 Good morning and welcome to the third meeting of 2017 of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, I remind everyone present to ensure that their mobile phones are on silent for the duration of the meeting. Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. That covers items 4 and 5. Are we agreed? We are agreed. Thank you. The second item on the agenda this morning is to take evidence on the Scottish Government's draft climate change plan, RPB 3. The draft plan was laid on the 20th of January 2017. The Parliament has 60 days to consider this document. This committee will be carrying out its scrutiny and collaboration with the Economy, Jobs, Fair Work Committee, the Rural Economy Committee and the Local Government and Communities Committee. Last week, the committee has launched a joint call for written evidence, and I would encourage as many people as possible to send us their views. The committee has a full schedule of meetings plan at which to consider the oral evidence. At our meeting on 31 January, we will be joined by stakeholders to discuss the overview of the plan and climate change governance. On 7 February, we will be taking evidence from two panels of stakeholders on issues relating to specific sections of the plan within this committee's remit. We will be looking at resource use, the water industry, the public sector, peatland and land use. On 21 February, we will then take evidence from the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform. This meeting represents the first of our oral evidence sessions, and we have been joined by a number of Scottish Government officials who are leading or led on the development of the document. Chris Stark, director of energy and climate change, John Allen, deputy director of decarbonisation, Colin McBean, who is the head of energy and climate change analysis. Morag Williams is the team leader of the climate change plan project team. Good morning to you all. As we have rather a lot of ground to cover, we will crack on. I would like to ask a question just for clarity. The cabinet secretary's forward to the document says, and I quote, "...each sector's needs are now interlinked in the modelling. If one sector over or underperforms against our expectation, we can now model the knock-on impact on emissions savings required from those other sectors of the economy in the future." I am just a little bit concerned about the messaging around that, because it could be interpreted as saying that, if we perform far better than expected in one sector, then we might throttle back in another as we move forward. I am hoping that this is just a clumsy use of words, but it is worth clarifying that the targets being set however challenging would be ones that we would be seeking, not only to reach but surpass sector by sector. I think there is a distinction. Sorry, my apologies. I think one way of looking at that is to think about the point that the cabinet secretary made in front of this committee before about sectoral targets and the carbon budgets that are in this. It is very much the Government's position that, whilst we work within sectoral envelopes and the plan contains very specific sectoral envelopes, that there is a great advantage in maintaining those sectoral envelopes rather than sectoral targets. If you have sectoral targets, that removes a degree of flexibility, but I do not think that there is any sense of choking back. I just think that we are taking a sectoral envelop approach rather than a sectoral target approach. I would like to be clearer on that. If we had a situation where let's take a sector and transport was doing particularly well, would it or would it not create a potential situation where say agriculture was lagging behind, that the view was taken while overall we were on course in a particular year? It depends really on the point at which that is happening. The current act builds into its requirements that every five years or so when you set the annual targets that you derive a new plan. What we have done in each of those plans in RPP1, RPP2 and the current climate change plan, RPP3, is that we have taken at that point a view about the balance between sectors. On this occasion, you will remember we have used a times model to assist us in taking that view. I would imagine that it would be entirely consistent with both the act and the approach that we have taken in our previous RPPs and this one every five years or so to have a look at where you put your effort and where the effort is best placed. I do not think that this is writing things in tablets of stone for the eternity of the up to 2050. I think that there is a sense at which you would need to look at this every five years or so when you produce a new climate change plan. Or perhaps more frequently than every five years. Finlay Carson. What I would like to explore initially is emission envelopes. I would like to ask a set of two questions. How were the emission envelopes developed and how was agreement taken between the different sectors in the Scottish Government? Was there any conflict in agreeing those emission envelopes between the different sectors? What advice was sought from the Committee on Climate Change and how to take those factors into account? Perhaps I should give an overview of that and my colleagues Chris and Colin can chip in if that might help you. As you will remember, the broad approach that we have taken here is that we have invested quite heavily in this times model. This times model is a model that is used internationally for climate change and energy modelling. It is used to inform decisions like the one that we are doing here, but typically it is used that side of government. We have been quite unique in using it inside government. What the times model allows us to do is to think about where to put effort in terms of societal cost. The idea is that the times model provides you with the least cost way in societal terms of hitting the climate change targets. That is one of the starting points that we took. The other starting point that we took was the advice from the Committee on Climate Change. They adopt a different approach. They do not use times models. They use an approach similar to the one that we used in RPP2, which is to start at the bottom and build upwards rather than allocating effort from the top down. We took the Committee on Climate Change advice and we took the output of the times model. We also took input from stakeholders like the stock climate chaos, who provided a number of very helpful case studies. In determining those envelopes, I think that the times model was our key driver. We made use and we took this to the Cabinet subcommittee. The Cabinet Secretary took it to the Cabinet subcommittee and there was a discussion there. The Cabinet subcommittee took the times runs and they also balanced this against deliverability issues around social welfare issues, things like fuel poverty and also economic growth and the need to maintain economic growth. As the Cabinet subcommittee discussions proceeded and there was a modification of the initial times run, that moved us towards a proposal for Cabinet and there was also a Cabinet discussion. That is roughly the process we followed. I do not know if Chris Orr Cullen would like to add anything to that. I suppose that the key components of that are that we are using the model not only as a diagnostic tool but as a way to constrain decision making. The way that that works is that you require Cabinet or a subcommittee of Cabinet to make those decisions collectively. The times when we run it gives an early assessment of how you might allocate the carbon and then we assess that against the priorities of each of the Cabinet secretaries. Just in the back of that, you may have answered already, but what is the justification for the significant variations in the planned emissions reduction by sector? For example, we are looking at agriculture set to fall by 12 per cent compared to 76 per cent reduction in the residential sector and we are predicting to remove emissions completely from the electricity sector. Can you give me some information on that? With that in mind, what level of consensus existed across the various stakeholders when it comes to making decisions like that? It is basically a product of that collective decision making process. It is the collective assessment of the analysis that we provide using times plus the views of external stakeholders and issues such as economic impact. Crucially, it is also the package of proposals that delivers each envelope for each sector. You are seeing the product of that collective decision making process. That answers the final part of your question. It is a collectively agreed position among the various cabinet secretaries. There was consensus, even though some of the targets are far higher than others. There was Government. Two points here. We are still looking for an answer on the role of the Committee on Climate Change. They gave advice prior to the plan being prepared. I am interested in whether they had any sight of the plan before it was published. If you look at agriculture, if memory serves, between 1990 and 2014, agriculture's cut in emissions was about 14 per cent. That was heavily criticised as being inadequate. We are in a situation where everyone has to step up to the mark. That plan requires a 12 per cent cut, albeit over a shorter period. Can you outline for us what the thinking was behind that target being set in agriculture? I think one of the important things of this and one of the points that was quite frequently raised with us during this process was the sense of fairness between the sectors. I think that is what you might have been getting at too, that why is this sector having to do a lot more and why is this sector having to do a lot less? I think that lies behind your question around agriculture. I think that this basically comes to the really big difference between how RPP2 was done and how RPP3 was done. If you remember in the RPP2 thing, what we did in essence was we asked all the sectors how much of a contribution could they make. Lying behind our sense of whether they were doing well enough was some sort of sense of equity in the sense that there needs to be some sort of degree of equal effort between sectors. Obviously, that was modified in RPP2 by, again, practical considerations. The great advantage of times is that it allows us to look at the cost, the societal cost of pushing hard. One of the very clear things that came from running times was that it is very difficult and expensive to reduce emissions in some sectors rather than in others. The fact that the electricity sector is almost decarbonised pointed to the low societal cost of doing that, relatively high societal cost of doing a similar decarbonisation in agriculture. If you think through agriculture and the fact that most of the emissions are biologically driven, so they're the result of nitrous oxide and methane as opposed to carbon dioxide, that gives a sense of where we are. If you look at the agriculture sector in some detail, what you'll see is the use of fossil fuels within agriculture is subject to reasonably similar constraints as the rest of the economy. In that sense, that's what you'd expect, but when you start to work with these biological processes around the use of fertiliser and methane production for muminants, it starts to become much, much more difficult. That's in a sense what our balance of emissions reduction comes from. The UKCC gave its advice. We had conversations with the UKCC on how to use time models and the distinctions between time models and their approach. They didn't see the final plan before it was published. That was because of the cabinet process behind that. Can I just return to this point about agriculture? The section in the document, Pathway to 2032, identifies targets for a number of sectors, challenging targets in many cases, industrial waste, peatwin, woodland for example. The language around the agricultural sector is quite interesting, because there's use of words such as expect, encourage, work with. When many of us might want to see the word require in there, it seems to me that... I hate to use the phrase agriculture's getting off lightly because I hear what you said, Mr Eilwyn, but there is a tone to this that suggests that agriculture is getting an easy ride here. I don't think that's the case. I think the work from times of the streets are not getting an easy ride. I think the other element here is... Your other committees will see this when they take evidence from the relevant cabinet secretaries, that there's a very strong sense of working with the industry within there as well. Although there are things in which there's more push behind, in order to operationalise these, working with the industry is particularly important in this sector. Claudia Beamish. Just a quick follow-up. Thank you, convener. Good morning to you all. In relation to agriculture, I'd just like to push that a little further if I may. John, you've highlighted the societal costs of decision making and also the actual financial costs as well. I'm just trying to understand this a bit more clearly for my own benefit and for the record. If you take electricity, I'm not sure, and I'm only posing the question, perhaps it can't be answered today, but I'm not sure that we would be where we are now with electricity. If there hadn't been very clear Scottish Government and previously UK Government direction in relation to regulation and a lot of grants and those sort of aspects of it, I ask myself, having taken a keen interest in the last committee on agriculture and trying to continue to do so, from this perspective at least, I'll put it as a question. Is that not factored in? If you look at the possibilities for organics or agroecology or agroforestry and those contributions, is there any way in which the grants could be pushed further on those so that there could be opportunities for that sort of a transition, which is perhaps more just like it was from fossil fuels to electric renewables? I hope I'm being clear. I hope it's not too... I think there are two elements to what you are asking, perhaps, or three elements. There's the comparison with electricity, which perhaps Chris might like to say something about in a minute, but then there's also, when looking at agriculture, I suppose there are two or three different ways of moving things forward. Obviously, the first way is through regulation, the second way is perhaps through using grants and the third way is through encouraging farmers to understand that there are things which are not only good for the planet but also good for their own pockets, a sort of more voluntary type approach. I think that the approach that the Cabinet Secretary in this area is taking is to get across a message that not only is low carbon farming good for the planet but it's also good for producers' pockets, and that's very much the starting point. There are other things like there is sort of compulsion here, and for example, we've previously announced our intention to move to compulsory soil testing, and compulsory soil testing is one of the things where there are great benefits for farmers at the bottom line. But there's a very clear acknowledgement that we need to take food producers and farmers along with us so that they realise that low carbon farming is not good for the planet but good for their pockets. This sort of sense, although the Government has been very clear about compulsory soil testing, the regulation approach, there's a very strong acknowledgement that we need to take people along with us. I think that's the really important thing to understand when you're looking at the agricultural chapter. It's a very strong desire to work with farmers and food producers to get across the message that low carbon farming benefits the planet, so it's really important, but it's good for them too at a personal level. Finlay Carson, on the back of that, we're talking about improved profitability for farming, and I don't think that it's lost in anybody that soil plays a big part in that, and maybe the reduction's inputs will actually result in an increase in outputs. Was that taken into consideration when you looked at the cost of getting the 12 per cent reduction that there was potentially an increase in profitability for agriculture? Was that taken into consideration and the cost, the return on investment, if you like? Yes, and I think that's true across the whole piece, that the ways in which we took the time's output and started to think about how we translate that into our envelopes very much did involve, first of all, a sense of how easy it is to move in this direction because it's good for both the individual farmer or say the individual household in terms of energy efficiency as well as society, so there's an investment there, but also those non-monitory benefits, so if you improve the use of fertilizer, that has other non-carbon benefits for society, and those sort of benefits were factored into the consideration as well. Good morning. Just to come back to the convener's point about the wording within the climate plan, when you talk about expecting farmers to be undertaking soil testing by 2018, what exactly does that mean? Does that mean that there will be compulsory soil testing in 2018 for all farmers, or is it that we're in a process of negotiation with the NFUS about the best way to do this and it may take five or six years to achieve but we'll start it next year? My understanding is very much that the Government announced its intention to move to compulsory testing some time ago, and I think that Cunningham commented on that in the chamber last week, but there's a very clear acknowledgement that we need to take food producers and farmers with us, so that's my understanding. What does that mean then for next year? When I read that you expect farmers to be soil testing next year, what exactly does that mean? Is that hope or compulsion? Policy on compulsory soil testing has not changed since it was set in June 2015, so that is our expectation that that policy will remain in place. Implemented in this time frame. I think that this is something that we need to explore with the Scottish Government. We can tend to move on. Alexander Burnett. I'd like to learn a bit more about the times model, and I thank Chris and his team for the additional session that they gave to explain, and I'm sure that it will be a subject that we're going to have to learn a lot more about. Can you just answer what information the model provides on expected emission abatement associated with achieving each policy outcome, and whether the model provides information on the abatement costs, such as pounds per ton of carbon, for each policy outcome derived? And if so, why isn't this detail provided in the draft report? I think I'll start off and then hand over to Colin. I think this is something that we talked about in some detail when we gave the informal presentation before Christmas, and I think it's important that we come back to that. There's a very clear difference between RPP2 and the current plan in terms of the information that it provides about abatements at the individual policy level and also costs at the individual policy level. So I think it's important that we do explore this. There is a difference, and that difference in essence comes from how the times model operates, and Colin will explain that, but also there's a fundamental difference that we're in a much better position to understand abatements across the piece. It's very much our view that the numbers in RPP2 are less useful than we thought at the time, because we have a much better understanding about how abatement operates as a system, and that's the whole point of the times model. I think that with that introduction, I think that handing over to Colin will probably help. As you've discussed already, the times model is a whole system energy model. Fundamentally, that really changes the way we have to conceive the problem of carbon abatement, not least because the model is actually a dynamic system. So when we pull on one sector or expect something to happen in one place, there