not really mention. However, to come back to the bill—which, after all, is what we are looking at—I wonder whether there is anything that we can put into it that would ensure fairer funding for rural areas. Lots of the things that we are talking about today would, if we were talking about urban areas, come from a different pot of money. Is there anything that we can do in the bill to ensure fairer funding for rural areas from other pots, instead of trying to carve up this particular amount of money among the competing—but real—needs in rural communities?

The bill is a framework bill, so an awful lot of legislation will come from it. Regulations could enable changes to be made to schedule 1 in relation to who can get support under the bill. Those regulations will be subject to the negative procedure. Is that the right approach? For those who do not know, the negative procedure means that the instrument is lodged in the Parliament but that, if members are against an element of it, they have to vote it down in its entirety; they cannot amend it. It is a “take it or leave it” procedure. Is that adequate, or should that be changed to enable greater scrutiny and consultation on any changes that are proposed?