Chamber and committees

Like Karen Adam’s amendments, my amendments seek to respond to a call from the committee for more scrutiny in specific areas. The bill, as introduced, contains a number of regulation-making powers, among which are powers for ministers to specify functions or descriptions of functions for Scottish ministers and relevant authorities, to specify additional authorities as relevant and to specify a timeframe within which a relevant authority must produce a good food nation plan. The bill also provides that any regulations that are made using those powers will be subject to the negative procedure in the Scottish Parliament. However, the committee has agreed that that offers insufficient opportunity to scrutinise the relevant secondary legislation.

In our stage 1 report, the committee requested that the first exercise of the power conferred by section 4 to specify functions for the Scottish ministers and any exercise of the power conferred by section 7(2)(c) to make a public authority a relevant authority should be subject to greater levels of parliamentary scrutiny. My amendments 60 and 68 provide for that extra scrutiny. They would also ensure that, if the Scottish ministers wished to make regulations making a public body a relevant authority that would be required to produce a good food nation plan, those regulations would be subject to the affirmative procedure.

I believe that to be the correct level of scrutiny for those regulations, and my amendments respond to the committee’s view on the issue. I urge the committee to support the amendments in my name.

In relation to that, how does your work on strategic objectives on fuel poverty in an island context relate to recent fuel price hikes? I am sure that other members who represent islands are more than aware of that. I am very aware that the price of heating oil, which is still the main source of heating in areas off the gas grid, seems to be accelerating even beyond the dizzy heights of the cost of other fuels. How do you adjust those strategic objectives as you go, to ensure that you take account of what is happening at the UK level?

I want to turn briefly to the islands survey and return to the familiar theme of housing. One theme that came out of the survey was that of younger people expressing the complications that they experience in coming back to an island after being away for education or work elsewhere. How can the Government respond to that problem, given that, as we have heard, many islands face a labour shortage?

Finally on this theme, looking at the issues that were raised in the survey about housing, you said that the situation is different on different islands. How does the Government intend to make sure that its response is tailored to those different situations? I will not go into all the examples, but some islands have an oil industry, some have a fishing industry and some have a shortage of housing. How do you make sure that an island’s policy is tailored to those realities?

One issue of interest to me is workforce dispersal, and I know that the Government has raised that issue. Obviously, as has been observed, the world has changed in terms of people’s practices around where they work. What can the Scottish Government do to give individuals the choice to work in an island setting? I am thinking particularly of those who work in public agencies or the public sector.

Obviously, not everyone wants to work all week from home. For hybrid working to make sense in an island setting, is part of the solution to establish or find places where people can hot-desk during at least part of the week, so that they are not stuck in the house all week? How do we make sure that there are the facilities in island areas to do that? What work can we do with others to achieve that?

Can you say any more about how many crofters have been helped through that route or through other routes, such as the croft house grant scheme? Is that on the increase?

I have a brief question on that point. Clearly, there is much more still to be done, cabinet secretary. However, given the work that you have described and the fact that broadband, or rather the internet, is reserved, will you give an indication of roughly the balance of support that has come from the UK and Scottish Governments towards achieving those things?

The cabinet secretary and the deputy convener have touched on the strategic objective of reducing fuel poverty and what the Scottish Government is doing around that. How does the work that the Scottish Government does on that relate to what is happening in the reserved sphere? It is difficult to talk about fuel poverty without talking about transmission charges. If we are talking about renewables as being part of the answer in the islands, it is difficult to overlook the fact that energy companies in Scotland have to pay £7.36 per megawatt hour to connect to the national grid, although projects in most other European countries pay virtually nothing.

Thank you.