are ripples that go right across and right through the modelling process. You're not in the position, for example, where you have a single price of carbon for a particular policy measure coming forward, because the costs that that policy is facing are directly affected by the costs that are showing up elsewhere in the system. For example, if the system is drawing biomass into heating, that biomass is no longer available for any other process in the model or is only available for another process at an increased price. It means that you really have to consider the full systemic picture rather than zooming in on an individual component as you would have been able to historically. The strength of that is that it allows us to be confident about the overall system cost that we're facing, because we're not losing, as we might have done in previous approaches, the costs that are happening on an air rather than intracectoral basis. Where, for example, we're pulling forward low-carbon electricity, the model is actually forcing us to build the technologies to supply that electricity, and then we're taking that and checking that the transmission system is actually capable of dealing with those flows. We don't have the unanswered question at the back of our minds about what happens when we electrify transport or how far we can electrify heat before we start to run into large unexpected costs. That's why we've been able to put for the first time an overall value to society on the whole package of measures, which is the figure that you'll have seen referenced in the briefing and in the document itself at around 2 per cent of cumulative GDP running forward. Thank you, as I understand, as a final total based on a set of constraints. Do you keep a record of what different constraints were used during the process? Does the Scottish Government keep a list of the different model runs? Yes, we do. We have a full audit trail back of each of the model changes that we've made. We first received the model in January this year, and we've moved forward a combination of tightening up some of the technical constraints. For example, we had discussions around biomass that led to tightening the biomass constraints in the model and policy constraints. For example, around heating. The model, when it's left to run itself, would like to change over to gas boilers very quickly. However, if you do that, you're making that decision on the basis of the information that the model currently knows. We know that there's a lot of discussion going on at a UK level and wider about the prospects of repurposing the gas grid. If you took a naive, modelled approach, you would jump immediately into a position of starting to decommission parts of that grid, whereas a more nuanced position is to try to minimise the potential for regret moving forward and use the model to inform those decisions. That's why you would see in the plan the heavy focus on seep and reducing demand first, and then moving on to low-carbon heating technologies in the second half of the plan, which is in line with the timescales that we're seeing for decisions about alternative fuel sources coming forward. Can I ask if there are any plans to publish any of these different sets of constraints that we used? We can certainly make those available. Yeah, no problem. Finally, given the completed process, can I just ask what you're doing and where reviewing the time model is going forward or discussion about that? We've been given permission to make the model open source and available to academics. We're currently in a position of tidying it so that it can be handed over to academics. We're also in the process of arranging for one of my staff to spend some time so that we can work with the academics to bring them up to speed. I'm sure that they'll very quickly pass us by, but just in that initial handover period. Thank you very much. Thank you. Moving on, Claudia Beamish. Thank you, convener. Could we look a bit further at the wider benefits and multiple benefits of the plan? It would be interesting for the committee, and I think the wider public for the record, to hear how opportunities to secure wider benefits such as related to human health or biodiversity, auto jobs, for instance, indeed, the possible of the plan. The possibility of manufacturing new technology to just give three examples or the point that John's already highlighted about fuel poverty, I think. How were they assessed and how is that reflected in the model development and selection of policies and proposals? It's a very broad, quite detailed question, I know, but if we can begin to tease that out a bit more. I think it's a very helpful question again. I think, from the start of this process, we've been particularly concerned that we take account of these wider non-carbon benefits. At the RPP2 level, there was a general sense of awareness of them, but we didn't have an awful lot of information on them. Particularly as we move to a times model, which looks at societal costs, but societal costs are very much in the sense of the capex and the operating costs of the energy system. It's quite a broad definition of cost, which times looks at it, and it's a massive step forward, but it doesn't include these non-carbon benefits. We were very clear that what we wanted to do was to have good quality information on those non-carbon benefits to put aside the times runs themselves. What we did was to commission literature reviews of the evidence on non-carbon benefits in three key sectors. That was the built environment, the transport sector and the agriculture sector. We have published, and you can see these on the website that I published last Thursday. You've got them there, right? Some very detailed evidence reviews of the sorts of benefits that you've got from various mitigation policies, but for other things. I think that it was helpful because that allowed us to give ministers a clear sense of those and to give our colleagues developing policies and proposals across the government a clear sense of those. That was the point of that. How were these taken on board? We didn't take them on board in a very sort of world. There's an extra pound here, so we didn't do that very, very formal cost-benefit analysis. That's quite hard to combine with the times technology because we don't have that sort of overall, we just have extensive information on these three quite important sectors. It's very much a judgment process, but it was very clearly factored into how we modified the times runs from the least cost run, our starting point. It was very much sort of in the minds of our policy colleagues, but also members of the Cabinet Subcommittee and Cabinet of Cabinet when those decisions were taken. When Cabinet and the Cabinet Subcommittee looked at the time, the envelopes generated by times, there's a very clear sense in their minds about how they would want to modify those to take account of these non-carbon benefits. Is that, I haven't made the time yet to delve into these, is that, for instance, on fuel poverty, would that be highlighted? How that target, having been missed and going forward the challenges of meeting it and the importance of that for people on low incomes and rural dwellers, would that be something that we could look at in here to see if that altered any decision making process within policy makers or whether it went to the, I don't expect detail of the subcommittee, but whether that informed the process? It did inform the process in the sense that fuel poverty and the importance of warmer homes was a very strong factor in how we arrived at the residential envelope, and there's this very strong focus in the first 10 years of the plan on energy efficiency measures in the domestic sector. That comes from the Government's concern around fuel poverty and the non-carbon benefits of the health benefits of warmer homes. Absolutely. The fuel poverty example is a very good example. The other examples are where we can see that there's a wider economic benefit, for example, from investment in a particular technology around a particular sector. That was absolutely fundamental to the advice to ministers around all those issues. Indeed, many of the discussions with ministers jointly were around the impacts in the long run and around what we occasionally call co-benefits or non-carbon benefits from those issues. Could you say something specifically about biodiversity in view of the previous conversation and discussion that we've had about the agriculture sector and the concerns about those targets for 2020? I think all I can say was that, again, these factors were because we had the evidence on land use. The work on agriculture, for example, was done. There was a fair amount of stakeholder contacts, both with NUFS and also with the NGO. Those biodiversity factors were very much part of those conversations and very much in the mind of Cabinet secretaries as they made these decisions. Are there any changes reflected because of those discussions? Are you able to tell us that? Beyond saying that those things are in the mind of people, I'm not sure that I could point to a particular decision and say that that would have been different if we hadn't had that piece of evidence for sure. The process wasn't like that, as I was trying to explain earlier. It's very much part of the mix of considerations, yes. Mark Ruskell. How does that then fit with the budget-setting process? Effectively, you've now got a document that has actions across government. There are some quite ambitious trajectories here in different sectors. Clearly, that has an impact on the objectives of different departments. There's also a budgetary implication. It's not clear within the document what the long-term budgetary implications are or even what the scale of ambition is relevant to current budgets. That's a really fair challenge. The policies make a distinction between proposals and policies. Policies are funded and we know how those will be paid for, where there is a cost. Not all policies, of course, carry a cost. I suppose that what we hope and expect from this is that what we are introducing is the idea of carbon budgeting properly into the future policy making process. This sets that element of the policy making process out, so it provides the carbon framework for future decisions and then the budgetary decisions do need to follow that. My personal view is that it is reasonable for us to set it out like that here and for later spending reviews or budgets to then tackle the question of how one would fund those policies. Is it clear what the scale of ambition is? For example, the proposal in here to continue with a fund to enable people to take out loans to buy electric vehicles, is that £1 million or is it £100 million? Big difference in terms of the ambition and what has changed? Again, it's a fairly fair challenge. Where we are clear on how a policy will work, we are very clear on how much the cost would be of that policy. What you won't see, and I absolutely defend that, is a cost overall. What we are saying here, and this is the fundamental shift in the way that we view the policy making process henceforth, is that carbon budgeting becomes as fundamental as financial budgeting. Therefore, you will find the funds for the entire climate change plan as it rolls out over the coming decades will be located in every portfolio. Effectively, the cost of tackling climate change is found in the money that we spend through Scottish Government policies throughout the piece. I think it might be helpful if I could just add a couple of words about two things in terms of the scale of ambition. What we've been very clear about in how we've constructed this document is the need for transparency. When a 170 page document lands on your desk and you've got a few days to read through it, I can understand that it doesn't necessarily feel transparent. What we've done here is, in each of the sectors, we have very clear policy outcomes. Where it's been possible to do this, we've actually attached a time profile in terms of numbers. You'll see in certain sectors, transport is a reasonable example of this, that the policy outcomes are pretty clear and the time path is pretty clear as well. If we are to hit the emissions envelopes which are in the plan, we need to hit those policy outcomes, those sort of time profiles. That gives you, and it gives us, a reality check on how well we're doing. The other element of that is the work that we've been doing on the monitoring framework. You'll see that there's an articulation within the plan and a promise to develop this further, and also a commitment from 2018 to produce annual summaries of our monitoring framework. It gives us very clear indication about where we're going, both in terms of those policy outcomes, but in terms of a number of other indicators which are lower level indicators which give you a sense that we're on track. There are two examples in the plan of that monitoring framework that we hope to roll out across the whole plan, by taking from Pete and as an example taken from Forestry. That, I think, gives you, I hope, summary assurance that we're keeping this transparent in terms of ambition. The other element of that is the budget summary that we publish annually alongside the budget or just after the budget. I know that the committee and its predecessors have had some concerns about the tie-in between that summary and RPPP2, but obviously from next year, when we produce that, we want to try to make that as tied into RPPP3 as possible. You'll start to see the policy outcomes, the monitoring framework and also the budget summary giving you that sort of information that will help you keep on top of progress and obviously help us keep on top of progress too. Maurice Golden. I wonder if you could give us a specific example of where there is a detailed policy or proposal in the climate change plan that perhaps will increase carbon emissions but will help to deliver other priority areas for the Scottish Government, whether that be economic, biodiversity or health benefits. I think one pretty good example is the way in which we've treated the industrial sector, so this is the heavy emitter sector and the plan is very clear about our concern around carbon leakage. In other words, if you come down too heavily on the industrial sector because you have, in essence, manufacturing industry, then if you push too hard on that in terms of the carbon reduction envelope, there's a danger and a real danger that those manufacturers will move, they will leave Scotland. We've been very clear that the path that we're anticipating for the industrial sector needs to be roughly in line with the rest of the EU and in particular the ETS. In a sense, we've constrained how we deal with the industrial sector so we don't go harder than the EU as a whole and therefore minimising the risk of carbon leakage or manufacturing leakage in Scotland. I think that's one very clear example of the plan of that sort of approach. If there's time, I think that Colin's raised a very good suggestion for another area where we can demonstrate. So another example of that would be hydrogen. We see potentially hydrogen coming forward as part of the solution to heat. The exact nature of hydrogen may change somewhere between now and the time it comes through, but it is something that certainly initially would result in emissions appearing in the industrial sector, but avoiding emissions in the residential sector. And then, as the process developed, you would see carbon capture and storage fitting on to the hydrogen manufacturer in a way that you can't fit carbon capture and storage on to domestic boilers, so you see that shuffling happening between sectors. We're going to move on to a section on policy assumptions, but let me kick that off by picking up on CCS, because table 7.4 talks about the UK Government's involvement. The UK Government has effectively pulled the plug on carbon capture and storage, so I'm a bit concerned about the assumption there that they have a role to play in this. They will play a role in delivering the plan given the position they've taken on that particular topic. You're right to say that the UK Government made a shift, so they pulled funding for our CCS competition that had, I think, the figure was £1 billion as a prize, effectively. I don't think that demonstrates a complete reversal of their position on CCS, so indeed, if it did, we wouldn't be including it in this document as a credible policy. It is my understanding that there is remaining interest around carbon capture and storage at UK Government level in bays in the department. Our policy is to encourage that as much as possible and, indeed, for Scotland to be the location for any future investment around CCS or CCU, which is, I suppose, the other part of this carbon capture and use. Does the optimistic view not give the sounds that are coming out of Westminster around us? I think that it is an optimistic view, but I suppose that's because I'm optimistic. Under all circumstances, CCS plays an important system role, and Colin might want to say something about just how big the impact is. That we've done on that is the same modelling that my colleagues at UK Government will have done, of course, around the whole of the UK systems. Getting at it, what's plan B if the UK Government doesn't step up to the mark on that? We have run a model without carbon capture and storage for the power sector. The implication of that is that the system cost rises significantly. It's about an extra £3.5 billion on to the system cost. That's in line with what you see on the models being run on an international basis. They've been run for the IPCC in the AR5 process, and they show that carbon capture and storage is being very important going forward, not least because of the potential risk at a global level of an overshoot on carbon dioxide, in which case the only option for bringing that back down is biotechnologies with carbon capture and storage fitted. You see that referenced in the AR5 reports. Dave Stewart. On the same theme, I'm interested in the assumptions that you have made in the plan. Clearly, in a simplistic way, any plan is as good as the assumptions that you make, and obviously has to be dynamic and responsive. I think that I quote from history. I think that it was Napoleon who said that any plan falls apart with the first contact with the enemy. A couple of examples. You make a big play, I think, about the seven policy assumptions around being a member of the EU. Clearly, that's a fast-moving situation, not least the Supreme Court, as we speak, discussing article 50. You've made big assumptions about the EU. Clearly, that's going to change. