Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Official Report 678KB pdf

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Aquaculture Regulatory Review

Welcome back, everybody. Our next agenda item is consideration of the Scottish Government’s aquaculture regulatory review. I welcome to the meeting Professor Russel Griggs OBE, whose “A Review of the Aquaculture Regulatory Process in Scotland” and recommendations for change were the first stage of the review process. We have questions that will take us to about 10 past 12. I will kick off. On the basis of your engagement with the industry and communities, what are your views on the current relationship with stakeholders and the level of trust in the decision-making process?

In simple terms, on the basis of a number of factors, I would say that the situation is not very good. The industry has developed since 1970. It began as a little cottage industry, and it has grown, certainly in parts, into a sophisticated industry that requires sophisticated decision making. Over time, as the industry has become more complex, each of the partners involved has developed their own issues.

As I said in my report, it is the only review that I have done in which nobody—I mean nobody—has wanted to retain the status quo. The relationship between some of the stakeholders had reached a point at which it was not just about trust of organisations but trust of individuals inside organisations.

The issues relate to a load of things. Whether those things are true does not really matter, because they are perceived as being true. Therefore, I thought throughout the review that the one thing that we must do is put in place a system that tries to restore trust. Part of that is about making it robust enough for everybody’s voice to be heard in it. However, on the basis of it being a simple three-part process—the Government makes policy, regulators and planning authorities put that policy in place and industry and other stakeholders comply—the issue is how you change any part of that process.

I suspect that the easiest way to describe the strength of feeling is that, on a couple of occasions, the two civil servants who accompanied me in the review had to cover their ears because of some of the comments that were being made.

Obviously, you have years of experience of big industry and communities and so on, and you are well aware of the pressures on communities with regard to renewable energy in the south of Scotland. Is it a similar situation for communities where there are fish farms? Is there scope for it to improve, or do we need to start to make improvements now to ensure that communities and industries thrive?

That is a very big question, if I may say so. Let me try to answer that in parts. One of the challenges for all communities at the moment is in deciding what the voice of the community is. That is becoming more complex and more difficult as we go on. As you know, over the past six months, there has been a debate about second homes and people who do not live in communities for the whole year. Therefore, I suppose that you can now say that there is an economically active part of a community and an economically inactive part. The issue is about which voice should have the biggest say in community decisions—not just on renewables or, indeed, fish farms, but on a load of things.

From the work that I did on the review, it is clear that the “anti” voice in some places is very well funded and resourced, unlike the local voice, perhaps. Therefore, there is a need to bring some balance to that situation so that we understand that, when we are listening to voices, it is not the loudest voice that should get its way but the voice that speaks on the basis of evidence. There is no doubt that the communities that are involved in fish farming have benefited economically and that they will continue to do so, as they go forward.

11:15  

Some of the people who do not want fish farms come at the matter from a very different view, which is much more to do with their view of what rural life should be. It is interesting to note that that might not be the way of life that the people who have lived in a community for decades would put in place.

Do I think that communities get enough say in that process? No, I do not. That is why I recommend in my report that a social contract needs to be built into whatever we take forward, including figuring out how much the industry will pay to get licences, if that is what we want to call them. The greater part of that money must go back to the communities; they should not get just the jobs and the bits of infrastructure.

You mentioned some communities being well funded, but my issue is always about whether evidence on that is well founded. “Funding” and “founding” are two similar words that can drive a different outcome. Are there plans to put the right mechanisms in place, so that we have peer-reviewed evidence, rather than a polarised argument?

As you know, among my recommendations is that, in the process, there should be a scientific body that reviews all evidence. As I did the work and talked to about 90 organisations and to people, I saw an array of scientific evidence that would take you from one end of the spectrum, which says that there is nothing going on at all, to the other end, which says that the world is about to end. Therefore, we need somebody in the middle to judge that.

However, the point about scientific evidence is different to the point that you are making about communities. Because communities now comprise various types of people—including people who have lived in a place all their life and want to work, and people who have come to live there for different reasons—we need to strike a balance in listening to those voices. When I say that some parts of the communities are well resourced, I mean that, in a couple of communities that I looked at, the reporter who was gathering the evidence was ambushed by the bits of the community that did not want the fish farm, because they were well organised. The bits of the community that did want it were not well enough organised.

Therefore, there are two issues. There is the scientific evidence, which we need someone in the centre to look at. However, as we start to look at everything from fish farming to second homes and rural housing—on which Rachael Hamilton and I might exchange volubly in a minute—there is a much wider social debate to be had about how we deal with community input and whom we listen to. It is a very challenging subject; it is not easy. There are two bits. The scientific bit that I looked at is straightforward, but the social impacts of how we change our communities, or how we regard their changing nature, is a different issue.

