Can I just finish, minister?

Once the appeals process had been exhausted with the person or the organisation that had refused the licence, I would be concerned if the only outcome was judicial review.

I am happy to give way to the minister.

I thank the minister for clarifying that. I have been involved in appeal processes against NatureScot or Scottish Natural Heritage, not only as an individual but through representing constituents in the Parliament. The system and the reasons around it are fairly opaque, so if that is the way that the minister goes—

Yes, I will.

I have listened to the evidence that the committee has taken, and I think that Karen Adam’s comments during our evidence taking were apposite in a lot of ways. However—let me be clear—the use of cable restraints and snaring is highly regulated in legislation, and it requires a great deal of formal training. That training has taken us away from where we were many years ago, when I was younger and there were no restrictions on where you could place snares. In those days, you could place them where animals could get hung up and where they could end up—inadvertently, in most cases—strangling themselves to death.

That is not where we are now. Now, snares are set in locations where that cannot happen; they hold the animal in place, and, because of the stops, the animal cannot be strangled. The stops also work if the animal is caught in the wrong place.

The snares that we have now also give you the ability to discriminate with regard to the animals that you kill. Once you have caught the animals, you can, before you dispatch those that you want to dispatch, release the non-target animals by cutting the snare to free them. The fact that snares are also required to be regularly checked and that every snare must be identified and subject to inspection means that the activity is highly regulated.

I understand why people take issue with this, but it is my opinion and my experience that properly set and managed snares hold the animal to allow its humane dispatch—or its release, if it is not a target animal. There is no reason why non-target animals should end up being killed. I believe that most—in fact, nearly all—people who use snares know that they are taking on a huge responsibility, and they want to ensure that the animals that they catch are not subjected to suffering.

As the minister has rightly said, there are other ways of doing this. For example, those of us who have been out at night with lamps know that foxes become lamp shy, and you can clear a massive area just by turning on the lamp. Thermal sights work, but they are not always appropriate, because you cannot always see the backdrop. Shooting does not always solve everything. Let us be honest: when you fire a gun, you do not always kill what you want to kill. We know that, with snares, you can hold the animal and dispatch it very quickly.

As for the minister’s comment that all of those things can be done at night, I am sure that Jim Fairlie knows that, if you are protecting a lambing field and looking after lambs all day and all night, you do not have the time to spend all night chasing foxes that are trying to work their way in. A snare or cable restraint gives you that ability.

I am grateful to the minister for clarifying the position, because that might get around the concerns that members of the committee have raised.

Just to clarify, without talking any more, I will press amendment 179, but I will not move amendment 18 at this stage. I will bring it back at stage 3, once it has been amended to address the minister’s concerns.

Annex J is the one that is in question. Will the cabinet secretary address when the committee might get that? We were told late in the day, when we were discussing it. It has not yet been received.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?

I welcome the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. It is our role to scrutinise the Scottish Government’s actions to secure progress towards becoming a net zero nation and to check whether it has the resources that it needs to tackle the climate and nature emergencies. We have a huge remit, and in the time I have I can pick out only a few highlights.

Last year I stood up in the same debate and undertook, on behalf of the committee, to hold the Government to its commitment to increase transparency around the carbon footprint of its budget. Some progress has been made this year, with the publication of the climate change and carbon assessment alongside the budget, which we welcome. However, on Tuesday morning, just as we were starting to take evidence from the Government, we were told that some of the figures used in the assessment were inaccurate. Clearly, there is a huge amount of work still to be done for the Government to reliably articulate to the Parliament how budget decisions contribute—or indeed do not contribute—to reductions in carbon emissions.

One theme of our budget work has been funding for public transport, which is a vital component of the Scottish Government’s own ambitions to reduce car travel by 20 per cent. On buses, we heard about grants and funds being reduced to zero, with late notification of that to key organisations such as the Strathclyde Partnership for Transport. We are unclear how such decisions will help to deliver the step change to net zero.