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Can the plan be adapted on the basis that we, once we cease to be members of the EU? There are two excellent examples of underpinning assumptions for the plan that you see before you, and I'll stress that. This is a draft plan, so that's the other part of this. Where are those assumptions to change? Where there are changes in circumstances, what we would have to do is amend the plan. That's a simple way of approaching it. What we know is that we are constrained by the overall carbon targets set out in the Climate Change Act. What we must do is put in place a process that accommodates any future changes. Going back to the first question that you asked at the beginning of this committee, I think that's what that, except that clumsy word part of the forward was about, is that our ability to do that is greatly enhanced by the way we've approached this in the third RPP. We can now model a change in those things. It has knock-on implications, of course, if some of the assumptions that allow us to make the carbon assessments we're making here change. The way in which we approach this will accommodate that in the future. What you see here is, to go back to John's point, as transparent as we can make it about how we've approached that and what the underpinning assumptions are, including our membership of some of the European-wide institutions such as the ETS. On a more positive point, you commissioned an extra document from Aether consultants about travel. One of the very positive issues that they raised was the important role that active travel plays in breaking what I would call the bunker mentality of departments. In other words, if you have active travel, you achieve modal shift. You also improve the health of Scots, which is clearly something that we all want to sport. You've got a very high appraisal in all the boxes that were ticked in that particular assessment. Can you say a little bit more about active travel and assumptions that you've made on that as a very important vehicle for modal change and reducing our climate change emissions? Yes. Again, I think there's this recognition amongst the policy teams which are developing this about the importance of active travel. There are a number of long-standing commitments that the Government has towards active travel, including funding. Those are very much factored into the development of the plan. I think it's probably fair to say that my policy colleagues in Transport Scotland recognise that there are limits to how much modal shift you can obtain through active transport. There's also a recognition that some of the large transport emissions can't be influenced by active travel. It's important and it's factored in, but there's also a recognition that we have to do things elsewhere as well. You obviously can't control the parliamentary and policy issues that come along in terms of votes in Parliament. One issue that we've raised before in the times model was contradictory policy and climate change, which would be air passenger duty reduction. Clearly, that's going to increase emissions. What thoughts have you had in your assumptions about how that's going to be rebalanced elsewhere across the Scottish Government portfolio? We're very mindful of the Government's commitment and the Government's policy around a departure tax, where I think it's now labelled. What we have done is factored in those emissions into the development of the plan. As I explained last year, because of the way in which times works, it's incredibly difficult to tease out the consequence of that particular change, but we have taken account of the increased scale of emissions from reducing APD, and they are factored into the plan. It does take account of that, although I couldn't point to the one exact policy, because it's impossible to do so, which is the consequence of that change. It's going to have an effect. You mentioned that this is just a draft plan, so in future assumptions will that be made as a concrete assumption in the plan? It was a concrete assumption in the current version of the plan. It will continue to be so, as long as that's the Government's policy. On the issue of aviation, aviation and shipping, there's very little on the plan in specific detail around those relative to other sectors. Is that because of the international nature of those? Yes, that's very much the case. Aviation is a good example. Scotland is not the only but reasonably unique in including international aviation emissions, for example, in its targets. It's a very clear decision to do that because they are part of our colourful print, in a sense. At the same time, there's a very clear recognition that the recent global agreement on reducing aviation emissions is the way to go. The Committee on Climate Change, for example, is also very clear that it's a global approach, which is important. There is stuff in the plan around emissions from airports, which are factored in and similarly from ports, but you're absolutely right that it's the international elements of those areas, which is where the policy weight will be taken. The aviation sector in the UK has a target of reducing emissions by, I think, 50 per cent by 2050 while growing capacity by a similar amount. Is that something that's factored in any way? Is the expectation that we'll see a 15 per cent improvement in the efficiency of new aircraft? Yes, it is modelled, but it's that specific efficiency saving from the use of New Yorker. There's nothing beyond that. There's a lot of stuff around biofuels, for example. There's some other stuff being worked upon. No, it's not in the air. It's further to that UK Climate Change Committee. One of their recommendations was that there should be an aviation strategy, which is compliant with international civil aviation organisation agreements. Do I take it that this is or isn't compliant with that? Probably a question that needs to be directed towards the transport conversation. As you know, I should have made this point much earlier in this conversation, that what we can offer you in a sense is an overview of the plan and how it stitches together and answers some of your questions. But there are some things that I think are probably best left to the transport officials and the transport ministers who developed this work. I think that's probably something that is better asked in that sort of forum. The transport scenario, as with every other sector of the economy, has had an immense amount of consideration. I would be surprised if we were proposing something that wasn't compatible with the set of things that you set out. A quick question about the European emissions trading scheme. Obviously, as we've heard already, there's some considerable uncertainty around that, whether the UK is going to continue to be part of that scheme. What are the alternatives? Does this model factor in there being an emissions trading scheme for heavy emitters, either on a UK basis or possibly even on a Scotland-wide basis, depending on constitutional futures? What are the assumptions based on that? Is it possible to run an emissions trading scheme on a Scotland-wide basis, or indeed on a UK basis? This is a really important issue, of course, when we consider the implications of Brexit. In a second, I'll ask Colin to tell you exactly what is modelled in with regard to our expectations of the ETS. In summary, we are expecting to remain part of it. The question could there be a replacement? Absolutely there could, but it would need to be designed and they would have to understand the impact of it before we could model it properly, but of course we would do that. Colin, do you want to say just what's in the model when it comes to the ETS? So what we've done in terms of the ETS is we've treated it as two time periods. It's a time period for which we have certainty, which is out to 2020. Out to 2020, we know what Scotland's share of the EU ETS cap is and we know how we'll be adjusting our emissions to report against the targets. We know exactly what those numbers are. Beyond the 2020 period, we don't know what Scotland's share will be of the targets. The reason I differentiate between those two is that, for the first period out to 2020, that means, in effect, we run the model with two separate caps on it. We force it to solve for emissions in the non-traded sector and then we force it to live within the cap that we know is coming forward for Scottish emissions on the traded sector. Now, when we go beyond the period to 2020, we don't know what Scotland's share of the emissions cap will be. What we do is we take the model and we solve it with one emissions cap. That forces us to take account of the relatively best place to share effort between what is currently the traded and non-traded cap. The way that I would characterise that is that that's actually giving us an insight into the negotiating position that we would want to take about our share of the traded sector cap to ensure that it's a proportionate effort that falls on the traded sector and that it's not disproportionate either to the traded or non-traded sectors. In relation to the EU and Brexit, I'm reflecting back to the last committee and the RPP 2. There was a lot of discussion and concern about the future technologies that hadn't yet been invented and the research opportunities that can be made in Scotland to develop those. I wonder if there's been any assessment in relation to Brexit of the implications of possible loss of research collaborations or indeed of actual funding that is coming to us at the moment up to 2020. That specific assessment in this area, although it is my plan to do so, we have considered where there are interactions with the European institutions and should some of those institutions or rules or legislation not be there, we would have to consider that. Essentially what we've been doing is our homework. Once we are clearer on how some of those things will plan out, you will see a clearer Scottish Government position on some of those issues. At the moment, what we've done is mostly look at the body of European law. I know that my colleagues elsewhere in the Scottish Government have considered the interaction with innovation funding and other European funding programmes. There is a big interaction around energy and climate issues as well. We've begun that assessment but we haven't written it into this document. That's something that I expect to happen. Once the team rolls off this, on to that will be the next task. It's the Brexit implications. Moving on, we'll look at monitoring and evaluation. Section 35 of the Climate Act requires that each new RPP should reflect upon the progress made around the proposals and policies in the preceding one. However, the document seems to reflect a variation in the degree of detail that is provided. For example, the electricity chapter has very little detail that is set against some others. What lies behind that? I think that this probably reflects the way in which the document has been written. What we've tried to do is produce as much information as we can about progress. You'll see that the chapters are structured in that way, which has got information on progress in RPP2. I think that some sectors have given us more information than others. I don't think that there's any deliberate thing behind it. I think that there's certainly some useful feedback that we can take away from that point about the relative concerns that some sectors are not as well versed in those stories as others. We can take that feedback and, as we develop the final plan, we can beef up those sections. We'll have that consistency across the document. Moving forward, we obviously require a monitoring and evaluation framework to accompany the plan. Where are we at with that? We've spent a lot of time thinking about monitoring and evaluation. We've seconded Dr Sam Gardner from WWF to help us from a number of months. The work that Sam has been doing for us has been very much to think of what's needed in monitoring framework. Given his perspective as an employee of an NGO, we have that cross-check. Sam has also got very much involved in the policy work. The work that has taken place, taking the envelopes, as agreed by Cabinet, and working up the policies and proposals necessary to deliver that. Sam has been very much involved in that process of thinking through how do you hit and what do you need to be able to demonstrate that you will hit those envelopes. When I was talking earlier about the time profile of policy outcomes, that's very much part of that process. We have the output of times, which gives us a real sense of the penetration that you need in electric vehicles. I just want a very small example, but that's an important one. We've taken that information from times. We've sort of road tested that a little bit, excuse the pun. In the plan we've given those policy outcome profiles. Some of them need a little bit more work for sure, but I think the bare bones of that are there. We also have developed a policy framework, which is explained in the plan. It's quite a useful picture, which sort of explains that. As we roll out the final plan in due course, we very much intend to give an update on what we've got with that monitoring framework. The final monitoring framework will be published in 2018, along with the first annual summary. It's very much a work in progress, but what we've been very clear about is that it needed to be bedded into the plan. It needed to be bedded into the policy development process, hence Sam's role and the value that he's added to this project. Also, we're very clear that you need information to evaluate where we're going on. One of the things that I'm very keen to do is to have a conversation with the CCC. You'll remember, in their last progress report, they were very clear that we needed smart indicators on progress. One of the things that I would like to do now is where we are. I would like to have that conversation with them so that we can sort of marry our approaches as well. My understanding of Dr Gardner's succonment ends in a couple of weeks' time, is that right? Yes, because that's obviously WWF wanting back, so it can help you in the scrutiny process and other things. Dr Gardner's succonment has been extended a little bit up to the publication point. What we will be doing is taking forward the work that Sam has started and the framework that he's developed. We'll do that as an internal piece of government work. It's been enormously valuable having Sam with us because he's bought a very clear sense of what we need to provide to you and the NGOs in order to monitor the framework. Interesting position will be holding one of the NGOs to account for the climate plans. I think that's what joint working is all about. I want to develop this monitoring process issue because I think that the plan indicates that it will produce a capability to measure progress or otherwise in a variety of ways. If we assume that it will function as it's predicted to do, how would you envisage encapsulating the detail for the process of scrutiny by this Parliament and these parliamentary committees? For example, would there be an annual or biannual reporting mechanism so that Parliament could consider whether progress has been made or not? Perhaps on a less detailed level, one of the criticisms of RPP2 was that it was long on proposal short on policies. You couldn't accuse it of being that document. Nonetheless, there are a number of proposals that will develop into policies. I'm interested to explore the opportunity that will be for the committees of the Parliament who have an interest in the plan, going forward to have oversight of how the proposals have developed into policies and the more detailed items that I've mentioned previously. The commitment in the plan is to have an annual summary monitoring report. To some extent, the shape of that is a conversation that we can have over the course of the next 12 months or so as we develop that framework. What you need is an important consideration, so I'd encourage us to have that conversation about your needs as well. What I am personally very clear on is that there's a commitment in the plan to have that monitoring framework published every year from 2018. The CCC also produced their annual progress report, and I'm very pleased that over the past couple of years they produced that after the greenhouse gas stats have been published. I'm very keen, as I said a few moments ago, to have a conversation with them so that our scrutiny work without eroding their independence, but we're operating off a similar set of indicators. I think there's an awful lot going to be for you to allow you to do that. I think for us we need to be able to keep track on delivery. That's important to our cabinet secretary as well. We will need to keep an eye on exactly the issue that you talk about, about the development of moving proposals into policies. That's one element of it, but only one element of it. I think the other really important element of this scrutiny process is the greenhouse gas inventory. It is published with the lag, which is why we're keen to have different sorts of indicators in the monitoring framework, which give us a more up-to-date feel of where things are going on. It's an important part, and Colin and his team have been working very hard behind the scenes to improve the quality of that inventory as well. There's a lot of information there, which I'm very keen, and there's a commitment to the plan that we laid before you, but I would welcome that sort of conversation about what you need as well. I can just add one bit to that, which is that he's very deliberately the intention of this process that we plan an annual cycle of inquiry. Without revealing too much about what Mr Wheelhouse will say to Parliament later about the energy strategy, there is a similar process for what we plan there too. I would really appreciate the views of the committee on how you would like those things to be aligned and, indeed, how we might plan the scrutiny with Parliament around that calendar of the year, because I think that's a really valuable thing for all concerned. Okay, and just finally in this area I can ask the planned governance body that's been talked about. Will there be a role for some of the NGOs in that to have oversight of delivery of the plan? I think that's something that we need to reflect upon. As you'll be aware, we used to have something called the Climate Change Delivery Board, which didn't have NGOs on, but it had Dr James Curran, who was chief executive of CEPA, and then, as an independent, it also had a cosly representative, and it had Dr Andy Kerr from Edinburgh University. It had external members. During the development of the plan, we operated a slightly different model, which we got the senior civil servants together who were responsible for the different areas. We have experience of both, and I think it's an issue that we need to work through with the cabinet secretary about how she wants to do that. Obviously, the other part of that is the process that the cabinet and the subcommittee takes as well. I think that the blunt answer is that we haven't worked that through yet, but I think that we've got an awful lot of experience on which to base that sort of thinking. Thank you. Okay, moving on, Jenny Goldruth. Good morning to the panel. In terms of stakeholder involvement, it's clear that a collaborative approach has been adopted with regard to the draft plan. Page 27 of the report talks about half of the Scottish population seeing climate change as an immediate and urgent problem. I understand that a series of climate conversations were held nationally with members of the public to engage them in this process more broadly. I wonder if you can point to specific examples of where that stakeholder engagement has affected the draft plan itself. Secondly, I wonder if, as part of that engagement strategy, you specifically focus at all upon how you engage with young people, which is something that the committee is going to be doing tonight more broadly. I suppose that cuts into the next question, so I apologise to Kate Forbes, but in terms of effecting behaviour shift, I think that it's really important that you speak to the next generation. I wonder to what extent that stakeholder engagement has focused on young people at all, if it has. If I say something briefly, I'll let you talk about the climate conversations, but the one that I'm most familiar with is around energy efficiency, where we've done a lot of work to discuss what sort of policy might work. Quite different to the way that we might normally go about things, so you might characterise the normal approach of the civil service of the Government to these things, to sit in a room and plan something and then put some advice up and implement it. That just won't work when it comes to people's behaviours in their homes, how they interact with, for example, the energy market, why, for example, people don't do what economists like Colin might think are seeming the rational things to invest in their homes to make it warmer. Those conversations have been incredibly helpful in throwing light on how you might roll out an energy efficiency programme. Again, we'll put more detail around that later when we publish the energy strategy today, but that's one example of where those conversations have led to a change in the way that we approach that. John, you might want to say something about the climate conversations more generally. The climate conversations more generally, these have been rolled out in a number of ways. We've encouraged stakeholders and other people with an