Professor Griggs, I am joining the meeting virtually and am very sorry that I cannot be with you in person today. I was interested to hear your perspective on community. I thank you for doing all that work.

I have been speaking to coastal communities as well—I speak to people who earn their living by catching crabs and lobsters. The coast is where people in those communities swim, where their children play and where tourists, who also bring money into the local economy, come to enjoy diving and water sports. It is interesting that you were talking about who the community is. Some people do not want fish farms even if they would receive payment, because many of them would see that as being bought off.

You have recommended a single consenting document, but that seems not to include a mechanism for communities to reject the imposition of a new or expanded industrial fish farm in their local waters. I would like to hear your thoughts on the principle that coastal communities should have a say in where fish farms are located.

I might not have put it properly, but, in my recommendation on who gets involved in consenting process, the community would have to be statutorily consulted. As I said in one of my previous answers, the community must decide what that voice is. We have to have a long debate about how we will do that, but I believe strongly in the community giving a view. The challenge with communities is how we listen to the different voices within them.

I spoke to many coastal community groups as I went through my work on the review. The way that fish farming is developing, especially fin-fish farming—we will put shellfish and seaweed farming to one side—means that it will become much bigger but much less intrusive in coastal waters because most of it will be done on land and it will probably only be in their last year or so that fish are out in the sea.

I say in my report that I had not visited a fish farm for 20 years until I started to undertake the review. My goodness—was I shocked when I visited some of the new fish farms. They are sophisticated pieces of technical infrastructure in which the majority of the fishes’ development is done on land and only the last part is done in the sea. That is very different from the traditional fin-fish farms that were set up from the 1970s onwards. I guess that, with the wonderful view of hindsight, the industry would accept that not all those farms are in optimal positions. That is why one of the other recommendations in the report is that we look at where fish farms are currently and decide for the future whether they are in the right places.

Thank you for that reassurance. In conversation with coastal communities, I have been told that they feel that they would not be recognised. It is good to hear that you are concerned about them and want to ensure that they have a voice.

Let us be precise: the community should have a voice, but it is for the community to decide what that voice says.

Good morning, Professor Griggs. What are your main observations on the key issues with the current regulatory framework?

I have been doing this for a while. If you examine any planning or development process, you will see that there is no doubt that the best way to do things is to start before you do them. If you want to do something, get all the interested parties round the table before you even get to filling in the application form so that we can decide what are the issues with which we will all have to deal as we go forward. That has the sexy name of multilateral pre-consultation—which it is not, but that is what it is called. It has worked effectively in relation to, for example, offshore wind.

The way that the matter is approached at the moment is to leave everybody to do their own bits. That does not work because they do them sequentially. They do not have to do that, but they tend to. The developer can talk to only one of the interested partners until he wants to talk to another one.

I will give you my view about the only way such processes can work, especially when they are complicated, as the one in question is, and especially when they do not happen often. Aquaculture applications do not come to planners, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency or anybody else every day of the week; there are probably three or four a year. Therefore, it is not something on which people are building up expertise because they do it all the time.

The best way to approach the matter at the beginning is for the developer to get everybody round a table in a managed format to say what they want and to ask what issues will need to be resolved, whether they can be resolved and what will have to be done to resolve them. Developers will tell you that having a “no” as early as they can get it is as good as having a “yes” as early as they can get it.

Like many other bits of the planning system, aquaculture planning is not joined up. It is not, however, difficult; it is not rocket science to join it up. It is challenging and needs more work, but its being joined up would get much better end results, such that when the application goes in, all the parties round the table are more or less agreed on it. Therefore, applications should go through the system more smoothly; at the moment, there is a lot of back and forth.

If you are interested, I have some numbers that show that all parts of the system are way over their statutory obligations on how long it should take to do things, so they are missing by miles—not just by the odd day—the targets that they have set themselves. That is because we take a piecemeal approach. Somebody will go and speak to the planning department, then to SEPA and then to NatureScot, and then NatureScot might speak to SEPA or the planning department, so there is no continuity or cohesion within the process.

You touched on communication. When it comes to investors and stakeholders, are you saying that it might not necessarily be about the communication that people bring forward but about their understanding of the framework. Maybe there is misunderstanding or miscommunication.

That is right. For example, SEPA might have a scientific view on one thing, but the developer might have a different scientific view. We need to take the two scientific views together and find out what the right one is: we need there to be a party that does that.

It is about people talking to each other. It is simple stuff. It is just about people sitting around a table, discussing a subject, looking at the pros and cons and figuring out what the ways of taking things forward are and where the challenges are—where we have to do more work—and where things are quite simple.

