Chamber and committees

Mortalities.

With respect, cabinet secretary, if 25 per cent of my cows died every year, I would be out of business, and I would not want to continue, because I would be sickened by it. I leave it at that.

I remind committee members and members of the public that my entry in the register of members’ interests shows that I am a joint owner of a wild salmon fishery on the River Spey. The River Spey is on the east coast of Scotland and is not directly affected by salmon farming on the west coast of Scotland.

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?

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?