interest to run these and we have a toolkit for them doing that. Therefore, when those happen, we have very little control over who's involved in them. We have spent a little bit of money actually recruiting panels to participate in those, so we actually pay people to participate in the climate conversations. The numbers of people involved in that have been relatively small, although they have included young people. The numbers are small because of the nature, like a focus group, and therefore you can get an awful lot from a relatively small number of conversations. That demographic of young people has been included in that sense. The other elements in which young people have been involved in this process is to the 2050 group. The 2020 group set up a group of young people in their 20s who were interested in becoming climate leaders of the future. We have worked with them at various points on that. They were involved in the stakeholder event in December, for example. Young people have been involved, but not— To deliver on the significant buy-in from some sectors—probably all sectors—what direct conversations have been had with the likes of industry, or we've touched upon earlier, agriculture, and what is the vibe in terms of buy-in? Are some of them having to be dragged kicking and screaming to do this, or are they all universally right behind it, or are some in between? The conversations have been proceeding at different paces, I think, is the way of talking about this. For some years, the Government has had an involvement with the 2020 group, which is an independent group of businesses who have a strong interest in climate issues. They have been an important industry voice, but that is a self-selecting group of people who have an interest, and often an industrial interest in this area as well. Chris has pointed out that when it comes to things such as energy efficiency, there has been more involvement, particularly as the seed programme covers both non-residential and residential buildings. In agriculture, there's been a fairly intensive involvement of industry. One thing that I'm very pleased about is an opening up of conversations with the standard business organisations. The Government has now started to speak to all the business organisations about the climate plan. This is an enormously important development, because previously we hadn't had a great deal of success in those conversations. I'm pleased that the business organisations are interested and willing to talk. One of the key things that we will be doing over the next few months, as we reflect internally on the climate plan, is deepening those conversations with industry. The question is how clear are those sectors on their responsibilities and understanding the role that they have in them. Even allowing for the fact that they may get that they have a role to play, are they sufficiently well-equipped to deliver on the targets or to assist us in delivering on those targets? I think that a legitimate criticism of the plan is the extent to which each sector has been consulted in exactly the same way. You can contrast, for example, the renewables sector, which is one that we engage with very regularly, have a very clear understanding of their needs and how they will play a role in this system, going forward with a very disparate sector like the services. There has been engagement all through this plan with all the industrial sectors or commercial sectors in the economy, but the extent to which we have been able to do that varies immensely according to what the policy package is and how much we have existing relationships with them. That's something that I'm very keen that we do something about. My take on this plan is that this should be a facilitator for the discussions with some of the sectors that have had less engagement. How much work remains to be done? I accept quite a lot in some areas. I'm thinking particularly of the services sector, which is, of course, one of our biggest sectors at least, and is very disparate. We need to think about how best to facilitate the discussion with each sub-sector of services so that we can get into the discussion of how to get there. That probably moves us on to the whole issue of behavioural change, Kate Forbes. I just want to move on to the ISM approach, which the draft plan refers to in the three contexts that influence people's behaviour. There's a really helpful piece in the annex that covers that. Can you identify where, in the plan development process, behaviour change was considered? Particularly, where was it reflected in the iterative process of developing the emission pathways and the policy outcomes through the times process? One of the key things for us in thinking through this plan was behaviour change. It's been important. We have long recognised the importance of behaviour change within the Government and the importance of getting people to do the things that will help us in reducing carbon emissions. The work on the ISM model has been going on for a very long time. What we did in this plan, which I think pushed this forward, was that we put quite a lot of resource about how you use that model. We have the model developed. In conjunction with a number of external consultants, we developed toolkits for thinking about this. Crudely, how can you run a session for various different sorts of people using this ISM model, which will help in thinking about behaviour change and policy design? We put a reasonable amount of money behind this. We offered our colleagues in different parts of the Government the opportunity to have these workshops and to have them both for policy makers within Government and also externally. We had a pretty good take-up. Energy efficiency is one that comes to mind. It's a pretty classic issue that you invest in new systems, you invest in new heating systems and individuals have difficulty in using them, or they use them in certain sorts of ways that don't achieve what we want to do in terms of energy efficiency or carbon reduction. That was one of the areas in which the policy people took this and ran with it around a couple of these workshops, both internally and externally. The ability to change people's behaviour was very much factored into the development of policies and proposals. That has also reflected in the work that the Scottish Government's energy efficiency programme is doing on-seat. That's one pretty clear example. There are pieces of work that are upcoming. One that I know about is that we have an intention to look at the school run in terms of transport and mode choices and what we can do to influence behaviours around that as well. I think that there are two examples there, one that we've done and one that we intend to do. In terms of what you intend to do at the school run points is helpful, but what other plans? Could you sketch out some other plans in terms of furthering the work of engaging in low-carbon behaviours and increasing the pace of change after the publication of the plan? For me, just taking a step back on this, I think that one of the really key messages of the ISM model is that this is not just about running workshops or exhorting people to throw away your car keys or something. It's not about that. It's not simply just focusing on people. It's very much about making sure that you've got everything lined up so that you have the right sort of infrastructure in place, that you provide information and you help people do that, go on that change and also that you work with the social norms. For me, I see this in a very holistic way, so for me the work that needs to be done here is further refinement of the policies and proposals to make sure that we've got all those elements in place. I don't think that you can just pull out behaviour change like that and say it's about behaviour change. It's about the whole picture holistically. As we do further work on the policies and proposals in all areas, I think that that's going to come through. We had an example this morning when we were talking about soil testing and farming. We talked about energy efficiency and heating controls, but for me it's just across the whole piece. Active transport is another example of that. To ensure that you would say that behaviour change and factoring that in has played a big part in the... It's been a big part in our consideration. It's been a really big part in that sort of process once you have the envelopes of designing the policies and proposals underneath that. But this is not an issue of setting a lot of laurels and saying that we've done it and there's an awful lot more work that needs to be done. I think we have a really good framework and we have a really good toolkit and we have now a reasonable amount of experience in running these workshops both for policy developers but also involving the public or the people in the sector and we need to do more of it. Claudia Beamish On page 30 of the draft plan, the issues around the planning system are highlighted and I wonder if anyone on the panel today can describe for us the interactions in relation to the possibilities that you see in relation to the planning system and especially in view of the fact that there's a planning review which has just been launched recently by the Scottish Government. How that relates to the national planning framework? Michael Matheson I might take this joining please step in if you want to but it's particularly important when we think about the infrastructure challenge overall. We could actually try and distill out from this an infrastructure strategy and that's something that perhaps we will come to when it comes to putting more flesh around some of these issues. But we are particularly aware of the importance of the planning regime when it comes to the planning for future infrastructure and particularly transport and energy infrastructure which are the two key points for us. We look to that planning review which is under way at the moment as being a very important point and then the reframing of in particular the national planning framework and the SPP underneath that as being important moments in the future. Planning is not, I've learned from painful experience, not something that you can change quickly. I think that it's immensely important that you get the strategic objectives right at the outset and let the planning regime reflect that and I think that this puts us in that space. My planning colleagues in the Scottish Government plan for NPF4 and as part of the planning review the things that we have set out here as strategic objectives for the whole economy will play a much bigger role I hope in the way that we view the planning regime. Mark Ruskell If I could just go back to the issue of stakeholder engagement and in particular UK climate change committee. I mean the committee came up with a number of recommendations last year, some of which have been taken on board and are fleshed out as policy objectives or whatever in RPP but a number have been rejected. So what's been the process of rejecting those and then discussing the reasons for rejection with UKCC justifying that getting their advice on whether that's a wise move or not? Mark Ruskell So I think all this comes really down to the different ways that we've tackled this that the CCC have a modelling framework which is rather like the RPP2 framework and that's resulted in a number of recommendations and the times framework is different and we've talked at length about the characteristics of that times framework but it basically suggests that you can achieve things in a more effective and at a lower societal cost by doing things differently and what we have done is that we've worked very much with the times approach so it's not so much we've sort of rejected in a very explicit sense some of the CCC recommendations they've informed our thinking but the times model throws up some very very different approaches and I think Colin has already talked about some of the issues particularly in the residential and service sectors where the times modelling takes a slightly more aggressive approach perhaps than the CCC modelling and there are flips in transport I think it's probably one of them where the CCC would push more and we would push less. Isn't that challenging if your own advisers are operating a different modelling system to your own because surely the assumptions will be different and there's a mismatch there? I think it provides a very valuable double check. There are other people and we have been talking to them as well who operate the times framework so there's a group at Edinburgh University who operate the times framework in a slightly different context and different times models but I think that the fact that they're using a different modelling approach isn't an issue I think it's a strength that we have a variety of different approaches and it allows us to sort of cross check what their advice against our advice or our modelling and against their modelling and I think that's going back to your point about iteration I think that's an important thing that we need to continue to do with them and deepen that conversation. I should add though that we've kept the CCC pretty much in the loop on where we're going with times modelling and our general approach that when the analysts and column were building the times model and doing the data checking we had some very helpful input from the chief analyst at the CCC so they know what we're doing and they know our approach and we just have a different approach to modelling. I can't speak for the CCC but my understanding is that they accept entirely the validity of the times approach so it's just an alternative way of modelling it. It does throw out different conclusions though I accept. Have you run their policy recommendations through the times model? They are just different ways of taking the approach so what times is doing as we've discussed before is looking at the whole system, what they're doing is looking at components within the system. I suppose what you can usefully do is to compare those two approaches and look for areas of difference and look for areas of similarity and use that to cross reference as John has said. The thing that we've been particularly careful to try and do during the modelling process is to view the model as a guide so it's not setting out in tablets of stone what the future will look like. It's setting out on the basis of our understanding of the best information that we have available to ourselves just now, what we think the future may look like and what we think the challenges may be in terms of getting to those pathways. I think that it's important to understand that there's not one truth, there are multiple aspects of that and I think that it's a good example of this again coming back to it is our approach to having the separate evidence reviews around the benefits that aren't captured in the times framework. If you look at the bottom line times number, they're not in there but they are in the plan and they are in the consideration that's come around the package of the plan. Can I just press you on one particular recommendation that we touched on earlier? That's about compulsory soul testing rather than a policy where the Government expects farmers to be uptaking soul testing by next year. Have you run those two different scenarios through the times modelling? One where there's clearly a compulsion, a regulatory regime, the other one where there's a policy based on volunteerism. What the times model does is it provides you with the least cost or the least cost modified envelope for the agricultural sector. It takes account of the costs in the agricultural sector of reducing emissions to society, however that's done, be it through compulsion, regulation, volunteerism or whatever. It does the same for other areas as well. It will take those things for transport and it will say, look, this is technologically what you can do. This is the best least cost technology that you should do, ditto in agriculture. Then the policy teams go away and they spend time, and this is where Sam Gardner was particularly important in his process of saying, look, here we have an envelope that we have to hit, here are the policy levers and proposals available to us which ones are best, which one will hit, which ones are best for us in delivery terms, which ones will work with the grain of stakeholders. That's the process. You can't, in a sense, run those two compulsory soil testing versus voluntary soil testing through times. All that times will give you is that you need to get the application of nitrogen at a certain level. It's very much the more traditional approach to developing policies and proposals that sets underneath the times envelope. Let's leave times out of it for now and just pursue this line about UKCCC recommendations. One of the criticisms that's been made is about a failure to identify who has ownership of a policy. What I want to tease out here is around this quite important issue. Will there be, as we move forward, people bodies, because it's not just government who will have ownership of a policy, or are we to assume that the relevant minister or cabinet secretary ultimately has that ownership? That's a really important question. I might not be able to give you a satisfactory answer to it, because I'm not sure there is one. The way that we've approached this is that we've made cabinet secretaries responsible for the policy making. That's what you see laid out in the draft plan. I think there's a different discussion about who ultimately is responsible for the ownership of the delivery of that policy. Our intention in monitoring that is that we are much clearer and transparent about who's responsible for that in the future. I think that it will vary according to what the policy is. Indeed, some of those policies vest the EU and UK level as well. There's a question there about how, if at all, we can oversee delivery in a clear fashion. If I could just add to what Chris has said, what we do in the plan is we're very clear about, first of all, are those policies at the EU level, which we've talked about, ETS, the UK level, we've talked about CCS, or the Scottish level. Table 9.1, for example, on page 73, does this. It's very clear on the public sector partners. Table 9.1 is not a great example of that, just as it's not applicable. On page 76, for example, there's an example where local authorities are responsible for a policy proposal. If you go through the policy chapters, public sector partners are clearly identified and there's also a very strong narrative on delivery routes. We have thought this through in the policy development and we're trying to be pretty clear about it. Again, that's part of this approach to being much more taking on board the concerns around RPP2. What we've been trying to do here is being transparency about the delivery routes and the public sector body, which is responsible. In governmental terms, Chris is absolutely right, the individual portfolio cabinet secretary has responsibility within cabinet for those policies and proposals. What happens if local authorities haven't been on the public sector forum before in the last part? What happens if a local authority doesn't deliver a say on the policy that you've got about dealing with taxis? What happens if they're the leader? That becomes a standard conversation between Transport Scotland and our colleagues in local government. We have been at pains to establish relationships with COSLA around some of these issues. There's an ongoing conversation there. That becomes a standard part of government policy delivery. Similar issues occur in education and elsewhere. Let's move on and look at Peatlands. I personally find the targets that have been laid down very welcome. If the 2017-18 draft budget line is the shape of things to come, then there's considerable funding there to help deliver on those. There are a number of practical questions that arise from that policy. It talks about providing grant funding to eligible land managers. I wonder if you could define which land managers are eligible and ineligible. I note from table 6.1 that I realise that this is probably only indicative that