The poor planning authorities, for whom I feel sorry in all of this, were given that to do some years ago. However, aquaculture is not on land but in water. In planning terms, what goes on in water is very different to what goes on on land. Some planning authorities have, going back, had relevant resources and expertise, but that is going away as time goes on, because people retire.

It is not that any of the bodies is doing its job badly, if I can put it that way, but that they would do a lot better if they talked to each other and communicated around the same table.

You mentioned the situation with resources and expertise. Is that due to there being a lack of office holders, or are there other issues?

Yes and no. I am not being difficult. As time has gone on, the people who specialise in, for example, offshore fish farming retire. They are not necessarily replaced, because that kind of planning is often not done in a council’s planning department. The council will probably recruit somebody who has a more general knowledge of planning, rather than somebody to do that type of work, who might sit at their desk for a year before something came up under their expertise. There is a mixture of it not being done often enough, so that the appropriate level of expertise is not built up, and many experts, of whom there are still some about, retiring, but people are not coming in to replace them.

In my report, I have tried hard to say that I am not criticising the planning officials: it is not their fault. It is just to do with the way that the system works, which is why that work needs to be taken out.

As the former chief executive of SEPA said to me in an interview, the applications are very important, because they generally relate to tens of millions of pounds of investment. To let some junior member of staff deal with them in a non-cohesive way does not seem sensible, so we need to lift them out and to make sure that the more experienced and knowledgeable people do that. They are very different and there are not many of them.

Is there potential reluctance among big companies to invest because of uncertainty? We have heard that there is a lack of resources not just in planning but in technical expertise, when it comes to our marine environment. We saw that in relation to the Clyde cod boxes, for example. Is that a big constraint, and does it need to be addressed, given the importance of salmon farming to our economy? Should the Government step up to the mark and provide more funding to resource the process better?

The industry would do that. My recommendations say that, if we were to move to a system that is similar to that in Norway, in which people buy a licence for 25 years, for which they pay a lot of money up front, a portion of that money would go back into resourcing the process. One of our challenges, at the moment, is that we need to pay for that—and the industry is happy to pay.

In direct answer to your question, if the situation went on for some time and did not get any better, the two Norwegian and one Faroese big international businesses would start to look at how they do things, because they are investing a lot of money. Recently, the Faroese business wanted to invest £700 million, I think, in the Scottish aquaculture industry over the coming years.

The businesses are not running away—I am not saying that at all. They want to build the industry here, but we need to construct it in a better way. We are all parties in this. This goes back to the point that people in communities make; it is not just about the industry. The industry, the community, the regulators and, indeed, the Government all have a say in what goes on in what is becoming a much more complicated area.

11:30  

Of course, the group that we have not talked about is the customers who buy the salmon, mussels and so on. The customers are imposing more environmental restraints on how they want the industry to produce. Fish farms already have long lists of audits and so on that they must complete.

However, I think that there is quite a straightforward way out of that. The industry is up for making more investment—it wants to grow. At the moment, the situation is complicated and frustrating, which is the message that we need to take away. As was eloquently said at the beginning, we need to restore trust between all the parties. They do not have to like each other, but we have to restore trust between them to ensure that, as they develop and consider each application that comes in, they take a collegiate approach to the process of consolidating or, perhaps, shutting down farms that were not in the best locations in the first place.

You have just touched on the fact that the aquaculture industry has a target to double production by 2030 through expansion of open-net salmon farming. However, I have been talking to concerned environmental non-governmental organisations and communities who stress that there is no evidence, from Scotland or anywhere else, that open-net farming is or can be environmentally sustainable. On the contrary, we know that effluent from open-cage farms is discharged and dumped untreated into the sea; toxic chemicals that are used to kill sea lice are also discharged into our marine environment; and tens f thousands of wild wrasse are taken from the wild to clean the sea lice off the salmon and are then killed. That is to say nothing of the emissions from importing salmon feed from across the world or the impact on wild salmon populations here due to sea lice, fish escapees and disease.

Do you recognise the fact that the industry’s environmental impacts are not sustainable? I use the word in an environmental rather than the economic sense. Have you seen any evidence to suggest that open-net farms could reduce pollution, sea lice and fish escapees to close to zero?

I will go back to what I said earlier. A great deal of the science is based on how salmon farming was, not on how it is going to be and how it is now. We need to build up a scientific base that looks at where the industry is going, which is that it is very sophisticated and technical; a lot of it is done on land and, eventually, only a small part of it will be done offshore. When we have done that—I am not a scientist—we will find that many of the issues that have been raised, although they will not totally go away, might well be manageable and allow us to look forward. If I may put it this way, I do not think that it is an insoluble problem.

