Chamber and committees

We have delivered the first phase of the £10 million islands resilience fund, which supports economic resilience and investment in our island communities. We are progressing our new national islands plan, which supports population retention and sustainable growth and ensures that islander voices are heard and understood across the Government.

We are committed to implementing the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, starting with the appointment of a new land and communities commissioner to support a fairer, more transparent and inclusive system of land ownership and use. We have started work on a rural renewal bill to enable economic growth in rural areas. As we heard in the earlier evidence session, we will support active farming and food production through direct payments.

Over the next four years, we will invest £110 million in peatland restoration in order to increase biodiversity, store carbon, strengthen resilience to wildfires, floods and drought, and support jobs in rural and island communities.

We are continuing to invest in forest and woodland expansion. This year, we have a woodland creation target of 12,000 hectares, and the target will increase annually until we reach 18,000 hectares by 2029-30. We are committed to achieving 21 per cent woodland cover in Scotland by 2032.

We are maintaining support for organisations that tackle rural mental ill health and youth loneliness. We will continue to support Scotland’s valuable fishing, seafood processing and coastal communities through the marine fund Scotland. We will take action to support wild salmon populations, consult on fisheries management measures for marine protected areas, support local food producers to strengthen food resilience, support sustainable agriculture, restore our peatlands and help rural businesses to grow.

We aim to ensure that rural and island areas remain vibrant places to live, work, invest in and retain young people. Over the coming year, we will continue to work closely with our community stakeholders, local government and this committee. Rural and island proofing is central to our approach, which will ensure that policy and investment decisions reflect the needs of Scotland’s diverse rural and island communities.

I look forward to questions on all the above issues and more.

Yesterday, Mr Fairlie and I had a really good round-table meeting with some of the organisations that gave evidence to the committee. Confor, the Woodland Trust and the Institute of Chartered Foresters were at the meeting. We had a very good discussion on their concerns about whether the change in structure would deter investment. I have asked my officials to reflect on some of the points that they made and to do some further work.

I have read last week’s Official Report. I have spoken to many people in the sector, and a lot of people have written to me about the issue. We have very stretching and ambitious woodland planting targets that will be fundamental to delivering our climate change plan and biodiversity strategy, as well as providing a huge economic growth opportunity for rural Scotland. I do not take any of those things lightly.

This is about outcomes. I need to be satisfied that, when I go back to the Cabinet or have discussions with the Cabinet Secretary for Public Sector Reform, I can justify whatever decision I make about the environmental body. I have my own three tests to meet, but I must also be able to say that, if we do not go down a certain route, we can still achieve good outcomes in relation to public sector reform and the sustainability of the public finances, and that what we are doing will improve economic outcomes, particularly for Scotland.

Mr Fairlie wants to come in. Are you happy that he does so, convener?

The people who were represented in the room said that they were fully on board with public sector reform. They saw opportunities for reform in forestry that would be helpful in that regard.

Effectively, I am voicing the thoughts that are in my head. I am not ready to make a decision on this yet. I do not think—

I am not sure where you are going with that. It will be down to my three tests, and that is where I must satisfy myself.

To be very serious about this, the outcomes are the most important thing. There is no point in doing something if it will have adverse outcomes. I need to reflect on the information that I am getting from lots of different people.

The public sector reform discussion is interesting. When you put forward proposals, you do so from a certain starting point. It has been interesting, because a lot of people have said that I should not include this particular body but that I should include this other one that I have not considered. The marine directorate was even mentioned. Some people asked why we were not removing the marine directorate from Government and putting it into the environmental body. That is why we must set out our initial position and have detailed conversations with those working in the sector and those affected by the functions of all those bodies. We cannot go into this with a fixed view; we must be able to listen.

That is absolutely not the case, because we have already provided that certainty in the rural support plan. That plan is in effect a framework that we will use to underpin what goes into the various tiers and also the other funding streams that land managers, farmers and crofters can apply to. We can be agile in shifting money around when we see more demand for one particular area and less demand for others—I can do that in year.

I cannot put every single thing that we are doing in the programme for government, or else it would end up being like a 1980s telephone book. There is not a specific bill or piece of legislation that we are taking forward in that regard, but the minister will be able to talk about some of the animal welfare issues that he is dealing with, such as farrowing crates. There are a number of things that are being taken forward, and the fact that they do not appear in the programme for government does not mean that they are not happening.

If the convener’s patience has not been stretched beyond belief, I can hand over to the minister.