you seem to be envisaging 10-plus projects a year failing to be awarded grants. I'm just going to leave it a little bit of clarity, because I think that, out there, I'm excited that people are by this policy announcement that they're looking for that kind of level of detail. I don't know the answer to that question. We will write to you and we'll just make a note of that. It might be the same with my other questions, which would be about the policy that indicates that restoration will predominantly be aimed at large landscape scale projects, rather than small fragmented ones. I can understand the logic of that, but I'm just going to look for an indication of what would constitute large or small scale projects. Whether you'll be focusing on badly degraded bogs or the easier to repair ones, or a mix of both, because that's a significant issue around the result that you get. If we're still on the subject of what you're going to write back to us on, I'm interested in whether the funding that's been identified is purely for the purpose of physically restoring the peatlands. There is an issue around having restored peatlands, particularly on a significant scale in certain parts of the country, the Cairngorn's national park, where, for example, you then face the cost of fencing in the bogs to protect them from the ravages of deer. It would be useful if you want to write back to us on all that to have that detail. I think that we should write back rather than seek inspiration at this moment. I'm happy to do that, but it is an area that a lot of interest has been generated around, and people are asking those questions, so as much detail as we have, I think, would be fine. Let's move on to the subject of waste, Maurice Golden. I refer members to my register of interests with respect to Zero Waste Scotland. The waste sector is a success story in terms of climate change, yet other waste targets such as recycling rate targets have not been met. How does the plan for the waste sector seek to deliver on related targets, whether in waste or other sectors? Briefing that I've had from my colleagues in waste can see if that actually gives you a helpful answer to that question. My sense is that what I have in front of me is very much that we're going to continue to work towards our ambitious, towards a suite of ambitious targets, including, I think, some of the things that you've mentioned, of reducing waste by 50% by 2025 and increase recycling, 100% of all waste by 2025, that we're going to be building on our waste regulations, which keep food waste out of landfill, by reducing the amount of food wasted in the first place and, through action, to meet our 33% food waste target. I think that those are the key points on that, but I recognise that that's not a full answer to what you've asked. So there could be potential conflicts there in terms of synergies between the draft climate change plan and other recycling or waste targets? No, I don't think that that's the case. I think that our colleagues in waste have worked, they're aware of their existing targets and I think that they'll have taken that on board. So I don't think that they'll be that sort of... I think that Colin Mayor. One of the issues that we faced early on in the process was that our modelling potentially identified waste as a potential source of energy, but our colleagues in waste were very quick to point out to us the existing policy framework around waste so we didn't undercut that agenda. So how, in terms of your assumptions on that specific point, how does energy from waste fit in with the assumptions you have made for the waste sector going forward? So we were guided by our colleagues from waste about what we put in terms of diverting waste streams into the modelling. The alternative is that waste can look very attractive to those models as a source of energy, but obviously when you're starting to develop more positive uses for some of those waste streams around, for example, the recycling, the whole reuse agenda, you don't want to be cutting off that source of raw material. So the information that was fed into the model took account of those policies. You're confident there won't be a conflict, for example, between energy from waste and the contractual commitments that local authority have made to burn waste and the targets set by the Scottish Government to recycle the same waste at a level of 70 per cent by 2025? That's a level of detail beyond which we were going in the modelling. We're looking at this in a sort of high-level strategic view and we're taking the policy that waste is giving us going forward and implementing that into the modelling framework so we won't be breaking any contracts. Those assumptions as energy from waste staying the same in Scotland, increasing or decreasing within the assumptions for this draft plan? I don't have the energy from waste assumptions in front of me, I'm afraid. I can certainly add those to the list of things we're writing out with. Is there any conflict potentially between the food waste reduction targets of 33 per cent and the bio refinery road map? Potentially there are feedstocks there that could be very interesting in terms of processing and a reduction of those same feedstocks. I don't think that there is a conflict, although I can see why you asked that question. What we are able to do is to understand how the energy system would cope with that, so that's what times is very good at now, whether it can go down to that level of detail. I'm not sure, but what we therefore take from my colleagues in the policy team that look at waste and the minister responsible is a set of assumptions that allow Colin to do the modelling work. I am confident that, in the future, we could model, for example, different approaches to those things. Bioenergy is quite underdeveloped as a topic at the moment, so that's something that I expect to develop in the future, a position in which that would change, I'm sure. The Committee on Climate Change has recommended encouraging recycling and separate food waste collections in rural and island communities. What solutions is the Scottish Government considering and what leadership will be provided to local authorities in those areas who may not have the expertise of major waste collection service changes or commissioning new waste processing plants? I think that the best thing is that we write to you with that question. Can I just pick up on this issue about local authorities? Table 12.1 talks very clearly about local authorities being partners in delivery, but local authorities face other challenges that may conflict with what we are trying to achieve in this area. For example, if you take Angus Council, top performing recycling authority in Scotland, because of budgetary pressures, it has decided to close some recycling centres, reduce the hours of others, and it's currently withdrawing access to food waste collection in rural areas on the borders of settlements and villages. What consideration has been given to the fact that local authorities, as partners, may have other pressures coming to bear that may take them in a different direction to the one that we want to go on with us? At the top level, the idea of partnership with local authorities is built on. There are various degrees of partnership. The policies that you laid out here are at that kind of level. I feel very strongly that we need a multiplicity of approaches across Scotland. Perhaps 32 would be too many. At the moment, we have a plan that is very macro, if I can put it that way. I think that the next stage is one of the most exciting things to think about how we manage this and indeed the energy work that we will do after the current period of setting strategies is to understand in much more detail what local plans for those things are and indeed for the Scottish Government to support those local plans. When I think that a partnership is that, I would like to assist with the process of planning for a more bespoke energy and climate plan. I think that that stops short of a different carbon budget for each locale of Scotland. You'd be free to suggest that, of course, but I can see that that would be a very difficult thing to implement. I do feel that something very useful for us would be to be in partnership with local authorities to better understand what the plan is in that area. Partly as a means for public funding to flow, but also because it acts as a prospectus for private investment when you do that properly. That's something I'm very keen that we should do after this. Local authority clusters might be part of that. I do feel that 32 of those plans is probably too many. I'm happy to be challenged on that, but we certainly should have regional plans in as best we can put those together. That does require quite deep partnership working. I think that sets the framework for that as the best way I can describe it. Moris Golan, if you want to come in there. Do you have a point on that? Just thinking about the macro-level policies again, what consideration has been given to potential policies around deposit return or introducing greater producer responsibility within the draft plan? Again, I'm not an expert in waste unless any of my colleagues know the answer to that question. We'll add that to the list. Apologies that I don't have that detail. Moris Golan, not finally. One more. I'm just thinking about jobs this time. Obviously, the evidence review makes clear that there's a lack of recent data and certainly Scottish-specific data. I just wondered if you felt that this was a concern and whether it was a plan to commission any studies around this. I don't think it's a concern, but I do see it as an area for further research. Indeed, all of the stats that I'm aware of around job numbers, for example in the low-carbon economy, are highly speculative. Although some of them now are national stats, some of the methodologies for bringing those things together are constantly reviewed. I think that there's an area that we could do more on. Colin, do you want to say anything about how we might approach that? At the moment, the challenge has been from the main macro-level data sets that everything has done on the basis of standard industrial classification. That tends to be a fairly blunt tool. Particularly as the tentacles of the low-carbon economy start to reach out into traditional sectors, it becomes much more tricky to split out which jobs are or are not low-carbon in nature. What we've tended to fall back on on that is bespoke surveys, but those bespoke surveys are obviously expensive and we have to run them at quite a large scale in order to get any kind of level of statistical robustness. That's why the UNS has brought forward the measures that they have. I think that it would be helpful if you were looking at that going forward to not just look at the total numbers of jobs but the types of jobs where they would be located. I'm aware that RAP in England has published wider than the waste sector, but a circular economy report looking at both the total number jobs, where they're likely to be presented, how that reflects on unemployment in some of our most deprived areas in England. I think that it would be useful to publish any reports that you may have on that and also look at a more detailed study into that. Let me say now that I agree with that. There's always a tendency for us to alight on a single figure for job numbers in something as desperate as a low-carbon economy. I don't think that's particularly illustrative of what's happening here. I think that the major reason why I would like to do what you've suggested is that it really steers future policy development. We would have a much stronger sense of where the high-value jobs lie in tackling climate change if we can get underneath the skin of the national position. In doing that, let's take account of the jobs that will be created by people in restoration because there will be jobs around that as well in rural areas. Claudia Beamish Can I turn our thoughts to blue carbon and marine issues in relation to climate change? As you'll know in the last session of the Parliament, I took a keen interest in those issues as did Paul Wheelhouse, who was then the climate change minister. There was in the RPP2 on page 225, just for the reference, what I would describe as a box on blue carbon, rather like there was a box on peatlands in the RPP1, which flowed into where we are now with the low-carbon issues that are highlighted in this draft plan on peatlands. Frankly, very disappointingly for me and a number of others, unless I've missed it, I don't see blue carbon in there as a development. If I can just quote very quickly, it says on that page, that the Scottish Government is working with Scottish Natural Heritage to continue to develop our understanding of blue carbon, A, increase understanding and B, to review and develop policies on blue carbon and consider proposals to capture their potential. Most importantly, it says that it is hope that this will allow us to build a foundation from which it may be possible to develop policies and proposals for inclusion in the next RPP, which is RPP3, or the Climate Change Plan, in order to contribute to the efforts necessary to meet Scotland's annual greenhouse emission reduction targets. I think there's an absence and I'd like to know if you can shed any light on how that's happened and whether, indeed, at this stage it might be remedied. I know through questioning, sorry, but in the last session, through the questioning that happened in part, and also representations from NGOs, I think that's why the box went in. It wasn't there at the start of the previous plan. I am very disappointed, frankly, and I'd like to have any comment. Certainly blue carbon was something that we were aware that this predecessor to this committee was very interested in, and I remember the conversation in this today's predecessor very much about that, and his hopes, which I think are yours, to be mish, about the potential for blue carbon. That's something that we have been speaking with our colleagues in Marine Scotland around. My understanding is that the advance of both science and some of the monitoring frameworks has been much less rapid than it has been in the corresponding area of Pete. I think that we've been making enormous progress with Pete, which is reflected in both RPB2 and RPB3, the climate change plan, and that has been on part on the back of some of the monitoring and scientific understanding. As I say, my understanding is that things just didn't develop as rapidly in both monitoring and the economy might be able to add to that in terms of IPCC and the accounting framework, nor in terms of our scientific understanding of some of the measures which may be potential here. That explains its absence. It was something that we did consider and pushed quite hard at in the early stages of the development of the plan, but the message that I've been having back from Marine Scotland was that we're just not as far forward because of both science and accounting frameworks on this one. I think that we have to accept that this is an area where we require further work. I'll reflect on that after this. I think that the other thing to say is that, of course, this is partly the process that I hope we are now engaging in, so I'm pleased, although that might sound odd. I think that the scrutiny process should, throughout things where we require to do more and to look further, so it sounds like one of those areas. In view of the fact that there was what Mr Wheelhouse and I described as this box that referred to the possibilities for the future in RPB2, that we should at least not lose it altogether. I would be keen to see what sort of research has been put into the final plan and what sort of research there has been, because I know that there has been someone seeking help in a whole range of other areas. It seems to me, at the very least, that that's something that we should be able to update you on. I'll take that entirely. There are obviously a number of items that you've taken away today to write back to us. I do appreciate how incredibly busy you are at the moment, but if we could get answers as quickly as possible to do that, that would be great. The committee clerks will be in touch with some reminders of some of those points. I thank all of you today for your attendance and your useful evidence. We'll now suspend for five minutes for comfort break in the regime. Welcome back to the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. We moved to agenda item 3, which is to take evidence from Scottish Natural Heritage on its report on deer management in Scotland. We've been joined this morning by Andrew Bachel, director of policy and advice, Donald Fraser, the operations manager for deer and wildlife, Claudia Rouse, head of rural resources unit and Des Thompson, the principal adviser for biodiversity at SNH. Good morning, everyone. Mr Bachel, I think you will give us a short statement to begin with. Very much, chairman. I hope it is reasonably short, but I'd first like to say thank you very much indeed for inviting SNH to come back to provide you with further information and to respond to some of the other submissions that you've heard. Having listened to a range of the responses to the SNH review of deer management, we've no doubt that there are many questions that you may wish to raise with us. We're pleased that the report has stimulated considerable interest and has widened the focus from just red deer in the uplands to all species of deer throughout Scotland. Deer are a huge asset, a vital part of the natural heritage and our ecology, as well as a valuable economic resource contributing to tourism, food, culture and jobs, and that's an important context for our work. We don't think that anybody has disagreed with our overall conclusion that deer are having an adverse impact on the natural heritage. We are more than content with the conclusions of the report and those findings as they were based on the best available evidence and robust analysis and scrutiny of that analysis. The evidence has been drawn from a number of sources and we would never claim that the evidence base was perfect, but we don't think there are any fundamental gaps or errors in what we presented and we see no reason to redraw the conclusions and we can explain that. You have heard some views to the contrary which we will pick up on. The five pieces of evidence that we have relied on are the James Hutton Institute work on populations trends data, the native woodland survey, the site condition monitoring data, section 7 analysis and lastly but certainly not least the assessment of the performance of the deer management groups since 2013. There have been some generic and some specific comments on that. I'll address some of the generic ones to start with. There was a question about the timing of the review. Given that more information was due to be delivered to us in 2017, a question about whether we should have deferred publication but that would have been out with the commission timetable that the previous minister had set and in our view would not have added greatly to the findings but nevertheless we will continue to review information that comes to us and take that into account over the following months. One thing that we were not asked to do, in fact we were specifically asked not to do, was to produce recommendations but I'm clear that it might be helpful to consider options and certainly we would be happy to explore next steps, not at the stages recommendations but in order to carry the debate forward that's now been started. We're conscious that it's not necessarily around the issue of evidence though that more needs to be done to resolve the conflicting demands for deer management. It's vital that we make use of the various policy statements and documents and guidance that exists in order to deliver action on the ground but more than anything perhaps we need clear settled priorities to bring that into account. I would argue that that's the most important piece of work that now needs to be done. There's also been a question about the experience of SNH that we have brought to this