Bringing it all on to the land is not a sensible way to go at all, because the parts of the world that are looking at doing that have dreadful problems with disease and their carbon footprint is astronomical. In all honesty, the reason why Scottish salmon does well and has a premium is because part of its life is spent in Scottish waters. If you grew salmon in a big concrete tank, there would be no advantage in Scottish salmon over salmon that had been bred near the M25. Therefore, we must be careful about that, because that might be the end of the Scottish salmon industry.

Perhaps I am less worried than you are about where we are because, given where the industry wants to go technically over the next decade—with regard to how it controls pollution and does a great deal more on land with very sophisticated production units that produce salmon up to a certain size before they are moved offshore—a great deal of what you are talking about, although it will not be totally eradicated, will reach a point where it is environmentally manageable.

You have alluded to how sophisticated and technical modern-day salmon farming already is. A key recommendation of the review was that there should be a single consenting process. Can you give examples of what lessons we can take from the Norwegian one-stop-shop approach? Can you give us an example of what the Norwegians do that we do not do? Will you expand on how you see the new process working in practice and say who should take overall responsibility?

The Norwegian one-stop shop is quite interesting because it is not really a one-stop shop; it is a one-person shop. That person takes the application in and then speaks to all the other people who he needs to speak to. That model is great from a developer’s point of view, because the application is passed to one person and they deal with it, but that person brings in all the other parts of the Norwegian Government and regulatory system that they need to, and that means that the developer gets it back in, say, one form.

In my report, I said that the single consenting approach needs to be managed. The role would logically be placed in part of Marine Scotland, which would be tasked with taking applications as they came in and gathering local planners and regulators to consider each application as it came in. That would make it a much more managed process, because one person would be in charge, but it would not prevent all the other parties from doing what they needed to.

In my view, that would be slightly better than the Norwegian process, because the application would not disappear into a system somewhere, and the process would be managed with all parties involved working together. Sitting round the same table is exactly what the regulators and industry want to do.

The single consenting document comes from all the people involved, including the community, sitting round a table and discussing what will be done. That is important for two reasons. First, when something is consented, it is important that people understand what has been consented, what can be changed and what cannot be changed without going back through the loop. The document is not only about getting the application through, but about telling the developer, the community and regulators what has been agreed. As technology and science advance, it will allow those involved to move forward without coming back through the loop, but it will also set out the things that they will have to come back and ask about if they want to change. That would give more certainty and clarity, not only to the developer but to the planning authority and regulator, about what has been agreed.

I envisage that a new part of Marine Scotland would take on that role. To be slightly flippant, quite strange people would need to be put into that. They would need to be an interesting mix in that they need to really understand the aquaculture industry—it cannot just be someone who does the job on an odd day, as Karen Adam said—and they need to have that wonderful ability to understand rural communities. More than anything, rural communities worry about somebody 250 miles away making decisions for them and deciding something that they do not want to happen. Therefore, whoever manages the process has to be clever and understand rural communities. It will be their job to ensure that all parts of the process work.

There is no disagreement about the single consenting process, but the clear message that comes back from everyone is that whoever manages it has to be an expert in communities and in the aquaculture industry. There are not many people like that about, but I am content that they exist. They would gather all the people round the table. The model is similar to the Norwegian one, but I think that it would be slightly better.

I will just say that this applies not just to rural communities but to island communities.

Indeed.

I have a quick supplementary question on your point about bringing everybody together in a one-stop shop. In your introduction, you said that one side of the argument is more organised than the other. Could it potentially stifle the growth of the industry in Scotland if one side got more organised through that one-stop shop? I am sorry to use the phrase that you challenged; it is not a one-stop shop.

No, I do not think so, because part of the role of the person who is sitting in the middle—the ringmaster, shall we call them—is to ensure that the right voice of the community is heard, and they would do that by going out into the community. The convener knows that, at the moment, I spend all my life finding out what communities think and, although that is challenging, there are ways to find out what a community’s proper voice is on a subject. However, we do not do that well enough on aquaculture. In the future, there will be a lot of community engagement and consultation at the outset to find out what the correct voice is, if that is the right way to put it. I do not think that it will be about whoever turns up and makes the loudest noise; it will be about the benefits for and the impact on the community, and they will be explained clearly.

Wind farm operators probably do a lot better now at consulting communities than they did 10 or 15 years ago, and the process with aquaculture could be done in a similar vein. It is about good management, which is why it is critical that the person who manages the applications understands communities.