The committee has dedicated much of this parliamentary session to ferry services, as did our predecessor committee in the previous session, so it will come as no surprise that I mention that issue here. It is disappointing to hear that money has not been allocated for work to upgrade the harbour at Ardrossan; it will merely continue to a review of the business case for that harbour. We also heard that no decision has been made to procure vessels through the small vessel replacement programme, although funding has been “earmarked”. We still do not know what the final costs of hulls 801 and 802 will be.

The electric vehicle charging infrastructure has been another theme of our budget work. We were pleased to hear about the delivery of 2,700 chargers through £65 million of funding for ChargePlace Scotland. However, progress through the electric vehicle infrastructure fund is less clear. The fund is to develop 6,000 new charge points over four years. We are now half way through that period. We heard this week that £20 million of the fund has been committed but not yet drawn down, and the fund has yet to deliver any charge points. That raises questions about the effectiveness of spending and the pace of progress under the fund.

Another part of our pre-budget work has involved assessing the budget settlement for Scotland’s environmental regulators. We were pleased to see that both NatureScot and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency have received a real-terms increase in funding for this year. We hope that that will translate into real progress in areas such as habitat restoration and robustly enforcing existing laws and regulations that protect the environment.

Before I make my next point I remind members that I am a partner in a farming partnership. The land concerned has trees on it, but I have not applied for any planting grants in the past 10 years. My point is that the trouble with the good news about SEPA and NatureScot is that it is somewhat undercut by the news elsewhere in the budget. For instance, we need to see an acceleration in tree planting, both for habitat restoration and to absorb carbon emissions, but funding for Forestry and Land Scotland and woodland creation schemes has been reduced, despite setting ambitious targets that have already been missed since 2017. We know that this is a tough financial year, but we question the consistency of decision making and its implications for the Scottish Government’s reaching its own goals. We remind it that forestry is not a tap that it can turn on and off as required.

I turn to the budget allocation for energy. The Scottish Government’s ambitions for the offshore wind sector are welcome. However, we have raised questions about the efficacy of funding for as long as we continue to have somewhat clunky marine consenting and licensing arrangements. The cabinet secretary told us that the decision to kick-start the £500 million fund for offshore wind energy meant that funding for hydrogen energy innovation was not being prioritised in this budget year. We note that, so far, only 7 per cent of the £100 million previously committed to hydrogen energy over the parliamentary session has been allocated, with no additional moneys being made available in this budget.

The Scottish Government has previously committed to spending its considerable revenues from ScotWind leasing on tackling the climate and nature emergency, yet we have heard that the money drawn down so far has been used to support the overall budget, and that that might be the case for the foreseeable future. Again, we appreciate the Government’s financial predicament, but it is worth reflecting on the long-term benefits that ring fencing could afford.

We are at a crossroads in our journey towards net zero—2030 now looks pretty close to us. There are questions about whether some of the decisions in this year’s budget maintain the momentum that we will need if we are to meet our 2030 and 2045 targets. To that end, I add a note of qualified optimism. There will be a climate change plan this year. Some of us wish that it could have been produced sooner. I am told that it will be delivered by November. It would have helped the committee’s budget scrutiny had we had it in our hands, but we are where we are. The plan will set out what the Government intends to do to deliver its carbon reduction targets and details of the associated funds that are needed. Alongside the Parliament’s other committees, we look forward to considering that plan and, I hope, achieving a better understanding of the Scottish Government’s policy choices, which it now thinks it will still be able to deliver by 2045. Indeed, that plan should make our budget scrutiny next year more meaningful.

To ask the Scottish Government whether it anticipates that the total cost of HMP Highland will remain within the £139.5 million budget by its planned completion in June 2025. (S6O-03032)

I am somewhat surprised by that answer. We have seen the budget for the new prison go from £86 million to £110 million to £139.5 million, and we have seen the completion date go from 2023 to 2025. If the cabinet secretary checked the Government website, she would see that it has been confirmed that there will be another delay and that the new prison will not be operational until 2026, rather than—as I mentioned in my question—2025. Can we really believe that, with another year’s delay, the price will not go up, as it has done over consecutive years during the design process?