work. SNH has a lot of experience as a deer manager. We own and manage a number of significant estates where deer are a major component of the wildlife. We have staff with practical experience of deer management who also provide advice to others and have been integral in preparing some of the documents like the wild deer national approach and so forth. We have a very strong science base with experienced wildlife managers and others able to address complex ecological and data issues. Our review involved people from all of these backgrounds and several of them thankfully are here with me today. But we didn't do this work alone. The conclusions are ours and we stand by them but we have been greatly assisted by others in this process and in that regard I would like to put on record a particular thanks to the association of deer management groups and to Richard Cook without whom we would not have got a lot of the data that we have required to have for this work so our thanks to them. I would also like to make it clear that the report is not universally critical. There is a wealth of good practical experience out there on which future arrangements might be based. There are examples of attempts to deliver on the public interest objectives by managers of private land. What we didn't find was a consistent standard or a consistent evidence of progress. I suspect that I have taken up enough time just on an introduction there. I would like to ask Claudia Rouse to pick up on a couple of the other specific areas where criticism has been levelled at SNH. Thank you very much and good morning everyone. There were quite a few different comments circulating about our review and I am not going to go through them all. There were two main areas that I think really referred to the evidence and that I would like to clarify for you. The first was in relation to the trends and population where we received the most substantial amounts of supplementary evidence and criticisms and questions about the James Hutton Institute work. I wasn't proposing to clarify further because I actually felt that Professor Alban's oral evidence last week and the supplementary submission from the James Hutton addressed fully the issues that had been raised. What they did confirm to summarise is that the robust, the trends that we showed over the last 50 years are absolutely robust and that the questions about the changes in methodology don't bear scrutiny. The other issue about the difference in the modelling scenario compared to the practical counts was also with standard tolerance of about 10 or 20 per cent. It also was upheld the evidence. Moving on, I want to touch on the other main area that seems to have attracted additional analysis and some misunderstandings about how the data has been interpreted, which, as we discussed last time, is complex and difficult. That is in relation to the native woodlands survey. There have been a couple of specific issues that are not new to us because the survey was published in 2014. They have been quite well rehearsed in these positions. Mainly, I have spoken to the Forestry Commission who commissioned the work. Their view is that it is about misunderstandings about how you interpret this complex set of data. There were two issues that I have picked up mainly, but I am happy to answer any other queries you may have, about the interpretations of the data. One was that there is no dispute that deer are impacting native woodlands and that the headline figure that over 30 per cent of native woodlands are impacted by herbivores. However, there were some new analysis done that used a different data set, which then said that the native woodlands survey had incorrectly identified deer as the major driver. What this additional interpretation said was that it identified that non-native trees such as Rhododendrin are a greater threat and impacting on native woodlands. That does not do interesting new analysis, but because it uses a different data set, it does not apply and is not relevant to the findings of the native woodlands survey. It does not counteract the main finding that 30 per cent of native woodlands are impacted by herbivores. The one other factor that I can and I am just finishing on native woodlands was the allegation that surveyors had a tendency to overestimate the recording of deer as being present. That is incorrect in terms of the guidance that was given to surveyors. Surveyors were asked to do two things for the native woodlands survey. One was to identify the impacts that I have discussed as the 30 per cent figure and the other thing was to say, can you identify which herbivores are present? They could only identify 77 per cent of cases where herbivores were present and in 23 per cent of cases they could not identify which herbivore and none was recorded. For the record, as it shows in our review, in 73 per cent of cases they did identify deer and that is a correct figure. Supplementary information that is provided in the full native woodlands survey, but I do not think that we went into the detail in our report, 15 per cent of cases they identified livestock and in three and a half per cent of cases rabbits and hares. It shows that it was incorrect to say that the guidance on surveyors. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Let's move on. David Stewart. Good morning, panel. I've got a few technical questions about the SNH report on deer management. The first issue was what was the procedure for selecting external, pure reviewers of your report? We have a scientific advisory committee, which is composed of a variety of experts, and for this particular report we chose one member, Professor Robin Paceman, to go through in detail the annexes. Professor Colin Adams at Glasgow University asked to peer review the report. Colin was a former member of our science advisory committee and on occasions chaired our scientific advisory committee meeting. He's a very experienced reviewer. He didn't have a lot of time to review the report, but he returned the report with substantial comments that we then addressed. The external reviewers were effectively part of your scientific community that you have in SNH. Was there any external advertising to invite people to be external reviewers? Was it advertised? No, this is why we have a scientific advisory committee. It's quite standard to use members of a scientific advisory committee and members offer an expert advisory panel to review reports for us, and normally we'd have one or two reviewers carrying out that assessment. You would have picked up our evidence from Professor Albin last time round when he suggested that one way forward was to make the report a so-called beta version, which is the horrible jargon from computer software, where you ask for external consultants to review a piece of software before you fully launch it in the market and it could be applied to any scientific piece of work. Is that something that you would consider useful in terms of its viability with the industry generally, no disrespect to your scientists who reviewed it, but in the sense that they would be seen as independent and external? My understanding of most academic work is that getting external validation from peers is very important in the academic community, presumably it's important in your community as well. Yes, it is. In fact, I am an associate editor of Journal of Applied Ecology, so I have to deal with this all the time in terms of getting reviewers. I think what we've done for our dear reviewers is perfectly fine in terms of how we've published other reviews. Indeed, for some reviews such as those, we might not have gone out to external review. However, I can say for the report that we received from the James Hutton Institute, we will be carrying out a more detailed review because there's so much more science in that report. That might be touched at the point that was made earlier by Andrew in the sense that the previous minister had suggested certain time-stales and that there was no recommendations. Obviously, you've had a lot more information then, so it's possible that you could have a phase 2 report that incorporates this new research. I don't think that's necessary and given the comments that we've received in the report, we don't see any need for that. It's clearly very important that when we get the James Hutton report and we're obviously looking forward to receiving that, given the excellent evidence that Professor Albin said, that it will go through a detailed review process. It did pick up. Obviously, the role of the committee is not to be the Government, we are there to keep government in check and we are there to give advice as well to organisations out there that are responsible to government. Clearly, we're not scientists but clearly there was criticism of the report. One very practical suggestion was if you had more external reviews and then had a stage 2 report, your report will be a lot more credible. Obviously, it's in our interest to see the reports more credible. You may have had one tramline that you started on. We're suggesting another tramline. Can I just add maybe to Desi's comments? As I think Andrew picked up, the five key pieces of evidence still stand in our view. The James Hutton will be subject to external peer review. The Native Woodland Survey is previously published, so it doesn't warrant any further peer review. The deer management group assessment, which forms a significant part of new data, there have been no disagreements about that and that has been collected in partnership with the deer management groups. The two other areas that are using our own data on site condition monitoring and the use of section 7s are quite small. Certainly, section 7s is a very small data set with 11 agreements. The data sets are not subject to further peer review. For me, the main challenge has been in terms of how we reached our conclusion based on the evaluation of those data sets rather than it being meriting any further peer review. Although I can accept that it was science that gave us this advice at the last advice session, if you have nothing to fear with your report, what are you to fear with having further external assessments? Clearly, the scientists of the first class who looked at it were effectively internal because they were part of your scientific advisory committee. That's quite normal in terms of peer review. It's often extremely difficult to find referees who we don't know. I should also add, of course, that as we were producing the report, we had a small group of scientists actually advising on a number of the chapters. We had a deer science group with three individuals, a group that was chaired by Andrew on occasion. As we went through the process of preparing the report, we were very careful to make sure that we had scrutiny of the science, but I must emphasise that once we get the report from the James Hutton Institute, we will be carrying out a detailed review. As for the record, I'm not criticising the scientists of the first class who were advising you. I'm merely making the point. If you don't advertise, it's very hard to know what's out there. Since there has been some criticism, a suggestion that certainly came from witnesses last week is that you do look again at this. My suggestion would be, why don't you look at advertising in some specific areas where you think it's useful, seeing it as someone who's not attached to SNH to give another view on this? I think that that would help with the credibility of the report. The review ultimately, and I'm not sure if Andrew wants to come in here as well, represented the view of SNH, and we knew that that's what it was going. We were asked for our view and we gave our view, and I think that that is mainly where the disagreements have been, not on the underlying interpretation, which, as I've said, most of the interpretation of the data is around misunderstandings, so I don't think it would be appropriate to ask for a peer review of something that represents the view of SNH's board. However, I'm happy to draw or explain further how we reached that view, because running through the thread of each of the five key evidences are about the impact on the natural heritage, and there is nothing anyone has said that disputes that. I'll take it off topic, and I'll give you a good deal of detail. We're already touched briefly on the data sets, but there have been some comments that the interpretations are not reflective of the evidence. What would be your response to accusations that the report is biased? I'll pick up the general question there and let Claudia pick up some of the detail. We have brought to this process people within the organisation, an economist, plant ecologists, people who experience in deer, the whole raft of skills that we have at our disposal, and they have all had a role in undertaking the review and monitoring how the work was done. As Des has already said, we have had the external review, and one issue that I might add on that is the scientists that we have picked for that are all picked through a public appointments process to get on to the advisory panel in the first place, so there is that level of external advertising that we didn't refer to. I think it's important that we've brought all of those skills together in the team that was responsible for bringing the report together. Inevitably, we will make judgments based on the principal functions of SNH, which is, as the adviser to government, on the natural heritage. It would be expected of us, I think, to cover that in more detail than to cover some of the other areas in which we're not as expert. If there is a slant in the report towards that and not towards other things, that reflected the brief that we were given, and obviously it reflects the nature of the organisation that we are, we would not claim to be experts in these other areas. I hope that we haven't then tried to draw conclusions that would be unreasonable. I thought what you were going to go on to say in us having some perceived bias is what some commentators have picked up is that the analysis that flows through the review was not then reflected in the conclusions and that we seem to note many successes in the analysis and then drew more negative conclusions. What I think that reflects is that we were absolutely, as open, rather like the group that you have here on the committee. We had an editorial panel that consisted of people who worked very, very closely in dear management in SNH, coupled with others such as myself, who have come in with more analytical and robust and a bit more distance from the industry to set out some scrutiny and challenge, and that is reflected in our management team and in our board. In terms of the flow, we related the many successes because we are really determining that this review wasn't seen as a critique of the industry. What we have found when you look at the actual analysis, particularly of the DMGs, there are many, many successes and many people are doing the right thing. We wanted to reflect those, but we did have to look at the terms of reference, which is where our conclusions come from, which was what was the impact on the natural heritage specifically. That thread runs through the increasing deer trends, the native woodland, section 7's site condition monitoring and the DMG assessment. I just want to interrupt Kate Forbes' point, because I recall that one of the accusations that was made was that you put the report together and you didn't talk to the people in your organisation or run it by them. Just to be absolutely clear, have people like Mr Fraser with expertise at the coalface as it were, did they have sight of the report and any input into it before it was made public? Yes, but I think that Donald will do it. Inevitably, we were involved very much in terms of the data gathering inside of it and getting the data for the report. We were involved in some of the drafting of the report and seen sight of the report at the end of the day. Obviously, there is a process to go through there in terms of editorial process, our management team looking at it and the board sign of it. Obviously, the report went through the whole gambe of the people who were involved in the organisation. Can I just add for the record that other colleagues, including our XDCS staff, of which Donald is one of them, are represented on our management team and on our board and we are on the senior panel with the editorial panel providing the scrutiny and challenge and examination and balance for the review. There has obviously been a great variety of responses to the report. Do you think that any relationships have been damaged, for example, between SNH and dear management groups? How do you see going forward that relationship being strengthened? I'll pick that up, but I think that Donald is closer to them. I think that I would accept that this has strained the relationships because when you say something that is uncomfortable and perhaps not expected, that's bound to be an outcome. It certainly wasn't an intention of SNH. We acknowledge the input that the deer industry has made to this process and we know that there are no solutions that can be found that don't involve them very closely in next steps. We certainly wish to put that on record, but Donald is certainly closer to this. Generally, we have a good relationship with ADMG. We have some good discussions with them. We have robust discussions with them. We have good involvement with the local deer management group. Through our local area officers—that's why I'm management officers and area officers—we have a good relationship there. I think that that relationship remains. There's no doubt that the report has pointed to areas where the industry and some of the deer management groups have to look forward. I guess that it is looking at the basis of what is the way forward, what are the points that need to be addressed, where are the next steps in that and to make sure that staff within our organisation and the DMGs and those in the lowlands are engaged in that process. What are the next steps? Have you got any suggestions or ideas for next steps to strengthen that relationship? At a very practical level, the report has highlighted the areas where there is weakness. There is some more work required in terms of some of the environmental aspects that need to be looked at in terms of deer management planning. We have also gone through a robust process over the past couple of years looking at developing deer management plans. Those plans are now being implemented. The very important point is that we are in that process now of implementation. That is where our staff and our role can benefit in working with deer management groups, working with individuals and working with the lowlands to identify those next steps, making sure that we are clear on what is being asked and that there is a clear route in terms of the way forward of working together. That is not a criticism because you are entitled to stand by the report, but if you are sitting today saying that we would not redraw our conclusions, we stand by them, it becomes very difficult given that the other side of the argument is equally as polarized in coming together to find a way forward. Is that not a concern? I am not suggesting that you should admit to someone that you do not believe is the case, but it seems to strike me that we have two arguments at different ends of this. I think that that is the issue in front of us in a nutshell, is that people do come to this issue, I was tempted to call it a problem there, but this issue with different perspectives. Their perspectives are based often on their objectives for the land and those objectives can be very broad from a purely sporting and commercial interest at one end to a purely habitat and conservation interest at another. The fact that people have different objectives, we do try to address through some of the documents we have, the wild deer national approach, good deer management guidelines and so on, but those themselves do not reconcile the different objectives. I think that the next steps must involve a closer dialogue about that objective setting and we need to establish a context