Thank you for coming along, Professor Griggs. I have listened very closely to what you have said. I live on an island and represent Argyll and Bute, and I am struck by the differing views from across the community. You and the convener were absolutely right when you said that there needs to be a person who can listen to both sides and restore trust.

Over the past year, we have taken evidence on what happens in our seas. You made the point that water is different to land, and many of my constituents on the industry side as well as those in the community and environmental NGOs have said that, too. I have been trying to understand how the flows of water impact fish farms and the cumulative effect of that. I would also like to know how the different planning authorities link together. Can you expand a bit on those issues?

That is an interesting point for a number of reasons.

My goodness. More papers have been written on the issue than on anything else—I have books on the topic—but nobody is gathering together all the science to give an opinion on it. There is a debate about how much of it is a local issue and how much is a national one, and we do not know, to be perfectly honest. We could take the view of the wild salmon body or go in other various directions, but all we know is that fish farming is one of 11 things that could have impacted on wild salmon and, on a bad day, the figures show that it has had an impact up to a level of only about 10 per cent, so we need to understand what impact the other 10 things are having.

It comes back to having somebody or something that takes all the science and evidence and gives advice. I do not understand all the flows that you are talking about—I am not a scientist and that is not my job—but somebody needs to. As it happens, areas of the west coast of Scotland have flows that are particular to that coastline and cannot be seen anywhere else, so should those areas be treated differently from other parts? The science is critical to ensure that we understand the situation better.

Each coastal community, rightly, goes away, does its own bit of work and comes up with data, but every time that happens, there will be three other studies that show something slightly different. We need a body that brings all the scientific data together so that we can understand it. The way in which water flows is interesting. Some years ago, in another part of my life, we had the wonderful news that we would do everything by wave energy—that is fine, but it depends on the wave. A lot of science is still needed.

You raised a point about how the technology is changing and how that can perhaps be made more obvious and more accessible.

11:45  

It is changing. We visited a new plant in Oban. I think that a very clever and positive thing is going to be done there: it is going to be turned into a visitor centre, so that locals and visitors can visit it to see how it all works. That is quite interesting.

I hear what is said about coastal communities. As you would when doing this, I spend a lot of time with people on rigid inflatable boats, going out into the ocean. When such people are not driving people such as me about the ocean, they drive a lot of tourists about, and they have a different view. They say that fish farming is very positive and that, in general, the tourists are interested in what is going on and how it is done, although there will always be some who are not. The industry should make things much more visible and transparent so that people can go and see what is happening. I think that I said in the report that the industry has not done a great job over the years of selling itself or how it does things to the wider community.

You have made an important and clear point. We have seen that approach in the way that wind farms have operated and with the whisky distilleries in my constituency sharing their technology and how things have changed. That is helpful.

Should I move on to the other fish types, convener?

Yes—but briefly, please.

We have talked about fin fish, but there are also connections with shellfish and seaweed. What are your thoughts on those industries?

I think that they are different. The fin-fish business is now a very sophisticated and heavily invested in international business. It is interesting that our shellfish sector is starting to grow a bit more, because a lot of the bigger companies in Orkney are buying shellfish farms on the islands to give them some scale. The challenge in the shellfish sector is that there is not the margin in it that there is in salmon farming to give people the opportunity to invest in sophisticated technology to take it forward.

There are issues for the shellfish sector, but they are not great issues. It could expand but, if we consider where it has gone and compare it with the fin-fish sector over the past 10 or 15 years, we do not see the same technological growth. I am not saying that it has not changed, but it has not changed to the same degree. Until it gets to the point at which it can charge a price point that is similar to that in the fin-fish sector, it will not make the margin for that. That is simply a commercial fact of life.

I find seaweed fascinating. It is as though people are still klondiking for gold out there—not just in respect of how they do it, but in respect of what all the end uses are. We have to remember that we are talking about a huge scale. I think that I said in my report—I apologise if I misremember the number—that, to get 1,000 tonnes of wet seaweed farmed, you need a farm of 7km by 5km. That is a huge bit of ocean. That is because seaweed is farmed flat. It does not go down; it is entwined on bits of horizontal rope. The structure of that means that it needs to take up such areas.

With seaweed, I do not think that there will be any constraints other than sea hazards. I know that a number of people have raised the issue of where the fishermen will go if something that is 7km by 5km is sitting near one of the islands and how they will get round that. That is more of a practical issue. However, if you speak to the people in the seaweed industry, you will find that they want it to grow, but they are not talking about astronomic numbers yet, until they have figured out what to do. There is a long way to go in the seaweed sector before any of us round this table can decide what it will look like and what we would want to do in respect of consenting to help it on the way.

