I remind members that I am a board member of Fisheries Management Scotland.

I welcome the committee’s interest in salmon mortality rates, which reflects the work that the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee undertook in 2018. I draw the cabinet secretary’s attention to recommendation 10 of that committee’s report, which refers to having ambitious, world-leading targets to reduce mortality levels. It goes on to say:

“It considers that this should include appropriate mechanisms to allow for the limiting or closing down of production until causes”

relating to mortality

“are addressed.”

At that stage, mortality was 3.8 million farmed fish, which was about 7 per cent of the total. As the cabinet secretary suggested, it increased to about 17 million in 2022, which was about 25 per cent of the total. It increased again the following year to 17.5 million, dropped slightly in 2024 and then shot up again in 2025. We now have mortality at around 20 to 25 per cent. What figure will the Government set as an acceptable level—in percentage terms—of fish stock dying in pens in Scotland?

The figures are remaining stubbornly high and well above the numbers that the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee considered to be totally unacceptable. Let us translate that to other stock across Scotland. There are about 6.5 million sheep in Scotland. If 1.5 million were found dead on the hills across Scotland every year, would the Government find that acceptable, or would it take action to deal with that?

My final question is this. If the figure reached 10 per cent and there were fish pens across Scotland where 10 per cent was being exceeded in every production cycle—I can point you to a few, cabinet secretary, but I will resist the temptation to do that—would that be an acceptable figure, or would you say that it should be lower? If it is 10 per cent, will you say to such sites that production should stop, as both the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee and this committee have suggested?

This is the first of the few times that I will speak to the bill at stage 3. I start by saying how much I think that our debates on the amendments have shown the Parliament in a good light, in that we have all been able to talk across the issues. I thank the member in charge of the bill for making that possible.

My concern about coercion is one of the fundamental reasons why I struggle with the bill. How do we identify coercion, and how do we prevent it? Brian Whittle was entirely right in what he said earlier. How do we identify coercion when we no longer have the relationships between doctors and patients that we used to have, where a doctor knew so much about what was going on in their patients’ families?

How do we prevent coercion? I do not know. As we heard so powerfully from Michael Marra and Ruth Maguire, coercion can be subtle and it is often undetectable. It goes on, often by suggestion and repetition, without anyone really knowing what is happening, apart from the person who is inflicting it on somebody else.

In addition, there is the coercion that people put on themselves. We should be under no illusion about that. If someone gets an unfavourable diagnosis, one thing that they will think about is whether it might be easier to end their life than to put their family through everything that they might go through. Some people have supportive families who can break through those shackles and prevent them from coercing themselves into doing something that they might regret, but not everyone has such a family around them.

I have heard of people across the Highlands who are coerced by the fact that there is a lack of palliative care in the area where they live. The other day, I heard of somebody who, if the bill passes, would contemplate ending their life rather than going to Inverness, two and a half hours away from their family, where they might get the palliative care that they cannot get locally, because they could not bear to be separated from their family. To my mind, it is that lack of palliative care, coupled with the approach in the bill, that makes the issue of coercion so difficult.

We know that, in Scotland, 14,000 people a year are probably not getting the palliative care that they need. Why is that? It is because there is not enough palliative care provision and there is a huge lack of funding. If they cannot get palliative care through the state, many people consider funding such care themselves, but not everyone has the ability to do that. People often ask why they should do so if they know where they are going, and they ask whether it would not be better to give what little resources they have left to their children and their partner.

I am not sure that any of the amendments in this group that were lodged by Paul O’Kane, Michael Marra, Bob Doris, Brian Whittle, Jeremy Balfour and Ruth Maguire make me any less concerned about coercion. I fear that they do not. However, I wish those members success, because I absolutely believe that Parliament should do anything that it can to ensure that there is no coercion in such cases. In particular, I believe that we should consider amendments 177 and 180 and ensure that they are agreed to.

I do not want to make a big thing of this, but amendment 50 gives me a huge amount of concern because it proposes reducing the penalty for a summary conviction for coercion. How can that be right, given that many of us fear that the potential for coercion is one of the main problems with the bill?

It may not be the cabinet secretary, because she might not be here in the next parliamentary session. I do not think that you are standing, cabinet secretary—are you? It will be your successor, whoever that may be.

Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. We will later consider in private the evidence that we have heard, which will inform the report that we put to the Parliament.

I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

We cannot hear you yet. Hold on. Let us just wait until I get the nod.

You must have got a report pretty quickly from the dry dock. If it was my boat, I probably would have gone down and looked at it myself. That still left four months to work out that there would be an increase in price before the committee was notified.

Excuse me, but I will start off by saying that that is the fourth time I have heard that speech. I heard it when I went to Clyde Blowers, I heard it when I listened to Tim Hair and I heard it from Graeme Thomson’s predecessor. Those speeches were almost exactly the same.

In the previous parliamentary session, the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee charged Ferguson Marine with updating it on the build of the Glen Rosa and Glen Sannox. That issue has been passed on to this committee, which is the logical successor committee. I have to say that the reports that have been delivered to this committee have, over a period of time, become progressively weaker, thinner and more off timescale. In fact, that resulted in this committee sending a letter on 2 April 2025 to Ferguson Marine—David Dishon dealt with that letter. We got a holding response telling us that Graeme Thomson would be in post and that we could not get a full report until then because it would be unfair on him. There seems to have been some speculation in the press about who authorised and suggested that response.

We then got a response on 13 May last year. That letter was written by you, Graeme Thomson, once you had had a chance to get your feet under the desk and to work out what the situation was. I would suggest that the report in your letter was fairly upbeat. You said that the work would be on time, and, in the third last paragraph, that costs would increase to £172.5 million, with a £12.5 million contingency. We were then told this January that costs would increase to £197.5 million and that delivery would not be on time.

Graeme, what am I to believe? Everything changes. It seems like quicksand. Having looked at the vessels for 10 years, I have to say that my frustration is huge. Will you explain why your letter of 13 May was so fundamentally wrong on price and on the delivery date?

Wow. To me, it seems to be a bit of a guddle, especially given the fact that, based on some of what you have said regarding LNG, you must have known that LNG could not be stored at either place when you started down this road, yet you factored that in.

So it will be the taxpayers of Scotland.