Chamber and committees

It is important that we recognise and reference that, as well as having thriving communities, people as individuals are important. If there are views to the contrary, I am more than happy to hear them, but it is about communities and the individuals who live in them. It is important to identify that.

National parks have a lot of experience in working in that area, because the vast majority of the land across our national parks is in private ownership anyway. They have a strong record of collaboration, working with landowners and land managers. The national park plans themselves have to be widely consulted on, and that engagement with all relevant people is really important. Another important point to remember is that the regional land use partnerships are about bringing together the public bodies. Each of our national parks has a regional land use partnership and framework, which is about bringing together all the different representatives to drive forward the priorities for the area. It is not necessarily about having teeth but about fostering collaborative working and trying to ensure that everybody is pushing in the same direction.

All that I am saying right now is that that could well be the case but it is something that we need to consult on and look at. If we are doing that with local place plans, national park plans are potentially a part of that, but more detail would follow in the guidance and the regulations that we would introduce on the back of that bill.

Yes, absolutely. You would hope that that could also act as a deterrent. If people knew that they could be given a fixed-penalty notice, that could deter behaviour that we would not want to see in our national parks. The role of rangers in educating and having those conversations with people will still be critical, but the fixed-penalty notices are an additional tool that they can use.

I certainly do not think so. The rangers have an important role in the national parks. The fixed-penalty notice regime would just give them that extra tool. Enforcement can be cumbersome for the national parks now because of the route that they have to take of referring things to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. I do not see the addition of fixed-penalty notices as changing the role of rangers. I think that it gives them an additional tool for tackling some of the issues that they can experience on the ground.

No doubt you will have heard evidence from the national parks about the training that their rangers go through. That is critical. Enforcement is always a last resort—you do not want it to be the starting point. However, it is important that they have that ability rather than having the system that operates at the moment, which I do not think gives them the ability to tackle some of the issues that they are seeing as effectively as they could.

Notwithstanding the time that the process took to designate our first two national parks in the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, which you outlined, I would say that the current process has been significant. I do not think that the Galloway National Park Association has been arguing that it has been a quick process. In fact, I remember meeting representatives of the association when I was first appointed as a minister, in 2018, and I note that it has been building its campaign over the intervening time.

In 2021, we set out that we were looking to establish a national park. We had a parliamentary debate in 2022, in which there was broad parliamentary support for establishing another national park, and many members were telling us to do that as quickly as possible and to designate more than one national park.

The process that was established was intended to be community led, and it was consulted on at various points, so it is not necessarily fair to suggest that it has been a rushed process. The steps that were taken at each stage to consult and to get the appraisal criteria right were all very important.

You have raised the really important point that, although the process to designate a park is clearly set out in the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000, the process of how to nominate is not outlined in the act at all. We had tried to develop and bring forward a process that would be built from the bottom up and that came from communities themselves.

To be perfectly honest, the whole purpose of approaching it in the way that we did, and the way that NatureScot went about its consultation, was not to go in with a fixed idea. We want the national park to be built by the communities in Galloway. As I also appreciate, however—and as was picked up in the Scottish Community Development Centre report—not having such an approach makes it harder for people to take a view. If people felt that they were against a national park, they were less likely to engage in other questions about what its shape could be or to consider alternative proposals. It is important to mention the Scottish Community Development Centre report, because it brings out some of those issues and challenges.

I did not want to go to any community and just say, “This is the model.” We would then have had accusations that we had come to impose something on people. It was a matter of getting a balance and saying to people, “Do you want this in your area? You can help to design it.” I absolutely appreciate that that approach comes with difficulties, but that was our reasoning for setting about things in that way.

There are probably quite a lot of lessons to be learned from the process. I do not think that all of them would require a legislative fix, but if the committee thinks that that is needed, I am more than happy to hear the committee’s view.

The independent assessment has made recommendations on the engagement process and how, if we should seek to engage again, we could improve on that. That is important—we need to take that into consideration.

As I outlined to Mark Ruskell, it has been beneficial to have the flexibility to design a process for the nominations. However, I am more than happy to take on board members’ views if they think that any particular areas need to be addressed.

I would be keen to hear more detailed views on which part of the process should be changed, because the process to get those nominations was very much designed to try to get that support.

Another organisation supported that nomination process and supported local groups in those areas in undertaking the wider consultation and engagement work to discuss the proposal. I would be keen to get clearer views on which part of the process should have changed or how we could have gone about it differently. As I said, the process was very much designed to take a bottom-up approach that did not impose the proposal on anyone.

It was important to say to communities across Scotland, “If this is something that you want in your area, come forward, engage and let us know,” rather than saying that the Government would choose an area and tell communities what would happen.

There is that wider piece, which relates to Mark Ruskell’s earlier point, about what a national park looks like and means, and how it can be different. It is not about having a one-size-fits-all approach across the country. There is flexibility to design something that suits local needs and to have better messaging around that.

The process that we have established over the past few years is about trying to get community support, but we must look back and see what lessons can be learned from it as well as from the reporting process.

To be fair, we all took pains to try to explain that. The Scottish Government did that. NatureScot launched the official consultation in November last year, and there were also three months of engagement prior to that to lay the groundwork and to clearly explain that the national park could fit around the needs of the area if that was something that the people of Galloway wanted to see.

I absolutely recognise the importance of agriculture and the dairy industry in the area. The park would have supported the key industries that exist in Galloway.

The engagement was very much part of the process, which takes me back to Mark Ruskell’s point about how to strike a balance between, on the one hand, going in with a clear idea of what the park could look like and, on the other, just telling people what will come to their area. You do not want to be top-down or to go in with an idea that says what you are going to implement, because people will accuse you of forcing something on them that they do not want.

I am more than happy to hear any views on that, but the approach throughout the whole process, starting when it was established, was to ensure that the park was something that communities and local people wanted to see in their area and that they could design it.

We have a number of recommendations from the Scottish Community Development Centre regarding improvements that could be made to the reporting process, as well as recommendations for the future that will be important for us to seriously consider in any steps that we take from here. I also want to hear members’ views of their experiences.