The Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee certainly considers all the costs, and we have considered the implications. The climate change plan has been drawn up by the Scottish Government, which has put some fairly opaque costings and savings in it. It is for us to drill down into those, and I am sure that we will bear in mind the point that the member made.

This debate is about fiscal sustainability, but I will end by talking about parliamentary sustainability, by which I mean the doggedness that the Parliament needs in order to see things through to the end. It means holding on to institutional memory while individual parliamentarians come and go. I will not be here in May, but others who are listening to the debate will be. Whoever forms the next Government, it will be up to the members of the next Scottish Parliament to hold them to account on delivery of the joint budget review on climate change. There is still quite a way to go on that.

I had planned just to listen to the debate and had no intention of speaking in it, but I have been prompted to come to my feet to talk about a couple of issues.

I remind members of my entry in the register of members’ interests in that, jointly with my brother, I own a fishery on the river Spey. I have had some knowledge of rivers for 40 years, in which time I have learned that they change regularly and that they are alive and dynamic. In the past few years, I have learned that climate change makes them even more so. In the past, we perhaps expected rivers to stay within certain boundaries, but now we know that they move and shift and do not stay within them.

Increased flows and more movement of sediment and gravel make the maintenance of bridges far more important—and that is even before they fall down, not just when they do. Those of us who walk along riverbanks and look under bridges will have seen that the latter build up levels of gravel underneath them. The Spey viaduct was one of those bridges that moved from the original course of the river to one of the abutments and beyond.

If we are going to do maintenance work on bridges, it should be not only on their structures but on the riverbanks. The only way to do that is for people to get into the river and dig—that is it. However, something called the controlled activity regulations prohibits them from doing so. Those complex regulations require the incurring of costs and the taking of a massive amount of consideration, especially in special areas of conservation and sites of special scientific interest, as is the case with the Spey viaduct. The regulations frighten people away from doing the work that they need to do around bridges.

While the cabinet secretary ponders the issue of money for the maintenance of bridges, I ask her also to ponder sending out a signal to the people who manage them, to say that if they want to take preventative action before the bridges fall down—by going into the river and digging it out to make it flow where it should, where it is channelled by those bridges—the Government and SEPA will do everything in their power to make that happen.

Good morning, and welcome to the third meeting in 2026 of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. We are now in public session. We have received apologies from Monica Lennon, and we welcome Sarah Boyack to the committee as the Labour Party substitute.

We began the meeting in private so that we could sign off a report that we had agreed to take in private at a prior meeting. Our second item of business is a decision to take in private item 6 on our agenda, which is consideration of today’s evidence on the draft climate change plan. We will also use that item to consider the evidence that we heard on the plan at our meetings on 16 December and 6 January. Do members agree to take item 6 in private?

Members indicated agreement.

It was a point, I think.

The next question comes from Bob Doris.

There I was, when scheduling for this with the clerks, thinking that it would all be over in 30 minutes, apart from the shouting. How wrong I was.

You had a lot of questions, Sarah, and I am not sure that we will get through them all. As I am conscious of the time, I will move to Douglas Lumsden, unless there is a specific question that you want to ask or that you feel is not sufficiently answered for you to move on.

Just to clarify, if the entitlement is removed, you are removing the young person’s ability to get to education. Is that what you are saying?

That is what you just said.

Just to push the point so that I fully understand it, if a young person uses Lothian Buses, for example, to go to school, and he or she has had their concessionary travel removed, they can walk or cycle but they are not allowed to use the bus to go to school. That seems bizarre.

They cannot use their travel card; they just have to pay their money. That does not protect bus users from being abused.