Chamber and committees

Well—

Following on from that point, I am sure that the minister will know that several applications have been submitted for pump storage projects around Loch Ness. As we have heard, there are concerns about the salmon population, angling, recreational interests, and the level of the loch and the Caledonian canal.

There is a group of people who are broadly in favour of pump storage but who feel that the current planning rules do not allow the planning authority to take a holistic view of the cumulative impact—in fact, they prevent it from doing so.

Although I welcome SEPA’s working group, every time I hear about a working group, I think that something might happen in five years’ time if we are lucky, but this problem is here and now. The applications have been submitted and they have to be determined. The problem that the petitioners have is that the applications will all be determined without the council being able to do what the minister has said should be done, in a better system—namely, to take into account the cumulative impact.

How will we avoid decisions being taken that might have significant adverse impacts on the existing interests of salmon fishing, angling and—more widely—the marine environment, recreational interests and the interests of other loch users?

This is yet another tragic case, and I would just note the statistics on the number of people who lose their lives as a result of having heart attacks outwith hospital, how access to cardiopulmonary resuscitation and defibrillators massively increases the chance of survival, and how every minute without that treatment reduces the level of survival by a staggering 10 per cent. I just thought that I would mention that, given that 3,752 people’s lives are at stake if they do not have such access.

I am quite sure that this issue will come back to our successor committee, and rightly so. The work that has been done has allowed a real focus to be put on the detail of the issues, which is to be welcome. I would just say that our hearts go out to the families involved in these cases.

No—I will wait until my colleague has finished.

I was not going to ask about nuclear, but I think that, underlying all the objections, there is a series of wider principled concerns. That is really why I am asking the question; I think that a lot of people would like answers.

I will ask about community ownership in a minute but, before we leave the current topic, I will put one point to you, minister. Although the grid certainly requires to be upgraded, the costs of upgrading it were, this week, estimated at £4 trillion, although that figure is disputed by NESO. That is the scale of the cost. In addition, the timescale for that work will be much longer than Mr Miliband or anyone else who supports it has said will be the case. It will take decades. Is the problem, therefore, that, although there may be solutions in the future such as hydrogen and nuclear fission, and all sorts of possibilities, including more storage, it will be too slow?

Even if we support your policies and Mr Miliband’s policies, the grid upgrade process will inevitably take much longer than he says that it will. The transition from wood to coal took 200 years. The transition from coal to oil, according to Daniel Yergin, the world’s foremost energy expert, took 100 years. How can we expect to move from oil and gas to renewables in just a decade? It is just not on, is it? It is not going to happen. It is for the birds, and therefore the risks that I have described are very serious, and are growing in severity.

What about local authority decisions, though? I am asking how many were overturned by the Scottish Government.

This is yet another tragic case, and I would just note the statistics on the number of people who lose their lives as a result of having heart attacks outwith hospital, how access to cardiopulmonary resuscitation and defibrillators massively increases the chance of survival, and how every minute without that treatment reduces the level of survival by a staggering 10 per cent. I just thought that I would mention that, given that 3,752 people’s lives are at stake if they do not have such access.

I am quite sure that this issue will come back to our successor committee, and rightly so. The work that has been done has allowed a real focus to be put on the detail of the issues, which is to be welcome. I would just say that our hearts go out to the families involved in these cases.

I strongly support that. The lack of response has been lamentable—woeful, actually—and not good enough. I very much endorse your recommendation, convener.

I truly hope that bodies will respond to the committee more timeously in future, in the next session of Parliament, and that, if they do not, they will be named and called out, because it is not fair to the petitioners that, when they come to us to be their voice, they do not get reasonably prompt, detailed and relevant answers. That has been too frequent an occurrence in this session of Parliament.

No—I will wait until my colleague has finished.

Good morning, minister. I now ask you to risk taking the journey from Castlemilk up to Inverness via the A9. On 12 August, I attended a meeting at which more than 300 people representing more than half the community councils in the whole of the Highland Council area discussed their concerns about the process. I want to ask you about that first, because many of the petitions are asking for the democratisation of the process and specific elements of it.

10:15

I have been attending public meetings for four decades now—rather too many of them—and I have never before encountered the amount of anger that I saw at that meeting. The source of that anger was that, although many of the community councils had made detailed objections about things such as the cumulative impact of a large number of onshore wind farms, grid improvements and substations, what happened next was that, even if Highland Council turned down the application, it then went to you, minister, and the Scottish Government, and in almost every case, the decision was overturned. That was the feeling at that meeting.

I ask you for your reaction to that, and whether you can give us the statistics about the number of applications that you or the Scottish Government have granted and the number of decisions that you have overturned. You might not have that information with you now, but a lot of people would like to see it, because that is at the root of the concern. There is a feeling that democracy does not exist in the wind farm process in Scotland.

I say that in the context that, as you know, both of us are—as most people are in principle—in favour of more renewable energy as part of a balanced grid.