Chamber and committees

Do you think there should be a reference to carbon in the bill?

I am eager to oblige, convener. I have a brief question for Olly Hughes. What percentage of tree planting that is carried out by the Gresham House fund in Scotland is native species?

On community wealth building and the just transition, I am interested to hear from each of our witnesses about the extent to which the market is delivering multiple benefits in terms of communities, nature restoration and making Scotland more resilient to climate change.

Mr Hughes, in response to Mark Ruskell’s questions, you talked about the Gresham House fund making “good strides”. You also mentioned job creation. How many jobs have been created in rural Scotland as a result of Gresham House funds’ forestry activities in Scotland?

Thank you. The committee would welcome more information on that.

I will go back to my earlier question about native tree planting. I think that the figure that you gave for native broadleaf was 20 per cent. I have dug out some correspondence that the bank gave to the committee previously. It expected that 46 per cent of the planting would be native broadleaf, which would exclude the open-ground figure of 20 per cent that you gave. Are you on track to meet that expectation? I am not sure whether that is a target or an expectation, but is that going as well as it should be going?

Okay. Thank you, Mr Hughes. I would certainly welcome further correspondence to clarify some of the figures. I do not know whether it is just me, convener, but I did not fully follow all of that.

I have a couple more brief questions for the rest of the panel. I want to turn back to carbon credits and to get an understanding of how carbon buyers use them. Are carbon credits being used as part of corporate offsetting strategies or are they being traded or retained as commodities? What standards are being applied to ensure that offsets are being used responsibly—for example, to offset genuinely unavoidable emissions?

I am not sure who would like to go first on that.

To ask the Scottish Government what support it can provide to any local authorities that are struggling to meet the rising costs associated with providing school transport, so that children and young people can travel to school in a safe, efficient and affordable manner. (S6O-03238)

Notwithstanding the funding that the cabinet secretary has mentioned, and without giving away our exact ages, the Education (Scotland) Act 1980 is older than me and the cabinet secretary and many people believe that the act’s minimum home-to-school provisions are no longer fit for purpose.

Changing legislation takes time, but my young Lanarkshire constituents and their families need action right now. I am pleased that Jim Fairlie, who has ministerial responsibility for buses, has agreed to meet locally with me and some of those families. Many children now face difficult walks of up to six miles a day between home and school, which is not fair on those children, so we need to find solutions. Will the cabinet secretary agree to take part in those talks?

As a member of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, I am pleased to be speaking in the debate. I associate myself with the remarks of the committee’s convener, Edward Mountain. Other committees have been involved, and I record my thanks to our clerks, the Scottish Parliament information centre’s team and the many witnesses who informed our evidence. We had 10 evidence sessions and we made 80 recommendations.

Although we are having a robust debate about the bill today, there is a lot of passion and a lot of agreement. We need to become a more circular Scotland—no one disputes that—so we need to harness that passion.

We have been hearing from people in our communities and the local authorities in our areas about how we can make things better. Sarah Boyack, my Labour colleague, is absolutely correct to say that stage 2 will be crucial. I believe that the minister’s door is open for work with colleagues and people across the country; we all have to co-operate.

I hope that Ben Macpherson finds someone to repair his iron by the end of the debate. I did a wee Google search and have sent him a link to a business in Edinburgh that might be able to help. It is a matter of knowing where to go—

Absolutely. We have demonstrated that on the record in the Parliament, just now.

I think that we all agree that the bill is necessary: we need legislation. In 2022, Keep Scotland Beautiful declared a litter emergency in Scotland. That there is an emergency is undeniable. Despite years of campaigning, with people doing litter picks and trying their best to recycle, we still have a massive problem with litter. That is a symptom of a much wider issue and of our reliance on a linear economic model, in which we continually extract new resources to make new things and new products, then throw them away before starting all over again. We have to break that cycle.

There have been serious impacts here in Scotland and around the world. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has data to show that, between 2018 and 2022, around 100 tonnes of plastic packaging waste was shipped from Scotland overseas every single month. That is a real scandal.

The question is what the bill can do to tackle that. Other members have expressed concern that there is too much focus on the recycling part of the waste hierarchy. I believe that the minister will take that in the spirit in which it is intended. We need to look at other aspects of the waste hierarchy.

We have heard that there is a lot of passion for reuse and repair. The example that I will touch on today—people who know me know that I talk about this a lot—is reusable nappies. We need to make it easier for people who want to do the right thing environmentally but are worried about cost and other barriers. In the spirit of that collaborative approach, the minister and I are doing a fact-finding visit next week to North Ayrshire Council. Since 2019, it has been leading the way not only in Scotland, but in the UK. Third sector partners are involved with the local authority. The approach was brought in by my Labour colleague Councillor Joe Cullinane and has been continued by a Scottish National Party Administration. It is the kind of thing that can help all our constituents and it is cost neutral for the local authority. I am considering lodging amendments at stage 2 to see how we can do that with our local authorities—not by telling them what to do but by enabling them and giving them the confidence to work in that way.

Another big issue in the bill is food: we need to do much more to reduce food waste. We have the scandal of ever-increasing food poverty and food insecurity while we are also seeing food waste increasing.