Chamber and committees

Yes. You are also welcome to come and speak to me if you want to raise anything before stage 2 to bottom out that particular issue.

It is not just nice to have; it is important to work towards it, but it is in setting the topic targets that the action actually happens. Let me take that idea away. As I said, Environmental Standards Scotland can already advise us on bringing forward any review of targets.

I do not want to be prescriptive about particular actions. I want the bill to give us agility in the way in which we address issues, and I am absolutely open to scrutinising how the bill, as it is, could allow more targeted action. However, there are a number of provisions in the bill, particularly in part 2, that will allow us to be more fleet of foot in how we deal with emerging and changing issues. I can come on to this when we talk about part 2, but I included part 2 to give us that responsiveness and agility in a number of areas. That will mean that we do not need to wait for primary legislation to be able to deal with an emerging situation or a trend that we have identified and which needs attention quickly.

A lot of the provisions in part 2 will allow us to do that. I am open to that because it is a real concern. We depend on quite a lot of volunteers to manage some areas, particularly our river banks. It may be that, in the associated action plans, local authorities need to pay more attention to things that are happening in the invasive species realm. However, I will not commit myself to anything. We can have a chat about that.

We can have a look at that.

I will say a couple of things on that. The targets themselves are very robust—there will be legally binding targets associated with the goals that feed into the biodiversity strategy. The high-level purpose is to align with the biodiversity strategy, but that informs the secondary legislation and the targets, so they would be binding.

None of us has control over who forms the next Government; the people of Scotland do. You would hope that biodiversity is so important to the people of Scotland that they would not elect anyone for whom biodiversity was not a consideration. We cannot future proof any legislation against future Governments coming in and overturning it or bringing in new legislation that rescinds some of the goals of the previous legislation.

I think that we are going about this in a robust way. The biodiversity strategy has been laid out. It informs the target setting, as does the advice that we have from the PAG, and the targets are set in secondary legislation. It is up to the Parliament to decide what goes through. A future Government that wants to rip up this bill or the biodiversity strategy would be scrutinised and held to account in doing that. That is parliamentary democracy—that would be my answer to that.

If there are suggestions on strengthening the language, that is what stages 2 and 3 are for, and I am happy to consider anything. However, I do not think that there is a particular risk with this bill in comparison with any other piece of legislation that we have ever passed in the Parliament. Legislation is always subject to change based on who is next in government.

We will find out.

It is important to say that we do not have that clarity from DEFRA. I want to bottom that out with DEFRA, because, as it stands, our assessment is that the provisions in regulation 9D do not permit individual sites in the site network to be adapted in the ways that might be required to mitigate the effects of climate change. They do not allow us to modify the boundaries of sites or to remove features from site citations. Nothing that has come from DEFRA has given us any confidence that we would have the ability to do that on the basis of regulation 9D. If we had that confidence, we would have taken a different view, but we have bottomed that out and we have no idea what DEFRA is doing in relation to that. In saying that, we are in communication with DEFRA and are asking it those questions directly.

This particular power would allow us to mitigate the effects of climate change in a responsive and dynamic way, modify the boundaries of sites, remove features from site citations and do everything else that I have set out as part of our ability to protect nature, habitats and species in an agile way.

The current regulations have no powers to remove certain features from the reasons for designating a site—that is the issue. The bill will give us the ability to do that and to be responsive to changes in the environment. The example that I have just given is a real-world example of how a site being designated as a European site freezes it in time; that designation was fine for then, but, 20 or 30 years on—whatever it might be—the forest is adapting to climate change, and adapting more generally, too. This is not a case of there being an invasive species; these are naturally occurring changes in the forest. That is a real-world example of where we could be quite fleet of foot in changing the designation of a site, instead of having to wait years to do that. After all, nature itself does not wait.

—but it is an indicator. Look at the fish species that we do not see in the more southern Scottish waters but that we see in Ms Wishart’s constituency—things that we are finding in different parts of Scotland. That is an indication that climate change is real. If we have the flexibility that part 2 of the bill gives us, we will be able to respond to it in an agile way.