I will, in just a minute.

If witnesses are getting money from any sources, it is important that they ensure that that is declared before they appear at a committee meeting.

I will take Stephen Kerr’s intervention.

I thank the cabinet secretary for her statement and for finally publishing the 400-odd-page draft climate change plan, which I have to admit I have not read fully in the hour in which I have had it.

I remain seriously concerned that the Parliament does not have enough time to fully consider the plan before dissolution. However, I have briefly scrutinised annex 1, which covers the need to decarbonise our homes. It will cost the owner of a pre-1960s house in the region of £45,000 to decarbonise. What percentage of that cost will the Scottish Government make available to home owners to help them to achieve the Government’s decarbonisation targets?

Should have done it last year.

I will give way to Mr Mason, on the basis that I hope he is going to recall being on a committee that I was on—an experience that he ignored earlier.

I agree with Mr Brown. I can think of one committee member who used to leave a committee meeting early to ensure that they could get their press release out before anyone else. I say to Mr Brown that I am just making observations. I am not pointing the finger at anyone; I am just speaking from my experience as a convener.

It is also right to get more balance in committees so that the governing party does not have an absolute majority. There are very few committees in the Parliament where that is the case.

I totally agree with Mr Mason’s point about the size of committees’ subject areas. The Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee’s remit includes matters that I do not believe are about any of those areas. Land reform is one of them. I am sure that the Minister for Parliamentary Business and Veterans would have been delighted had I not got so involved in that. [Laughter.] However, the point is that committees are sometimes given additional work that falls outside their areas. For the REC Committee, trying to deal with ferries, trains, motorways and so on became virtually impossible.

Uncomfortably, I find myself in the same boat as Richard Leonard in that I am going to give own my views, which do not necessarily tie in with those of my party.

I have been convener of a committee for all but one year of my time in the Parliament. It is a role that I have considered to be important—more so than holding a shadow cabinet position in Opposition, for example—because I think that members can make a difference in it.

I have listened to today’s debate and think that we have missed, or should consider, a couple of aspects.

When I started being a convener, I was incredibly lucky to have a good senior clerk who enabled me to bounce ideas off them and allowed me to fight over certain points. That allowed me to be educated, as a new convener, about what I could and could not do and what was in the committee’s best interests. To my mind, the role of the clerks is absolutely critical. When we look at our committees we must bear in mind that it is really important to ensure that we have the right clerks supporting them.

I have also gone through quite a few business managers in my time as convener. It is absolutely critical to have a relationship with them to allow the committee to work out its future programme. I know that almost all committee conveners do that, but that relationship is particularly important for a new convener. I will not embarrass the one business manager with whom I struggled, but I will say that he never gave me a biscuit when I came to meetings. He knows who he is, and I see that he is smiling.

On the issue of committee size, my first committee had 11 members, which to me seemed unwieldy and almost too difficult to manage. To be honest, those members’ experience and depth of knowledge, and the length of time that some of them had spent in the Parliament, made things virtually impossible. I would sometimes benefit from the knowledge of Richard Lyle and Stewart Stevenson, but sometimes I could not, and an 11-person committee can be difficult and unwieldy to manage.

Do I have time to give way, Presiding Officer?

I will wind up my remarks on that note. However, I encourage the taking of such an approach when the next parliamentary session begins.

I agree that teaching people how to convene is probably not the best way forward, but teaching them how to use the assets that they have at their disposal—in particular, the skills of the clerks and the staff in all the other parliamentary departments—is important, because it will make them more effective.

I remind members, as I constantly do, of my entry in the register of members’ interests. I am the owner of 202 hectares of land. I rent about 200 hectares of land under a non-agricultural tenancy. I also have about five hectares of land under an Agricultural Holdings (Scotland) Act 1991 tenancy. I have feet in many camps when it comes to land, and I have always supported land reform.

I echo the thanks that Mr McArthur put on the record to those people who have helped members to get amendments through. In particular, I thank the legislation team for being so amenable to the few amendments that I put forward.

I started off looking at the bill bearing in mind the information that had been given to me by a land reformer who said that it would not deliver what the cabinet secretary said that it would and by a legal adviser who said that it was “junk law”. This is the Scottish Parliament’s third attempt at land reform. None of it has really delivered what the Parliament wanted, and we predict that there will be a fourth attempt. What we know is that the first attempt at land reform resulted in Andrew Stoddart’s court case, and the second resulted in the Salvesen v Riddell case—and at what cost to the Scottish Government? We will find out, because I have put in some freedom of information requests that will, no doubt, prove that cost.

My amendments did not seek to do what Dr Allan suggested, which was to kibosh the bill; rather, they sought to prevent the cabinet secretary—or probably her successor—from facing the legal challenges that I believe that the bill will result in.

There are some clear casualties of the bill, investor confidence being one and tenancies being another. Why are those important? We need investor confidence if we are going to address our net zero targets, including on planting and looking after the remote areas of Scotland. I have looked back at the details, which show that, in March 2023, Lorna Slater—sadly, she is not here—signed a groundbreaking £2 billion investment deal with private investors and the bank Hampden & Co. The aim was to get them to invest in some of the targets that we sought to achieve. This land reform bill will not help to promote that investment. We can argue about whether that is right or wrong, but the Government does not have the money available to invest in some of the targets that we need to achieve. If members do not believe that, I point to the outstanding letters from Scottish Financial Enterprise and from renewables and forestry companies on their fears about the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. The bill will make real problems for us.

As far as tenancies are concerned, let me be clear that changing the law retrospectively comes with huge problems. We know that there has been a decrease in tenancies—I have raised that for long enough.

Part of the bill that I found particularly difficult is the exclusion of large landowners from being the land and community commissioner. It seems to be fine for ex-ministers and ex-special advisers to take that role, but not large landowners. I think that that is wrong. Fundamentally, it goes against the grain of everything that I believe about the Scottish Parliament in relation to equality.

We have debated amendments, including a lot of my amendments. I am very glad that, in most cases, they were debated in the spirit in which they were lodged. However, at one stage, one of them was not, and that was sad. My mother, who is long since deceased, would have said that that was probably because the person was overtired and that they should not have done it in that way. My mother often had wise things to say. I will leave it at that, but I am afraid that I cannot support the bill in the way in which it is drafted.

Thank you very much, Monica.

That brings us to the end of the evidence session. I know that Clive Mitchell has offered to write to the committee, and the clerks will follow that up to ensure that we get back from him, as it were, what he offered to do.

I will suspend the meeting for five minutes, and then we will move into private session before coming back into public session again. Therefore, I ask committee members to be back here at 10:56. Again, I thank the witnesses for the evidence that they have given this morning.