I will always remember my trip to the seaweed farm, because I was in a force 8 gale out in the middle of the Atlantic, so it was quite choppy.

We might be able to look forward to something of that order in September. Let us hope that the visit is not delayed any further into the autumn.

How might the new regulatory framework improve the reduction in sea lice infestations, decrease the numbers of fish that are dying and maintain the genetic integrity of wild salmon? What are your thoughts on how the Scottish Government responded to the recommendations that the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee made in session 5? How will the welfare issues improve with a single consenting process for new applications, as is suggested in your review?

The key point in my recommendations is the bit before the single consenting process, which is the creation of a framework.

When lawyers go to court, they know what they can and cannot do because it is all tied up in case law. When we drive our cars, we do so within a framework of rules and regulations. That is put in place before I want to take and pass my driving test. Currently, we do not have a framework for how we operate fish farming or aquaculture in Scotland. That is why we need a framework before the consenting process. In the framework, we would set targets over a 10-year period not only for the volume of fish that we could farm—we would have to put some environmental constraints around that—but on sea lice and a host of other things that are listed in my report. That is the Government’s job, not the regulator’s job, because that is policy.

The framework would say that we want to have a fish farming industry but that we understand that it has challenges. It would set out the constraints that we will put round the industry. That would make a single consenting process much easier, because, when an application was submitted, the authorities would look at the framework and determine whether it complied with the framework. If it did not, the applicants would have a lot of work to do.

That is why I clearly said in my report that there should be a three-stage process. You need the framework before you get to the consenting process. If you just put the consenting process in place without the framework, we will still be wandering around looking at millions of bits of science because we are arguing about them. The framework would decide what was the good and bad science on sea lice and other issues, so that it could include the good science.

The way that the industry is going technically will reduce many of the issues that have been talked about in the meeting. All the stuff—I am using a technical term—goes on in sea water at the moment. If you can cut down the amount of time that the salmon have to be in sea water, that will greatly reduce the issues. As part of the framework—the industry is up for this as well—we should set targets for how long salmon should spend at sea. Currently, that is fairly open ended—it can be two to three years. The industry would like to get that down to one year. That will take some time and a bit more sophistication to address but it is getting there rapidly. That will address some of your points, Rachael. It will reduce the number of sea lice and the amount of chemicals that we need to put into the water.

I do not know whether that will be perfect—we will need to follow the science—but the way that the industry is going technically will reduce much of what currently happens. I return to the point that, when it comes to the fin-fish sector—forget the other two for a minute—we must stop looking behind us and look ahead, because the industry is developing technically and in how it works. We have to make decisions on that basis, not on the basis of what happened 20, 15 or even five years ago. If we do that, we will start to get a different perspective. That will still not stop some people not wanting the industry, but that is a different view; that has nothing to do with me. However, if you look forward, the risks that have been identified over the past years will lessen because of how we approach fish farming.

I cannot comment on the bit of work that the Government has done. It was the Government’s choice to do it. I was asked to do my piece of work and I have done it.

I will ask a quick question on the framework itself. My understanding is that it will take a considerable amount of time to be produced. In the meantime, what are your observations on some of the issues in the industry that I have spoken about? Should priorities or technology be put in place before the framework?

That is a very good question. If I am honest, I would be pushing harder in relation to the time that it takes to get the framework in place, because it is very important. However, if we are agreed that there will be a framework—we all seem to be agreed on that—I would hope that, as we start to get applications in and re-evaluate them, we will start to look at what the framework might look like in the future. In many ways, doing one or two applications might help us to form a better framework, because we will take some of those decisions early on. However, we will still have to address things such as the scientific evidence and so on and bring that together.

I have some sympathy with the point of view that things should be done quicker. However, given that we now have a roadway and a direction of travel, I hope that, as the applications come in, what goes on out there will perhaps help to get things to where we want them to be a bit quicker.

I will bring in Mercedes Villalba to ask a quick supplementary question before we move on to the next theme.

My question is at a slight tangent, but, as we were talking about welfare issues and sea lice, I thought that it might be a good moment to bring up wrasse fisheries.

As I understand it, the remit of the report was to review the operation of the regulatory framework for aquaculture from the perspective of other users of the shared marine environment, including wild fisheries. Wrasse fisheries are wild fisheries, and they are entirely economically interdependent with aquaculture. Will you talk the committee through your rationale for not considering that as part of your report?

I did consider that as part of my report; we did speak to wrasse fisheries. I suppose that that goes back to Rachael Hamilton’s point. When we come to design the framework, we have to put of all that into the pot to decide what we can do. There is a list of things that we would start to consider, and the impact on wild fish, wrasse and everything else would be part of that.