The commitment in the climate change plan is to restore—more numbers—400,000 hectares of degraded peatland by 2040, which is a highly ambitious and highly exciting target. That will have dual advantages, because degraded peatland results in greenhouse gases leaking into the atmosphere, whereas, once it is rewetted and brought back into health, peatland sequesters a great deal of carbon. Therefore, peatland restoration almost provides a double bonus.

As the convener will remember, peatland restoration is one of the reasons why we could set our net zero target for 2045 rather than 2050, given the volume of degraded peatland that we are able to restore. We are probably one of the countries that have the most potential in that area.

We want to increase peatland restoration by 10 per cent each year up until 2030. We want to give that certainty, because, as has been alluded to, it takes a long time to bring degraded peatland back into health. The Government needs to set out its ambitions, and funding needs to follow those ambitions, so that there is certainty in recruiting the workforce and in training people who own and manage land to do that work on their landholding, whatever it might be.

Over the four-year period of the spending review, we are planning to invest £110 million in peatland restoration and £93 million on top of that in wider nature restoration. I am pleased to say that we exceeded our programme for government target last year. A lot of that was down to the amount of learning on the issue. The peatland action project has been innovative in the work that it has been doing.

I cannot remember exactly where it was, but I visited a project near Livingston that had restored peatland in a completely different way from traditional peatland restoration—the mechanics of how it had been done were completely different. The project was able to work really quickly and, within a year, degraded peatland had been restored to productive peatland that was sequestering and soaking up water. Innovations are taking place all the time.

Over the past year, we invested £28 million in restoring 10,000 hectares of peatland. We published the new peatland action skills plan and the peatland standard, and project agreements are in place for restoration projects covering more than 10,000 hectares, with partners managing that delivery.

We have a number of partners, but we want more—I am looking at the minister. There is so much capacity for those who manage land to carry out small-scale peatland restoration in a way that will make their communities more resilient to flooding. I am looking at the member for Angus North and Mearns in that regard. What is done upstream is so important in protecting our communities from flooding. Everyone is playing their part. For example, our national parks have been able to restore an incredible amount of peatland with the people they work with.

Peatland restoration provides an economic opportunity for rural Scotland. As the minister keeps pointing out, it also provides a way of diversifying income streams for farms and crofts. We need to share knowledge about how to do that, and those who have already carried out peatland restoration on their farms should communicate the benefits in relation to their practice or the outcomes that there have been.

I do not know whether the minister is allowed to come in on that point.

I understand why you are asking that question. It is the question that we are asking ourselves within Government. What areas require more capacity? How can we move capacity around to be able to service the needs of those who are interacting with the marine directorate?

The director general net zero is looking at the areas of corporate functions to see how we can work across other directorates under his remit to see whether we can deploy resources from other directorates where there is overcapacity.

During my time as energy minister, I found that there was quite a lot of churn of staff going through the marine directorate—the licensing operations team was a particular concern—because the knowledge and expertise that they had was very marketable. Offshore wind companies and others were recruiting and offering salary raises to those very experienced people. We made the point that this is a growth area in which people can have a long career, because of the amount of activity that is associated with marine spatial planning, for example. We were able to increase the capacity and put in apprenticeships, so that we could hothouse our own talent.

The director general net zero is looking across the whole portfolio at the head count that is associated with all the directorates. That exercise is happening now. I have alluded to the fact that the marine directorate is undertaking a five-year delivery planning exercise to feed into the decisions that the director general net zero will make on staffing and capacity. Everything that you have heard from stakeholders is feeding into that discussion.

I will hand over to the minister because, obviously, the day-to-day marine functions of the portfolio sit with him.

We are talking about the rural support plan, but your question goes a lot wider than that. In the second half of today’s session, we will come on to the budget and objectives of the whole climate action and rural affairs portfolio. There are schemes and funding streams within that portfolio that are outwith the support plan that Mr Fairlie is here to talk about. Some of those funding streams are available to leverage in private capital. We have seen that with the nature restoration fund and the funding associated with peatland restoration and woodland creation, for example. Those streams leverage in funding through sources of finance that are outwith Government.

In a challenging fiscal situation, we have to be agile and responsive to ways in which we can leverage in money that comes from outwith Government. Government money cannot achieve all of our objectives. With the climate change plan and the biodiversity strategy, we are at the early stages, globally, in looking at how we can leverage in finance from other areas. I have talked about that with the committee previously.