There is one thing that could be done, which we have not touched on. Quite a lot of Ministry of Defence houses are unoccupied, not only in Edinburgh but across the Highlands. Would Mr Griffin be prepared to take to his Government the option of releasing some of those houses to the Scottish Government to allow it to address housing problems?

I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests. I am a proprietor of a wild salmon fishery on the east coast of Scotland, where there are no fish farms.

We heard this morning in committee that mortality in salmon farms has been around 20 to 25 per cent, but it is somewhat better this year because of colder seas. Given that the industry seems to be predicting a 2 per cent drop in mortality, how long should it be before the industry should consider whether expansion is right until it has fish mortality under control?

I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests: I provide well-maintained and tenanted housing in Moray.

Given that Patrick Harvie, in his misguided legislation regarding landlords, forced up to 10 firms to move south of the border to build houses for let, what specifically will the Government do to arrest the decline in the private rented sector, which has seen the number of privately rented homes fall from 360,000 to 300,000?

It is right that we commit our unwavering support for Ukraine and the deterrence of the illegal Russian invasion. However, before I discuss what we need to do, I need to look back at what we failed to do.

I need not remind the Parliament that, on 5 December 1994, the UK signed the Budapest agreement, along with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia and the US, undertaking that we would protect Ukraine’s sovereignty. All the countries stood by to allow Ukraine to disarm—to remove the nuclear weapons that had been left on its soil. The US undertook to do that, and we paid for it, along with many other countries.

It was therefore sad that, on 27 February 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea, and on 21 March that year, when Putin annexed it, we did nothing. In fact, Barack Obama stood back and said that Russian actions were a problem but not a threat to the US. How wrong he was, because those actions and those alone emboldened Putin. It was a huge mistake. As the skirmishes continued along the Donetsk and Luhansk border, we should have done more. We did little.

On 24 February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, we finally mobilised. We took action. We—the UK especially—provided a huge amount of anti-tank weaponry to deter the Russians, but it required the Ukrainians to hold them back. Since that time, there has been almost a stalemate. First, the Wagner group forced people forward in its special military operation; meat grinder operations killed hundreds of people; waves of convicts and criminals were pushed forward; and war crimes were committed in children’s hospitals in Kyiv and Dnipro. That was absolutely horrendous.

We—the west—did much. As I said, the UK supplied next-generation light anti-tank weaponry. The west as a whole supplied—I think I have these totals right—382 tanks, 485 howitzers and 82 multibarrelled missile launchers. However, that is not enough—it is so not enough—because Ukraine stands firm where it can, using the weapons that we have given it, but is running out of ammunition to deter the Russians, who seem to push forward relentlessly, ignoring the costs.

We have given financial support. So far, I think, £380 billion has been given to Ukraine, and the UK has given £13 billion. That sounds like a massive amount of money—and it is—but it is not achieving what we need to do. As a soldier, I know that there are no half attempts at war. We either commit fully to it and allow the Ukrainians to defend themselves properly, or we just prolong the pain and the suffering. Shortly, therefore, we will have to come up with a decision on what we allow Ukraine to do with some of the weapons that we have given it.

There will be some disquiet and concern when we talk about the Storm Shadow missile that has been provided to Ukraine being used in Russia, but Russia is where all the ammunition is being stockpiled to be forced forward into Ukraine. We cannot hold the Ukrainians’ arms behind their backs and stop them from defending themselves against Russia.

I know that it will take time, and I know that we will wrestle with it, as we wrestled with the issue of supplying aeroplanes and tanks across the border, with Russia saying that that would be a direct threat to it. Well, the biggest direct threat to Russia was invading Ukraine, and we have to be whole-hearted in our defence of Ukraine and give it the resources that it needs to defend itself properly, because I do not believe, at this stage, that there is any way to negotiate with a megalomaniac—a narcissist—in the form of Putin.

Putin is prepared to allow his country to suffer impossible losses. I think that the latest figure is 70,000 Russian dead. When will enough people in Russia understand the casualties that they are suffering? Only then will Putin be forced to the table. We need to ensure that that happens. All wars are eventually solved not by armed conflict but by politicians, when armies either have some form of victory or run out of the resources that they need to continue fighting. We must ensure that Ukraine does not run out of such resources. Only once this war has been won—and we have to understand that it is a war—will we be able to give the refugees in Scotland what they really want, which is to go back to their own country.

My plea to the Scottish and UK Governments, and to everyone else across the world, is to continue to provide Ukrainians with weapons—but with enough weapons so that they do not have to stop their offensives and their defence of their country because they are running out of ammunition.

I want to reiterate the timescales to Parliament. I do so as an individual, although I am the convener of the committee. In August 2023, we became aware that the Government would not meet the deadlines—in fact, a ministerial statement on 18 April this year told us so.

I met the Government on behalf of the committee in April, May, June, July, August and September, asking for the bill to be produced before 5 September. That was the date on which it was eventually laid in the chamber, which gave the committee precious little time to take evidence.

I would like it on record that the committee worked extremely hard to meet the Government’s deadlines, which have been unnecessarily tight, and would have been tight even if it had produced the bill when we originally asked for it in May. We are now at the stage where the committee has to meet during plenary sessions of the Parliament in order to get the bill to the stage 1 debate. It would be right for the minister to acknowledge the committee’s work and the fact that this problem is of his making, not the committee’s.

Will the minister take an intervention?

Okay.

I am going to talk briefly about the financial memorandum, which I guess anyone would describe as thin gruel. The Government, in its defence, would say that it will not cost anything to come up with a climate change plan, because it was coming up with something anyway, and that it already has all the resources it needs to come up with the carbon budgets. However, the bill relies on subordinate legislation to set up the carbon budgets and the climate change plan, and they will have a cost and will not necessarily have financial memorandums.

Claudia Cowie, you were quite forthright, I think, in your submission on behalf of your organisation. I am trying to remember the exact words that you used—you probably have them in front of you. If I remember rightly, you said that there was not enough time and not enough detail. Is that a good or bad synopsis?

The next agenda item is the third day of evidence taking on the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill, which seeks to amend the current approach to the setting of interim greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in Scotland.

I am delighted to welcome Claudia Cowie, team leader, sustainability and climate change, Aberdeenshire Council; Alison Leslie, team leader, climate and sustainability policy, Aberdeen City Council; Mike Rivington, senior scientist at the James Hutton Institute; Jamie Brogan, head of climate partnerships at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute; and Cornilius Chikwama, audit director at Audit Scotland.

Thank you very much for taking the time to be here this morning. It was very short notice, so I appreciate the fact that you have found the time to come.

Before we move to questions, I note that the deputy convener has been held up in getting here this morning, but he will be joining us shortly. I also note that two members would like to declare interests. I invite them to do that now.

Welcome back after that short break. We have just a few questions to go.

For those who have been waiting for Jackie Dunbar’s questions, they are next. Jackie—you are on.

Let me push you slightly on that point. Should we state, or try to state, in the legislation that the Government is introducing that the climate change plan must be fully costed, so that people know where they are going? Surely, setting out a management plan without knowing how much it will cost in pounds, shillings and pence ain’t gonna work, is it?