in which that can be done openly and fairly. Let's move on and look at research on the logic change. We've touched on that already, but Emma Harper has a question. We've reviewed a lot of evidence in the last few weeks and even the academics were here last week, but as I've learned more about deer management, I see that it doesn't seem that anything was considered about immuno-contraception or using these porcine products that prevent deer from getting pregnant. Maybe that would be a less emotive way to deal with urban deer rather than shooting them. I'm just wondering if any of these methods of biological, surgical interventions were considered because it wasn't explored in the report. In terms of the evidence that we reviewed, they were the five key data sets. What you've talked about about the potential for the future control of deer through alternative methods rather than culling is an area of future research about how you would apply it, what society might feel is tolerable and the actual there's been developments recently about the technology involved in providing immuno-contraception. We didn't provide it as a review of the data sets because there is no information about using it as a control method. On an on-going basis, SNH ought to be looking at, because we heard an evidence talk about, instead of fencing everything, you could use these ways of devices to scare deer off. There's technology and approaches evolving, so surely that's something that you should be on top of as the agency with responsibility for deer management? It is something that we are considering and, in fact, at our next meeting of our science advisory committee, we're anticipating taking a paper on immuno-contraception for further discussion. There are all sorts of issues around its use, applicability and effectiveness, but it's one of several techniques that we've been considering, along with a variety of remote sensing techniques for counting deer, other techniques for assessing habitat. There's a whole battery of techniques that we'll be considering. On your specific point, we will be taking that to our science advisory committee. I'd just like to emphasize what Dey said there, in that we are looking at that. We have looked at that in the past. It's an issue that does come up, especially in regard to lowland deer, where we're trying to do management in an urban context. However, there are a number of considerations that you have to take into account—the practical considerations, the resource considerations and, most important, the welfare considerations of using that type of approach. There are constraints to that, which we have found. Thank you, convener. Good morning. Good afternoon to everybody. Could I turn our minds to lowland deer management? It's a very complex issue that we've taken a lot of evidence on in this committee and in the previous session, not least in a session in the Borders. The panel could ask you about the efficacy of the current structures for lowland deer management and just very quickly highlight one or two points that were raised on 22 November to us in committee. Ian Ross said, We do not have a collaborative approach in large areas of lowland Scotland. This is a challenge that we need to address. Then Eileen Stewart said SNH, I quote, making sure that the current patchy performance of local authorities is improved and stress that we do not yet have a model. On 13 December of last year, Richard Playfair highlighted, I quote, I would like to think that we promote the memberships views—that's the lowland deer network Scotland—but we do not necessarily know what their views are at any given time. That is something that we would appreciate as a committee or comment on perhaps more on the way forward, but if you have any comments on the remarks that I have quoted or other issues about where we are now, that would be helpful as well. In terms of the specific comments on the collaborative approach, we are dealing with a very different context in lowlands than we are in the uplands. We are dealing with different species of deer, a different land ownership pattern and the collaborative approach that is applicable in the uplands of Scotland may not be the solution in the lowlands and probably isn't the solution in the lowlands for that very reason in terms of that two issues. In terms of engagement with local authorities, that is something that, through the code of practice, there is a duty on public agencies to take account of the code of practice. To be honest, we do struggle with engagement with local authorities in terms of deer management, and that is down to their resource requirements, their priorities, but there are significant landowners in the lowland areas. It is something that we are actively looking at. We have a sharing good practice event, which has come up very shortly, to try to better help the local authorities to understand what the duty in terms of the code is, but also to understand what the practical implications of that means. In terms of the LDNS, it is a forum for deer managers and deer managers interested in the low grounds. It is not the equivalent of the deer management group structure in the north. It is a useful forum in terms of getting that information across there, such as education, such as some of the public's attitudes to deer, understanding about what the drivers are for deer management in the lowlands. We are making sure that we have that broad range of engagement with the different people who are involved. However, the nature of that task is quite big. The approaches need to be developed. We are looking at developing a pilot study, which is going on shortly, or has started, in terms of looking at the levels of public interest in the lowland areas, to see what the approaches are in place currently, and looking where the gaps are. We have a lot of that gap in our knowledge. If we have good information on science and population work in the upland areas, we do not have a lot of that information in the lowlands. That is some of the barriers and constraints to management. To be clear, understanding whether there is a problem in the lowlands is something that we have heard through some of the discussion. I do not think that we can be clear that there is a problem, but we need to make sure that we are not creating a problem. We have a lot of work going on in terms of habitat management, woodland expansion in the lowland areas, and that is prime habitat for deer in the future. We need to make sure that we are managing and planning for that. Do you accept that the relationship between SNH, Transport Scotland and Forestry commission, in so much as you fund, as I understand it, the low and deer network organisation, may be part of the problem that it is? It is more focused on looking at you as its funders and your views, your needs, rather than engaging with its members and listening to possible innovative approaches. I do not think so. I think that I would repeat that in terms of the structure of that. Richard Cuckoo's chair of the ADMG actually chairs the lowland deer network, so it is quite an open forum in terms of the agency funding that is really there to promote that engagement, promote that discussion. It has quite a wide membership, with quite a wide range of views on that committee, and it is evolving over time to see how it can better deliver. For example, we have heard suggestions that there needs to be some different approaches developed by pilot projects around making greater use of well-trained recreational stockers. It is quite clear that we are not getting it right when it comes to controlling the urban lowland deer issue. Don't we need to be more open minded to fresh approaches? Absolutely. I think that that is one of the forums that we can use. Lowland deer is one of the forums that we can use to do that, but there is a whole range of different planning mechanisms out there to look at wider management at the landscape scale. Even in the lowlands, it is really important to understand what are the issues. Claudia, do you have anything further to add? I think that when we were commissioned to produce this, I think that a lot of people would have been surprised to find that we had put a lot of emphasis in the work on the lowland deer issues because it wasn't broadly seen as being the big issue. I think that what this report has done is flag up that it is actually a very much a part of the big issue. We do not have the answers at the moment that the pilot projects will certainly help us, but we are in the infancy of dealing with deer as an asset and as a problem in lowland areas. That is the rural lowland areas as well as the urban areas. We are very much open to suggestions about how we can take this part of the work forward. I have a slight concern in you highlighting that the collaborative approach may not be the way forward when you think of the complex pattern of land ownership in, for instance, the region that I represent, South Scotland. If people are not able to work together in a more formal structure, I would be concerned about how that could go forward. I would also highlight that in South Scotland, for instance, which might be defined as lowland because it is not highland. There is often an issue about that, and there are some very large landowners with significant estates. I wonder how they are involved in the way that they might have been involved in the good models of deer management groups in the highlands. We are not dealing with the same issue across southern Scotland, and I tend to think of the large part of southern Scotland being upland anyway. The land ownership pattern is very much a part of that, but we have estimated that tens of thousands of individuals who are responsible for deer management on their land have a very different picture to dealing with the relatively smaller number in the highlands. I do not want to put words into my chairman's mouth, but I think that we cannot adopt the same collaborative approach, but clearly it has to be a collaborative approach. I think that one of the tricks will be engaging that very big potential audience, but not burdening ourselves with a bureaucracy of trying to micromanage such a large number of people. I think that there is a genuine issue that we have not resolved there. Thank you, convener. Just thinking about a shared vision of what deer management can achieve, do you think that it is clear to deer management groups what they are supposed to achieve on their patch in terms of public interest objectives, and who decides on that? I think that there has been a lot of work done on that, starting from the deer strategy and the deer code that was published in 2012, to help to distill what the public interest is that we are looking at. SNH did a bit more work to help to develop the assessment process for deer management groups, which again distilled down what the ask is of deer management groups. Through the deer management planning process, the latest round of deer management planning processes in the uplands has moved us forward in terms of understanding what the public interest is at the local scale, because there will be different priorities in terms of the public interest from Sutherland to Invernesshire to the west. It is making sure that there is a clear understanding of what those broad public interests are, but what is the importance of that local scale. I think that we have gone a long way to that. I was just going to add, because your question was asked quite specifically at the deer management group, so I did not want to detract from that. Donald was the best place to tell you that, but I did want to say, and again some commentators have picked it up. It was picked up as one of the research gaps by the SRUC work. There seems to be a lack of awareness of the high-level vision that is set out in the national policy while deer are a national approach. It is interesting that that was picked up as a research gap, because it does exist. There is a national policy, there is a vision and the priorities and challenges have been set out. There is an annual action plan that is on a shared website where all partners and stakeholders can inform and interact with what they are doing to take forward the priorities and the vision. It is notable from the research gaps that we obviously need to do more about communicating what that overarching vision is, but it is a slightly different question than you are specifically. Do deer management groups have the skills and resources to achieve those public interests objectives, and what help, guidance and funding is available for those deer management groups? I would not underestimate the challenge in some of that. There is a big challenge there in delivering the public interest, and the resource element is significant in that. That is both in terms of time and effort that goes into that, but also in terms of resources that are going into that as well. The primary mechanism for delivering the public interest is largely through the Scottish Rural Development Programme through SRDP and some of the other funding schemes to incentivise some of that, but it is limited in terms of what that can deliver. The priorities are set through the SRDP programme about where that can be delivered. There are challenges there, certainly in terms of the resources that are required to deliver that, but we need to be clear about what can be delivered and what time scale over what we are delivering. There are some big questions in there, but the planning process that we have gone through has helped to try and articulate what can be done within the time scales that we are looking at. In terms of the level of support and particularly the level of funding, has that remained the same over the period as there have been any new initiatives? It is just so that we can gather versus what we are seeing in the report and what either we might have expected to see going forward as well. Shall I just come in there as well? We did not carry out a review of the incentives that are available. I was pleased to hear your question because it is an essential area that would benefit from some further thorough analysis about what is available. We provided a summary of the SRDP funding, but that is not the full picture. One of the areas that research gaps project and that our own experience has picked up and that ADMG has mentioned is that they need more help in carrying out impact assessments. How do we resource that and incentivise that in the right way? It needs further work. Is there funding in relation to habitat monitoring that is available and when will that come online, if so? There is funding available largely for designated sites that are available through the SRDP option. For the wider country side, there is less opportunity for that support to be delivered. We were able to inject a small level of funding over the past couple of years to assist with the management planning process. Just to add to that, it was clear from the evidence that Professor McCracken gave last week that, for the SRUC, having carried out their review, clearly more effort and more resource needs to go into developing habitat impact assessments, working with deer management groups and members, so that we are much clearer about the sorts of adjustments and deer management that are needed to meet different objectives. It sounds easy. On the ground, it's incredibly complex and Professor Albin, in his evidence, also described what happens when sheep numbers are reduced and how that results in deer having a heavier impact on some of the habitats. We should face up to the fact that we are dealing with very complex management objectives. If we are going to move matters forward, we need to put a real resource into training up deer management groups and having adequate resourcing of monitoring. Mark Ruskell. We heard some evidence last week about the rate of delivery of public objectives. I think that the comment was made that public objectives have been set and deer management groups are working to implement them, but it's still early days. My understanding of your report is that you are calling for the step change in terms of delivery of public objectives, not necessarily reduction in deer density. How do you accelerate that? Funding is obviously part of that. Are you expecting more in terms of rate of delivery at this point, given that it still is relatively early days in terms of the establishment of these objectives? Part of it is about being clear about the objectives and the sort of management that we need in order to meet them. That in itself is very challenging. That's a very important dialogue that we've been developing with the deer management groups. I think that one of the things that hopefully does come out in our report clearly is that where you've got the skills on the ground, you've got a deer management group which has got the sense a bit between the teeth, they can produce an extremely good results over a relatively short time in terms of the management planning process, and we would hope and expect that to be translated into implementation. So, there is a model there which we know can be made to work. What we have across the spectrum of the deer management groups, and again I think what comes out clearly in the report, is that you have the other end of that spectrum where there is almost next to no delivery against the public objectives. Teasing out why that is the case, I think that we need to look at. We can't just go to those groups and criticise. Blindly, is it a capacity issue, is it an expertise issue, is it a funding issue? We need to understand from their perspective why they were not able to come up to a higher standard. Then I think that we would probably be able to target effort, resource, incentives, support, regulation out those groups who then are finding it difficult to move on. That's probably a charitable view, is it not, because what you've missed out of that interpretation is an unwillingness issue. To what extent, in reality, is the problem that there is an unwillingness either over the group itself or perhaps individual participants in the group to get down to dealing with this? I'm going to turn to that, but I'm going to put a marker down that you're asking us to go beyond what the evidence tells us, because it was not a behavioural study that we did in that sense. We can only answer that. Based on interpretation on it, you've listed things that you think are factors. I'm just suggesting that that may be overly charitable. There may be other issues at play. I want to put on record what I'm going to say is not an evidence-based answer in that sense. It's a more qualitative-based answer from experience over many years, is that you're absolutely right. There are people who have a whole spectrum of objectives and interests, and some are simply not interested in the spectrum of interests that dear represents. Some are much more focused on one or maybe two of those outcomes. In a sense, we might argue that that was reasonable looking from their perspective, but looking from the public interest perspective, it will not do any longer. In terms of the natural heritage, which is clearly the direction we've come from, we haven't got the evidence that those groups will move forward entirely on a willing basis. That's why we need to establish all the reasons that they might not, before targeting those for whom it might be less charitable, they don't want to do it. That's useful to get that on the record. Jenny, go, Ruth. In terms of dear counts and trends, last week there was a bit of debate with regard to what the total dear number is. Obviously, the report puts it somewhere between 360,000 and 400,000, which is quite a difference. Last week, the panel members were keen to emphasise the importance of trends versus the total number. Do you think that the work with the James Hutton Institute is going to provide a more accurate and reliable number going forward? Secondly, there was a suggestion last week that local counts should be conducted every five years to provide more accurate and up-to-date readings. Would you agree with that? On both points, yes, but certainly in terms of the evidence that I was hearing, I