Chamber and committees

The expansion of offshore wind presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create thousands of high-quality jobs. While employment law is reserved, we will continue to use the levers at our disposal to promote fair work practices across the labour market in Scotland.

The STUC is a member of the Scottish Energy Advisory Board and has also been invited to sit on the Offshore Wind Skills Short-Life Working Group being convened by the Scottish Government. This involvement ensures that the STUC can contribute to shaping the development of the offshore wind sector and its alignment with fair work and just transition principles.

We welcome this important research by the Scottish Trades Union Congress and will carefully consider its findings.

Scottish Government Ministers and Officials engage with major energy companies and employers on a regular basis as part of their duties.

As part of this engagement, Energy and Climate Change Directorate officials most recently met with Equinor in February 2025. The Marine Directorate also regularly engages with offshore oil and gas operators, including Equinor, as part of its chemical assessment contract with the UK Government’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero; and with respect to Equinor’s floating offshore wind project Hywind. Ministers and officials also attend a range of industry events where developers and investors in offshore energy are present.

Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) has supported the Scottish Government in the development of the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy (SBS) and Delivery Plan, through participation in official working groups ran by the Environment and Forestry Directorate.

FLS provided written evidence to Scottish Forestry officials on forest policy related actions which subsequently fed into the SBS.

FLS are now discussing internally how to support delivery of the Biodiversity Actions which will be summarised in their next corporate plan.

As Scotland’s largest manager of wild deer FLS provided practitioner input to the development of the SBS reflecting the critical dependency for SBS outcomes to be enabled by proactive deer management by all land managers.

The proposals in the Bill stem from the work and recommendations of the Scottish Land Commission. It found the most pressing land reform issues were in rural areas in relation to the scale and concentration of land ownership and the resultant impact on local communities.

While there will only be a small number of landholdings in the Central Scotland region which will meet the threshold tests in the Bill, the proposals allow for the amending of these thresholds in future, should monitoring suggest this is justified.

As I said at my recent evidence session on the Bill with the NZET Committee, Meeting of the Parliament: lghp/18/02/2025 | Scottish Parliament Website we are not going to fix all the issues in either rural or urban Scotland in this one piece of legislation. Other pieces of work are ongoing that will have an impact on urban areas.

These include the Community Right to Buy review which is looking at how effective existing powers are in both rural and urban areas, as well as work on compulsory sales orders and Compulsory Purchase Reform, a public consultation on the latter being due later this year.

The amount of peatland restored through the Peatland ACTION partnership since 2021, broken down by local authority area, can be found in the following table.

Good progress is being made towards the current target to restore 250,000 hectares of degraded peatlands by 2030, with - 75,000 hectares restored to date.

Recent years have seen strong increases including, in 2023-24, over 10,000 hectares restored in a single year for the first time. We will again restore over 10,000 ha in 2024-25.

Through the Scottish Budget 2025-26 we will invest £35.5 million towards peatland restoration. With this funding the ambition of the Peatland ACTION partnership is to restore at least 14,000 hectares next year.

The funding will also enable the Peatland ACTION partnership to invest in designing a large number of new projects for future years. This will ensure the sustainability of the sector, allowing us to be more responsive to funding and continue to accelerate the programme’s success towards our 2030 target.

Whilst regulation for decommissioning of offshore oil and gas infrastructure is a reserved matter, the Scottish Government supports this vital activity happening in a way that facilitates an orderly, managed and just transition to net-zero and maximises the benefits for Scotland’s businesses and communities.

Through the Decommissioning Challenge Fund, the Scottish Government invested over £10 million over the period 2017 to 2020 to support innovation and build capacity in the Scottish decommissioning sector.

The Scottish Government remains committed to restricting the sale of horticultural peat as part of its commitment to environmental protection and climate change mitigation. We continue to work with gardeners, growers, environmental organisations and the UK and devolved governments to understand and overcome challenges, including those imposed by the UK Internal Market Act, as we explore all legislative options to implement effective restrictions as soon as feasible.

Scottish Government considers industry involvement and engagement an important component in preventing the spread of Ips typographus into or within Scotland. Regular discussions are held with industry representatives from the nursery sector, growers and processing sector through the scheduled Scottish Tree Health Advisory Group and the Scottish Forest and Timber Technologies Industry Leadership Group.

Extensive surveillance and trapping is conducted across Scotland to monitor for the presence of these beetles. Following the trap finding in Scotland an intensive trapping programme has been underway to catch any residue beetles and prevent a breeding population from establishing in Scotland. There is no evidence that Ips typographus has become established or spread in Scotland.