Chamber and committees

Efforts to protect children and young people from harm are a priority for all members. How is the Scottish Government working to ensure that support for survivors is trauma informed and accessible?

Yes.

It is always an appropriate time to bring in Alasdair Allan for a question—not least in the new year.

As we have heard, there are different types of land, different types of land use and, I presume, different degrees to which carbon sequestration can be achieved. Will the witnesses say a bit more about the per-hectare target and whether they think that it works?

The Government also has a strategy on biodiversity. You mentioned the importance of ensuring that whatever we do for carbon will also be good for biodiversity. How do those two things intersect?

I think that you said that the majority of UK tree planting is happening in Scotland. In a second, I will move on to some of the specific stuff about sequestration, but can you say something about species, the possibly changing role that Scotland is playing and the targets that Scotland is setting itself for the planting of native species?

A lot of the conversation has been about what it means to have the right tree in the right place. The draft climate change plan has factored in a

“10% ‘stretch’ in CO2 removals”

from woodland creation due to

“improved location, species and management of trees.”

Is that a fair assumption? Do you have views on its workability?

Please do not take it from my question that I am seeking to polarise. I agree with what you say, but I am interested to know a bit more about how you all approach the perceived tension around issues such as ensuring habitat and biodiversity, avoiding monoculture and maintaining soil quality in the future. Before the convener brings people in, I think that you will find agreement around the table about multiyear funding, although some of us are quite keen to ensure that the Scottish Government also gets multiyear funding, which would make all of this a lot easier.

I welcome the Scottish Government’s work with the Scottish Legal Aid Board and others on those issues. Can the minister set out what more can be done to assist in attracting trainee solicitors to our islands to practise law and improve access to rural legal aid, and what the Government will be able to do in its next conversations with the SLAB and the Law Society of Scotland on those issues?

To ask the Scottish Government what work it is undertaking to ensure that rural and island communities have access to legal aid. (S6O-05331)

I am grateful for the opportunity to bring to the chamber an issue that matters to every fishing community in Scotland. It certainly matters to people in my island constituency, who have not been slow to raise it with me. I appreciate that the debate on my motion is the Parliament’s final item of business before the Christmas recess, so I am grateful to members who have stayed to take part in it. This is not the first time that the subject been raised in the Parliament but, as you will hear, there is good reason to raise it again.

In October this year, the United Kingdom Labour Government allocated its new United Kingdom-European Union fishing and coastal growth fund across the UK in a way that bears no relation whatsoever to the scale of Scotland’s fishing industry or, indeed, to the way in which such funds have been allocated in the past. Scotland consistently lands around 63 per cent of the UK’s total catch value, and more than 60 per cent of the UK’s seafood exports come from Scotland. However, the UK Labour Government has decided that, of the £360 million fund, only £28 million will make its way to Scotland’s coastal communities. The much smaller fishing industry in England is set to receive £300 million. Scotland has somewhere between half and two thirds of the UK’s fishing industry, but we will get less than an 8 per cent of the UK Government’s fund. That is because the funding has been divided up based on Scotland’s share of the UK’s human population—a fact that has nothing whatsoever to do with the scale of our fishing industry. Certainly, it has nothing to do with the proportions of landings, the value of exports or the total catch value for each country—nor does it have anything to do with precedent.

Prior to Brexit, the equivalent EU funding was split along the following lines: 46 per cent for Scotland, 36 per cent for England, 10 per cent for Northern Ireland and 8 per cent for Wales. That allocation recognised the significant economic contribution of Scotland’s fishing industry. I hope that colleagues across the chamber will recognise that the Labour UK Government’s decision to divide its new fishing fund using the Barnett formula is deeply flawed and does not provide our fishing communities across Scotland with the support that they need—indeed, the support that they were promised—after Scotland was taken out of the EU against our will.

The new UK fishing and coastal growth fund replaces the equivalent EU funding that was lost following Brexit. The Scottish Government requested £166 million of the £360 million fund and requested that it then be able to allocate its share to Scottish coastal communities, as fishing is a devolved issue.

I am afraid that the convoluted argument that Scottish Labour has offered to date on the issue—that the Scottish Government, in seeking to allocate our fair share of the funding in Scotland ourselves, is to blame for the situation where we receive only Barnett consequentials, rather than the equivalent proportion of the EU funding that we are no longer eligible for—does not hold water. The UK Government, by all accounts, refused to engage with devolved Governments on the issue in advance of, or indeed following, the allocation decision that was announced two months ago.

Labour Senedd members and MPs across the political spectrum at Westminster have criticised the UK Government’s allocation decision. Why are all Labour MSPs and indeed most Tory MSPs unwilling to do the same?

I had rather hoped that there would be no need to raise the issue again, given the pretty terrible reaction to the UK Government’s decision among Scottish fishing communities. However, the UK Government seems determined not to listen to reason on this occasion, despite many other notable policy U-turns in recent weeks.

In my constituency, Na h-Eileanan an Iar, fishing remains a vital part of our daily lives and local heritage, from Ness to Vatersay. In 2023, fishing in the Western Isles contributed more than £8 million in approximate gross value added to the Scottish economy. Its percentage share of the fishing sector’s economic contribution has grown by 8 per cent since 2016, despite the fact that the number of individuals who are employed in fishing in my constituency has dropped by 16 per cent in the past five years.

Fishing is a vital industry in the Western Isles and elsewhere, both economically and culturally, but it is one that requires sustained support given the challenges that the sector faces, for example as a result of Brexit’s implications for both exports and immigration and the consequent difficulty for some parts of the industry in recruiting crews. Increased administrative requirements, restrictions on labour mobility and the additional costs that are incurred in exporting to the EU have all had an impact.

Seafood industry representatives estimate that Brexit has led to a 30 per cent increase in the cost of transporting products and a 50 per cent increase in the cost of packaging, with export health certificates estimated to have cost UK food businesses some £60 million in 2021 alone. At the same time, 20 to 25 per cent of seafood industry vacancies remain unfilled, and the end to EU freedom of movement provisions has been a significant contributor to that.