Although Mercedes Villalba might well be right that I did not specifically mention that aspect in my report, it is not that I thought that that was unimportant. As we start to get all the experts round the table to look at what all the issues are, I am sure that that will be one of the issues that will come forward and that we will want to put in it. I am therefore not disregarding that aspect, if I can put it that way.

That is reassuring.

In relation to wild wrasse fishery, would it be appropriate to introduce stock assessments or limits on catches, given that we are getting reports of extreme declines in wrasse populations?

I have no idea; I do not know. I could perhaps do with a good scientist sitting beside me to answer that. Part of the challenge is that we need to go away to look at not only where we need to make the science cohere but where there are gaps in the science. If there are gaps in the science, we need to commission people to go away to do the scientific work to fill in the holes.

The point that I am angling at—excuse the pun—is that fisheries management plans are required for other species. Therefore, would it not make sense to bring in something for wrasse that is similar to what has been adopted elsewhere in the UK?

Pass.

Okay. No problem.

Have you covered your second question?

Those questions came under theme 3. Do you want me to move on to theme 4?

Yes, please move on to your next question.

Okay—sorry. I will keep it brief.

The precautionary principle is enshrined in Scots law through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. How relevant is that principle to decision making about environmental harm that is caused by salmon farming?

The precautionary principle is a fascinating subject; we could spend all day discussing it. It operates well when the person who is deciding on what a precaution is understands what they are talking about in relation to a particular sector and a specific technology. When a person does not know anything about that, sadly, the precautionary principle generally leads people to take no risk at all, because that is what people do. That is why we have the adaptive principle, which sits somewhere in the middle.

My view is that, if the precautionary principle is put in place by people who understand what they are doing and make a decision that is based on knowledge, understanding, science and so on, it is fine. From speaking to a lot of people when I was doing my work, I would say that the challenge with the precautionary principle is that, if people do not know anything about the issue, it tends to put them at the no-risk end of the spectrum. That is not where they should be, because the precautionary principle is supposed to make people take good decisions on the basis of good knowledge. If they do not have that good knowledge, it is very difficult to make those good decisions. I hope that that answers your question.

12:00  

Thank you. Does anyone else want to come in on theme 4? If not, I can ask my question on theme 5.

We will carry on, because we are very short of time.

Professor Griggs, you spoke a little about seaweed earlier. I find seaweed absolutely fascinating and quite exciting. Although you probably know all this, for the record and for anybody who is watching this meeting, seaweed can be used for human food consumption, animal feed, biofuel, fertiliser, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, biomaterials for packaging and, in the form of carbon sequestration, for the mitigation of climate change.

I have an interest in seawood and have been looking into it because one of the local authorities in my constituency commissioned a consultancy company to look at whether seaweed could be a financially viable business, and it recommended that it absolutely is viable for commercial cultivation.

However, you have spoken about the possible clash of interests. We are looking at how things are for the seascape at the moment; when it comes to diversification into other areas, do you think that there is space for commercial cultivation of seaweed? Is there anything that a potential seaweed sector could learn from the fin-fish sector with regard to regulations?

I will try to answer your question sensibly. You mentioned that there is an opportunity but also a challenge. Seaweed can be used for a whole host of things, so trying to find the target market has always been a challenge. If the seaweed sector is to develop, it needs to do what the fin-fish sector did. Businesses need to focus on finding their advantage in relation to their location and what they can sell. Once they figure that out, they can develop.

I think that the spatial challenges with seaweed are quite significant. Until we come up with a different way of creating seaweed technologically, we will still have that spatial issue. At the moment, the method is simply putting a bit of seaweed around a rope and allowing it to grow. The other challenge is that, although businesses might produce 1,000 tonnes of wet seaweed, once it is dried, the quantities are reduced.

Like you, Ms Adam, I am very positive about seaweed, but it still has a long journey to make, in a technological sense and in figuring out the best markets and the best type of seaweed that can grow in Scottish waters, because, as was mentioned earlier, that is also to do with water flow. However, you are quite right that that plethora of possible end uses for seaweed is pulling the sector on and on.

I will touch briefly on spatial planning. You referred to seaweed, but we also have to consider inshore fisheries with mobile and static gear, as well as renewables and cockle and mussel fisheries. As one of the starting points, do we need to look at the whole spatial planning issue and the pressures that all those different sectors could bring to our inshore marine environment?

Yes, we do. Indeed, as I have mentioned in the report, each council is now supposed to produce a marine plan. From what I saw when I was going round, not many have done so, because it is quite challenging and doing so is not without its issues. I think that Orkney and Shetland have plans, but aquaculture and marine issues are very important in a lot of the other council areas, and the councils still have to do that work.

