Chamber and committees

This information ispublicly available in the form of the Scottish Statutory Instruments Statisticsand is available from the Office of the Queen’s Printer for Scotland (OQPS). Thestatistics show the total number of Scottish Statutory Instruments broken down byyear since Devolution in 1999 and by subject area since 2001. The information canbe accessed on the OQPS website at the following address http://www.oqps.gov.uk/legislation/ssi/statistics.

Funding tosupport the eradication and/or control of bracken has been available to allfarmers and crofters through agri-environment schemes for a number of years andwill continue to be available via Rural Development Contracts under the new ScotlandRural Development Programme 2007-13.

In addition,payment for claims under a number of national schemes including the Single FarmPayment Scheme, requires farmers and crofters to comply with Good Agriculturaland Environmental Condition (GAEC) standards including avoidance of theencroachment of unwanted vegetation, such as bracken, which degrades theagricultural and environmental value of the land to the extent that the land isnot capable of returning to agricultural production by any time during thegrowing season in the following calendar year.

The new sheep and goattraceability system is being introduced to ensure full compliance with Communitylaw following the loss of the UK derogation to avoid double tagging. We were unableto continue with the derogation due to poor compliance levels found through FVOaudits.

The new system will bring the UK in line with other memberstates and is designed to simplify sheep identification and traceability burdensfor the industry. This should improve industry compliance levels resulting in improvedtraceability overall. In particular, the use of double tags helps to ensure theidentification of an animal’s birth holding by duplicating the identity of an animal.This duplication provides a benefit for animal disease control in preserving theanimal’s identity if individual tags are lost.

It is accepted, however,that the loss of movement tags previously used under the derogation, for which theCommission have confirmed are not allowed under EC law, may provide a dip in traceability.If applied correctly, they could provide a quick visual reference to all of thelocations an animal had been on. In the event of disease outbreak, however, thisinformation can still be gathered from accompanying movement documents, holdingregisters and central databases.

We recognise theimportant role of livestock farming in the Less Favoured Areas of the Highlands and Islands. In addition to expenditure of around£4.657 million, in these areas, on the Scottish Beef Calf Scheme (which aims tosustain quality beef production, particularly in remote and fragile areas, andprotect the environment), LessFavoured Area Support Scheme payments(worth around £24.225 million in the Highlands and Islands) are conditional onactive livestock farming.

Perth Bull Sales are important sales attractingbuyers and sellers from a wide area of the UK,and the organisers have been in discussion with the Scottish Government, includingveterinary advisors, about what measures are required to best mitigate any risk.

Any animals comingto the sales from the bluetongue restricted zone will be subject to EU regulations,including the requirement for negative results from pre-movement testing for bluetonguebefore they can exit the restricted zone.

In addition, animalsarriving in Scotland will be subjected to further checks through the post-movementnotification and checking regime recently put in place in Scotland for animals arrivingfrom a bluetongue Restricted Zone.

The Scottish Governmenthas ensured that strong representations have been made to the European Commissionto ensure that robust rules are in place to regulate the movement of susceptibleanimals out of bluetongue restricted zones. At the 10 January meeting of the StandingCommittee on the Food Chain and Animal Health the European Commission challengedall member states to ensure that the regulations are observed.

As a further protectionpost-import testing of susceptible animals continues to be undertaken. Industrycan help to reduce the risk of disease incursions by not sourcing stock from areasof high-risk.

In response to thefoot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Surrey the Scottish Governmentcommitted a £25 million support package to provide relief and recovery to thosemost affected.

Costs to the industryfrom the impact of the necessary movement restrictions are currently being assessedas part of Professor Scudamore’s review into the Scottish response. The resultsof this research will be published in due course.

The Scottish Government believesthat there is a need to reduce the complexity of fisheries management and that thereis little merit in introducing additional management categories at this stage.

The Scottish Government issueda contract to Glasgow Caledonian University on 16 November 2007 to undertake a study into the EconomicImpact of Recreational Sea Angling in Scotland. We expect the study to report later this year.

The Scottish Government is notin a position to quantify with any certainty the overall amount of fish discardedannually in the Clyde by the small mesh Nephrops fishery. Discarded fish includesmall and unwanted commercial species, but also species which have no commercialvalue which are also taken by fishing gears.

Fisheries Research Services (FRS)runs an observer programme which is directed at estimating the discarded componentof the main commercial species. That observer programme suggests that quantitiesof landings and discards of cod made by smaller meshed vessels are small in AreaVIa particularly in the Clyde. The Clyde Cod closure which has run from 14 Januaryto 30 April in the first quarter of the year is considered to be effective in protectingcod at a time when they are aggregating to spawn. The observer programme also suggeststhat landings of haddock and whiting in the Clyde are also small, but discards ofhaddock and whiting are markedly higher than discards of cod and may be of the orderof several hundred tonnes per year. The Scottish Government intends to work withthe fishing industry and others to implement measures, in particular under the ConservationCredits scheme, to reduce such discards.