Chamber and committees

I do not want to jump ahead too far and go into enforcement, but it is important to put on the record that most crofters are doing the right thing, and the reason why those who are doing the right thing get angry about the issue of abandonment is not because they feel that their neighbours are making money out of it; it is because, ultimately, if a township is denuded of people who are active crofters, the collective aspect of crofting becomes impossible in that township.

On the idea of environmental use, the key word seems to be “managed”. You have touched on this, but do you have an idea, even provisionally, of what that word might mean? The land has to be put to environmental use, but that has to be managed use.

As has been touched on, reporting is crucial in all of this. Recent crofting legislation has changed the people who are tasked with reporting on non-compliance. Will the bill improve the process of reporting on non-compliance and remove some of the need for neighbours to describe the activities of their neighbours, which is obviously not an ideal or workable situation?

Resource has been mentioned, too. Are there provisions in the bill that would free up resource and allow the commission to concentrate on the task—it is not your only task but, ultimately, it is part of your responsibility, as you have described—of taking tenancies off people if a croft is abandoned? Are there provisions that would free you up to do some of that?

I saw the same croft as the convener did, and, without referring to it too specifically, it raises a few questions in my mind that have also come up in other contexts.

It would be fair to say that most crofters are quite enthusiastic about finding ways of including care of the environment in legislation and giving it due recognition. I suppose that, as the convener has outlined, some of that comes down to enforcement and some of it comes down to whether the enforcement procedure is more than a desktop exercise when it tries to judge between active environmental management and abandonment. Would it be fair to say that one of the questions that has been asked of the commission in the past is about how it ensures that more crofts are visited and seen rather than judged from afar?

I have one more question on that issue. Section 2 removes the 28-day time limits when a crofter applies for consent to use their croft for another purposeful use or when a crofter applies for permission to be temporarily absent. Why is that being changed? It is the Government’s decision to write the legislation, but what is your understanding of why that is in there? Will that be useful to you or to the process? Will it help to deal with things promptly? Does that just give you more time?

I am not a crofter.

I do not disagree with anything that you have said about the fact that the landscape has changed and that many people want to use crofts and grazings for different things. However, to push back a little, do you recognise the fear that some potential new entrants might have that they could find it difficult to obtain a croft with the necessary grazings to do what they want to do—to keep animals on the common grazings—if, in some places, the trend of separating grazing shares from crofts was to be completely unchecked?

The issue has been raised with the committee on trips. I am not trying to pretend that it is apocalyptic, but questions have been raised with us about who might acquire shares in common land and why.

I will move on to the other scenario that you mentioned about the future. The bill gives crofters and grazings committees new opportunities to use common grazings for environmental purposes. At present, are common grazings committees resourced, equipped and able to hold money to the extent that might be needed to do all those things? Does the bill assist with any of that?

Will the member give way?

It was my intention so to do. My apologies, Presiding Officer.

I declare an interest as a long-term member of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I thank Bill Kidd for his work in bringing an important motion to the chamber, and I recognise his long-standing personal commitment to the issue.

The unusable—I pray—nature of nuclear weapons means that they consistently fail to deter wars of aggression, even when that aggression involves nuclear powers, as recent years have shown only too clearly. For many people, the real terror that is presented by nuclear weapons is their capacity to be used as the result of a misunderstanding, an error or, as very nearly happened in the Soviet Union in 1983, an information technology fault.

My party has opposed the use or storage of nuclear weapons in Scotland since 1963, and I acknowledge that people in a number of other parties take the same view; indeed, that would be the majority position in this Parliament. It is therefore relevant for the Parliament to take an interest in the wider risks that may be presented by any radioactive incidents at nuclear bases.

Since coming to light, the numerous reports of radioactive contamination have proved concerning for many residents across western Scotland. The UK Ministry of Defence’s attempts to downplay those concerns leave many questions unanswered. The reality is that the incidents that prompted today’s debate have not come to our knowledge through the transparency and willingness of the Ministry of Defence. Instead, a six-year freedom of information battle has been waged by various journalists. Thanks to their hard work, we now know that incidents occurred in 2010 and 2021 and that there was a major leak of a radioactive isotope in August 2019. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency concluded that those leaks were due to shortfalls in maintenance. Perhaps even more worryingly, the plans to replace piping to maintain our expensive nuclear deterrent were, it seems, slow and inadequate.

I understand that some members will have differing views to mine on whether the nuclear deterrent works. However, I hope that, as Mr Kidd set out, we can all agree that the public in Scotland, who are host to a truly terrifying nuclear arsenal, have a right to be convincingly reassured on safety matters. I believe that it is not unreasonable, therefore, that the UK Government, which is ultimately responsible for the UK’s weapons of mass destruction—I use the phrase that describes them in the Scotland Act 1998—takes action to address the concerns that clearly exist about recent incidents and does so correctly and transparently. Given that Scottish taxpayers are expected to contribute towards the £3 billion annual maintenance bill for those weapons, I do not believe that it is an unreasonable ask that sites be maintained in a way that commands some degree of public confidence.