heard the evidence that was presented. I think that James Hutton Institute has done an excellent job. In terms of the trends that are reporting, they are superb. We are looking forward now to finding out what is driving differences in trends across the country. They mention sheep densities, changes in climate. In terms of a dear population estimate, it would be very helpful to have that. There is a statutory obligation requiring us to have that, but what is much more important is having an understanding of variation in trends across the country and the impacts of those trends on the natural heritage interests. That is what we are heading towards. On the count issue, historically the Red Deer Commission did a rolling programme of counts that went round the country every five or six years on a basis like that. We had fairly up-to-date data that was available. In terms of the priorities in the early 2000s, our count programme was more focused on designated sites due to delivering the favourable condition targets. There is a conscious decision to do that. Over the past two or three years, we have gone back to a policy of trying to get round the deer management groups from an SNH perspective in terms of our count programme to do that. We put a lot of resource into that in terms of supporting the deer management groups through that. That is an expensive process. Through the deer management planning that is going on, deer counts and deer census information are an important part of that. In going forward, we have a better position where we may still have an SNH count programme, but we will also have the deer management group counts, which will become on-board so that that stream can continue. Is there not an argument in terms of amassing a baseline and setting a data that is reliable that if you could get the DMGs to do what Jenny Gilruth has suggested, you could then focus your resources in the areas where we do not have deer management groups so that we have a better picture? That is not a criticism of the approach that you are taking, but I think that it is an observation. I think that what we do at the moment is a reflection of quite a long-standing good relationship with the deer management groups in us, and that is an area that the Deer Commission and SNH have supported. I think that it is not open to questions as to whether that is the best use of a public resource to count in those areas, given that we have now opened the whole issue of deer across the whole of Scotland, and particularly there are bigger unknowns in terms of deer numbers and impacts probably in the lowlands now. It is a very good question that we will need to address. It may not be the moment to put it on the record, but SNH resource is very finite, and tackling all of those issues may have to be sequential on the current resource base because dealing with them all at the same time will stretch us very severely. Alexander Burnett knows that I want to come in with a question, but let's develop the resource theme right now. A number of witnesses have commented about your ability to take on the responsibilities that you have for a financial staffing point of view. I recognise that you are a body that is funded by the Scottish Government, but let's pretend that this is not being filmed or that there is no official report. Let's see if we can get down to some areas that are stretching it, but let's see what we can do. How are you sufficiently well resourced to do what you need to do to oversee the kind of deer management that we need in Scotland? It depends, as a bit of a circular answer, so apologies for this, but it depends what it is that the Scottish Government wants us to do. It will set out what it is that we need to do and we will do that. We have currently been asked to support the deer management groups with their plans, so that is what we have done. We are setting out the counts. Even as a result of this review, the feeling is that the pace of change needs to be speeded up, which is what some of the questions have been about. It demands us to do more work, and there will be greater demand on our resources. Dave Stewart, what has developed something that came out in evidence? What you are saying is what we have been told before. Basically, you have got the resource to do what you are doing now, but if there was to be further policy then it would be more challenging. Some of the evidence that we took suggested that, as an organisation, you had gone to the DMGs and said that there is a piece of work coming down the track. We cannot afford it because it cuts, and they have put their hands in their pockets to the tune of £65,000. That suggests that you are not sufficiently well resourced to do what you are doing now. Donald May might want to get into some specifics, but you asked me to assume that there would be no official record. Sorry, I cannot do that. I would be happy to say on the official record that SNH is asked to do an enormous range of things. Here we are today talking about deer, but even within the uplands we could be talking about other species that are an issue, one way or another. Or we could be looking at marine environment and marine monitoring or access and recreation and so on. Our remit is extremely broad. Our budget has gone down by 30 per cent in the last six years. It is impossible for us to do everything that we used to do or that we and the deer commission used to do. I think that we would have to say that we have had to cut the cloth accordingly. We no longer do as much in terms of monitoring. Our monitoring programme is more spaced out than it used to be. We cannot be on the ground to support every action that people are taking and giving advice in the way that it used to be because we do not have as many people to do it. I am bound to say that, if more is being asked of SNH, it will be a case of choices, which is what Claudio was saying. If we are given clear priorities, we will make our choices accordingly. My chief executive and chairman were in front of you not that long ago and probably made that point that we can do only so much in knowing what is most important that we have to look to the Government to give us advice on. The committee has touched on something that I was going to go into. If we go back into history, you mentioned the amalgamation six years ago with the deer commission in SNH. The first point was that there was an extra objective added, which was a bit sustainable to your management. You had more to do. You will not have those figures in your head necessarily. However, how do those staffing figures compare with the regular commission and the commission and what you now have? To answer my own question, you will know from evidence from Alec Hogg in the 13th December. He said that out of 500 staff, only 12 deal exclusively with deer and staff who work in deer are underrepresented. We have done another check through DCS and we make it around 17 staff, if you take admin and IT out. That does not seem to me to be a lot of staff. Roughly, how does that compare with what the red deer commission and the deer commission? I think that Donald Fraser worked for those organisations. He might not know the figures in his head. We will give them, otherwise we might have to supply those separately. I do not have the figures with me. Part of the merger of DCS and SNH was about making efficiencies so that that needs to be taken into account in terms of some of the senior staff and some of the support staff involved in the deer commission. We will not be a straight read across to the technical staff. The staff complement that was with the deer commission transferred into SNH. We have lost a number of the staff due to retirements and the rest of it in terms of waste that has not been replaced. In terms of our approach to the deer merger, we look to deliver that through the areas that seven SNH areas have. The staff resource that is available to deal with the deer merger has increased substantially through the merger in terms of how that skills and knowledge have been transferred. There has been an on-going programme of the last five years to try and do that. The potential staff resource is significantly greater than it was with the deer commission. Do you perhaps sense the figures from the red deer commission days and the deer commission days that we are useful to compare and contrast? Do you mind that there are extra objectives? The other point that I would be useful for you to determine, do you require extra powers to deal with your objectives, if that was something that you could get? It moves us on to some of the next steps. Again, as part of our review, we did not look at how the existing powers are operating. It is quite a complex suite of powers, some of which we have not used. I think that we will probably be emboldened by the process that we have gone through here to use some of our powers in the future. I think that it would benefit from some further careful look at how the existing suede is all in position, what the new powers are under the Land Reform Act given to us and a bit more analysis on how you might streamline that and is it sufficient. We have not done that piece of work. I cannot answer you whether we need additional powers until you have had a proper look and spoken to different practitioners about what the impact might be and how you might approach it. My final question, convener, is looking at best practice in other countries is useful in Norway's often quoted. Is the funding method there for a dear management something that is attractive to you within SNH? Is that something that we can look at best practice and incorporate in Scotland? Yes, certainly with some of it. We heard about that from Duncan Halley in terms of the centralising of record keeping on weights of culled stags and some of the other information. A number of us have worked with people in Nina, the other Norwegian authorities and there is a lot that we can learn from there. We have a very good working relationship with Duncan and colleagues. We are always open to suggestions as to how we can improve things. We try and do that. That raises a question around—you have touched upon this in some way earlier on—this report was a review of where we are at. I am interested in what sort of work you do on a day-to-day basis developing possible future policy to draw to the attention of the Scottish Government. As you have just touched upon, there are other countries doing it perhaps differently, better or whatever. What sort of workstreams are going on away from this that informs the approach to dear management? One example that I can give you is on the habitat impact assessments. If anything, we have been out in Norway to share the work that we are doing in Scotland to help them develop some of the techniques as one example. Through those visits, you pick up a lot of important additional information about the approaches that they are using. There is a lot of use of remote sensing, for instance, for assessing vegetation cover as well as counting deer, something that we can use. On to Emma Harper's question about some other work that we are doing. I would like to get a feel for the record about what is the process around deer management. Do you instigate pieces of work? Do you pull the ideas together? Do you then take that to government? How does it work if we are going to be progressing the whole deer management regime? It goes back to deer strategy and the action plan that comes from the deer strategy. That is the driver for the work that we undertake in partnership with other organisations. That sets the basis for the different work programmes that we are doing. There is on-going work that has been done over the past number of years, but it also looks at that kind of more innovative work that we need to do in the uplands, but more importantly in the lowlands for some of the work that we are doing. That action plan is a clear driver for that. Alexander Burnall, you are in now. Apologies. Thank you, convener. I note my register of interests relating to deer management. Just coming back to the report that appeared from the previous sessions to be in a clear consensus that the impacts of grazing are more important than the densities. How would you respond to criticism that the report associates too much environmental impact with deer and too little with other herbivores? I mean, I did pick up some of that misunderstandings, I think, and the misinterpretation around the datasets, which we acknowledge is complex. It was in relation to the impacts of woodlands, and I did touch on that earlier, so I won't repeat that. I think that we do also acknowledge that it is difficult, in a practical sense, on the ground to distinguish between sheep and deer without a recourse to other evidence, but I was preparing for this talking to Donald about the experience at a place like Cairnlochan. We know that there are 200 sheep, and we know that there are many thousands of deer, so there are ways of distinguishing herbivore impacts when you know what either the counts are or the stocking levels. But I think that SRUC did pick it up in their research gaps, that it might be something that we need to look at further information to help surveyors assess the difference. But certainly in terms of the native woodland survey, in most of the cases, they did manage to distinguish the difference, and it's quite significant between the 73 per cent attributed to deer and 15 per cent attributed to livestock. Absolutely, we're very careful on this. If we're not sure, we say so. But if we're finding deer pellets and other evidence of deer grazing or browsing, then we attribute the damage to deer, but if there's any doubt, we say so. Is there any suspicion that some of the criticism around this may relate to the whole section 8 issue, whereby you have to be able to prove beyond any and all reasonable doubt that the impacts are caused by deer only before you can pursue a section 8? Is there any element of muddying the waters around this issue? I've come to that point to link the evidence to the powers. I think that in the past, SNH would need to take criticism on the chin here, that we perhaps haven't used those powers or pushed the use of those powers as quickly as we might, but our hand has sometimes been stayed by threats that our evidence base is not good enough and therefore there would be a challenge. They would be very expensive to follow through. They're not a one-off fix if you go into a section 8. You are in probably for the long haul. You're not in today and out tomorrow, so it's not a quick fix. I think that for all of those reasons, particularly the issue of the firmness of the evidence, we have perhaps been less willing to take a risk with the use of that legislation than perhaps we will be tomorrow. Back to the scrutiny of the report. You say that SRUC will pick up some of that impact on herbivores and impact. Do you think that some of this would have been picked up? One of the problems is that it hasn't been picked up because the expert reviewing it doesn't have any previous experience in either deer or other herbivores? No, because other experts have been involved in producing the report. There's been no shortage of experts advising on that. Indeed, we've been in dialogue with SRUC whilst they've been producing their report. I mean, David McCracken, who's here, is on the expert panel of our Science Advisory Committee, so that is not an issue. Angus MacDonald. OK, thanks, convener. We've already spoken about the situation in Norway. We've covered the issues relating to deer management. However, Dr Duncan Halley stated last week that the Norwegian system has been effective in managing the resource at sustainable levels. Plus, he also stated that the system in Norway is uncontroversial and has broad public support. You've already stated that you've picked up some ideas from visiting Norway, but is it fair to say that Norway's got it right and we haven't? And what other aspects can we take on board? I wouldn't want to say that Norway hasn't got it right. From what we can see on the ground and talking with the experts out there, they have a system that works extremely well. I heard what Duncan said and it absolutely mirrored my own understanding, but the situation is perhaps less complex in terms of land ownership and management than we have in Scotland. I was going to make that same point, convener. We can't look at a single solution that's going to work in Sutherland and also work in Galloway, let alone in the central belt. The Norwegian model may work for part of that and not work for other parts. I think that we also have to acknowledge that not only is their land ownership system very different, they have experienced much more extreme sea soaring in their rural economy in terms of agriculture in the last century than we did and all of these things have played a part in them evolving their system. I think that in Scotland we need to evolve our own system, but learn from the best experience across Europe. To be fair, I think that Dr Hallie stressed that in his evidence last week. There's obviously been a lot of criticism of the report from stakeholders and we've covered lots of that today already, but I was just looking to the future. What do you think is the way forward in terms of linking with those stakeholders to ultimately achieve the objectives of the Scottish Government? We have a number of next steps in mind and I think that Claudia Hallie is probably a good moment to say about one or two things about that. I'll touch on them. I would just like to add as well in terms of the criticisms that you've highlighted and we've highlighted as well. It did quite a few commentators have said that it was a comprehensive and robust review, not just ourselves. To pick up your suggestions about what our suggested thoughts are on next steps, we've touched on many of them in the discussion already. In terms of the areas that we think the review has stimulated discussion about where next steps might lead, there's an obvious area around ongoing progress and monitoring of the deer management group's plans and the implementation of those plans. There is something that needs doing and we've discussed on what some of the issues are about taking forward work in the lowlands. It's not clear and there's not an obvious and agreed solution what that is and I think a little bit of further work is needed to make sure we do what is the most effective thing for the situation in Scotland. The other area that has attracted quite a lot of debate and suggestion and has come from various commentators is that we need to do more on setting cull targets. What is not clear is, and it's certainly not agreed, whether that is needed, what it would achieve and if you then thought it was needed, what would be the most effective way of doing it. Again, I think that that is an area where it would be useful to have further time to make sure we made the right decisions rather than rushing into something. Those are three particular areas that the discussions that you've heard here seem to have cropped up, but obviously welcome to hear your own thoughts. The convener mentioned that there is other work going on on deer management outside the scope of the review and in particular we've mentioned that today and we very much wanted to reiterate that the wild deer national approach is in place. It sets out the priorities and challenges for this five year period. It is a 20 year vision and there is an annual action plan with indicators that we are currently going on and reporting on, so that will be on-going, which isn't stimulated as a result of the review. Thank you for your attendance and your evidence today, that's been most useful. At its next meeting on 31 January, the committee will take evidence from stakeholders on the Scottish Government's draft climate change plan. The committee will also consider petition PE1615 on state-regulated licensing of game bird hunting in Scotland and the review of PE16015 on the Scottish Government's draft climate change plan. As agreed earlier, we will now move into private session. I ask that the public gallery be cleared as the public part of the meeting is closed.