If we want to do that work, the vehicle for that is already there. Again, it comes back to resource and who the councils would get to do the work, because it is not easy. However, it is not for me to say how you would mix that in with what is already being done with regard to spatial planning on land.

I agree with you entirely, convener. In addition, once we put wave power—which I was talking about earlier—into the mix, it becomes much more complicated. We could end up with a situation in which the waters around our coast are totally unapproachable by anybody. We have to integrate marine planning with the work of local authorities, which were given the task of producing marine plans some time ago.

Thank you. We have touched on resources, which naturally leads us to finance. Alasdair Allan has some questions on that.

Are you able to offer a view on any potential additional costs or benefits of the new process as it is set out in your recommendations and on the consenting process? Where might the balance of the costs and benefits lie between the various parties involved?

It is quite interesting. There is no doubt—I have made it quite clear—that what I am recommending will cost money; it will not be a cost-neutral exercise. All parties have agreed that we need to take this approach, namely that the industry will pay a licence fee—for however long, whether we move to a Norwegian model whereby people pay a lot of money for 25 years or we adapt that on the basis of what we want to do—and that a portion of that will be allocated to resources to manage the system. That is not just for Marine Scotland, which will manage all of that, but for each local authority.

The conversation that we had with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities on the costings was interesting, because, uniquely, it thinks that each local authority should decide how to deal with the process in its area—that there should not be a national policy, if I can put it that way, because some local authorities will want to keep the process in-house, some might want to contract it out and some might want to give it back to the Government to deal with.

To get back to your point, we now need to look at how much all the proposals will cost, assuming that they all go ahead. That will form part of what we charge the developer to develop the project. We then have to add in a portion of that—quite a large chunk—to go back as community benefit. Everybody is up for that.

Given the amount of money that companies in the fin-fish sector have to pay for licences in Norway and elsewhere, we are talking about considerable sums of money. How should we collect that? In my opinion, we could do it in two ways: either the Government collects it all and then distributes it again or you get Crown Estate Scotland to do it. Crown Estate Scotland leases some of the land so it already has a process in place for doing that. I am having dinner with Crown Estate Scotland tonight, and I am sure that it will say that that is not what it should be doing. However, my view is that we should not create something new if the system already exists. We need a central body that brings all the money in.

Interestingly enough, to go back to the point at the beginning about trust, local authorities trust that, whatever service we put in, that service will bring the resource back to them for what they are doing. They are not saying, “No, no, no. It all has to come to us.” They understand that, to get A, you have got to do B. B is about creating a sensible way of charging the developer for the project in line with the resource that is needed to make that work well for them and everybody else. It must also provide the community that benefit.

Lastly—I almost forgot, which I must not—to go back to the point that has been made in a myriad of ways round the table today, some of the money must be used to fund the scientific research that we will have to do as we go forward.

You mentioned that there is a kind of circularity in the funding system in Norway. Could you explain that a little bit more?

Oh, goodness me!

Unfortunately, you will need to be very brief.

May I do that off piste, please? It is quite complicated and will take a bit of time.

That would be fine. You can write a letter to the committee.

We would absolutely appreciate your views on that. Ariane Burgess has the final question.

I will pick up on what Professor Griggs said about science. You say in your review:

“Those using science must ensure that they have the most current, effective and relevant scientific evidence to defend their arguments against any negative issues raised”—

I am sorry to interrupt, Ariane, but we do not have time to go back. We need to get the final question answered and move on.

This is the final question that I need to get answered, convener. Professor Griggs, I want to understand the concern in community groups and non-governmental organisations about the proposed central science evidence base being run and managed by the industry and the Scottish Government. How would you reassure concerned stakeholders that your recommendations will ensure the independence of the science that is used for decision making on aquaculture expansion and regulation?

It would be the same independent science that we use for anything else that the Government does. The Scottish Science Advisory Council, which covers all parts of science in the Scottish Government, is very independent. If the science was to be managed by the industry and the Scottish Government, that would not mean that it would not be independent, and I would like to see something like the SSAC, which advises the Government on science generally, being that independent body. It is not about trying to preclude any science; it is about making sure that the science that we consider is the best science that is available. My understanding is that that is what the SSAC is there to do.

Unfortunately, we had a lot of supplementary questions that we were not able to bring in, but we intend to carry on with the topic in our next evidence session. We hope to ask the cabinet secretary about your review and the establishment of the short-term project board at our first meeting in September. I have no doubt that our paths will cross again in the future. Thank you for your time, Professor Griggs.

We will move on to our next item, which we will take in private.

12:11 Meeting continued in private until 12:16.