 Welcome to the 32nd meeting of 2017 of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. We have apologies from colleagues Corrie Rabimish and Finlay Carson. Before we move to the first item of the agenda, I want to remind everyone present to switch off mobile phones and other electronic devices, as they may affect the broadcasting system. The first item of business today is to hear evidence from two panels in relation to the committee's scrutiny of the Scottish Government's draft budget, 2018-19. Ie, we will first hear from Colin Campbell, the chief executive of the James Hutton Institute, Graham Cuck, director of safari gateway, Professor Julie FitzPatrick of the Mourden Research Institute, Raggy Lowell, programme manager for climate exchange, and Dr Jackie McLennie, head of the Food Protection Sciences Surveillance branch of the Food Standards Scotland. Members have a series of questions for you and I will move straight to John Scott. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning everyone. I thank you for taking the time to come and help us with this budget inquiry this morning. Budgets is the first question, and I would like to ask you what have the main impacts of declining research funding from the Scottish Government being on your various institutes, and what have you done to mitigate the declining budgets? Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to come today. Obviously, declining budgets mean that we need to take various measures. One of the first things is to seek alternative funding from other means. For example, in the case of the James Sutton Institute, that is meant to seek funding from increasingly, through things like the industrial strategy from Europe and from other non-scorish government public sector sources. That has been quite successful. We have been very successful in Europe, for example, at winning money, one of the most successful institutions in the agri-environment sector, in fact. Obviously, that has now also got some uncertainties around it in terms of Europe, although there is some welcome news just this week around horizon 2020. We have also had to cut costs, and that has meant reducing staff numbers, changing terms and conditions, and a variety of other cost reduction measures. We would be similar, and trying to generate external research income is really critical, and like the other main research providers, we have been very successful in gaining large EU grants. However, we have also been able to generate some money from UK budgets because the Morgan Research Institute was fortunate to be eligible to apply for some of those grants. Those are grants from Research Council UK, which for many years we were not able to access for a number of different reasons. Our income has been maintained by those activities. We have also tried to increase our commercialisation of our research, trying to take it through to products, which have a small return in royalties. Morgan is likely different, because we are part of a group of companies and charities. Some of our commercial subsidiaries have helped to support the work through Gift Aid, so they are not-for-profit companies, so they gifted some of the money back to the institutes, which we then continue to do more research with. However, like the James Hutton Institute, we have managed, essentially, by not replacing staff when they have retired or left the organisation. As I think the committee are aware, Safari is the construct, which is the Scottish Environment, Food and Agriculture Research Institute, which is the collective of six research institutes, including the Morgan and James Hutton Institute. Safari Gateway, of which I am the director, is essentially the knowledge exchange and impact hub of Safari. Our budget is relatively small compared to the SRP and so on, but actions that we have been taking include developing joint funding mechanisms, for example, around a fellowship programme, which we are working with, for example, Food Standards Scotland and others. We are also using the Safari vehicle as a mechanism to strengthen position in regard to bidding for funds in relation to things such as research, council calls and so on. As a centre of expertise, we are funded solely by the Scottish Government. We are a policy-facing, fast-response service for the Scottish Government policy teams, so we are more dependent, perhaps, than others around the table on Scottish Government funding. We do not have a legal identity, so we are not able to raise funds for a consortium, if you like. Having said that, we have been using our access to other research networks across the UK, very strategically, to try to leverage better insights into the Scottish Government and into our own research community, things like the UK Energy Research Centre, which is one of our major partners. We are being as canny as we can, but with shrinking budgets. I should have declared an entry as an honorary fellow of the Morgan Institute before I started, but I do so now. Has the amount of research that is required to be reduced proportionately with the budget reductions, or have you replaced the following amounts of funding with funding that you have sought from elsewhere? Yeah, inevitably, the research has declined. We cannot do as many things as we would like to do, and there is an opportunity missed here. We have many ideas about ways in which we can increase productivity, have bigger economic impact and make Scotland more sustainable. We cannot do all those with when there is less money. The money is specifically for particular research deliverables within the programme of research, for example, and those have to go when we cut back. You can replace some of those with other funding sources, but other funding sources have slightly different agendas and priorities, so it is not a straight like for like type of comparison. And what's really important about the strategic research programme, for example, is that it's about long-term mission-orientated research. It's the bedrock of lots of other ways of winning additional funding. By cutting that bedrock, you potentially cut down your options for getting other alternative types of funding, which build on it. I would support Colin in everything that he says. It certainly has reduced our capacity to work on a number of really key areas that are emerging at the moment. We are capable and we are doing work on antimicrobial resistance, for example, but it's obviously become incredibly topical, and there are very large amounts of money about to be released for that topic. It's difficult when the budgets mean that it's harder to employ new and young scientists into new and topical areas that we would be able to continue to generate income. There are huge opportunities for new science and new technology at the moment, and it's frustrating not to be able to do more. So it's not that the amount of work to do has declined. It's just that you are able to do less with the budget that's available to you? Absolutely. I think that within Scotland, the agri-tech sector is very important in terms of food production and protection of the environment. There are huge opportunities to get technology out there. Scotland is doing very well in that, and it would be frustrating if that's reduced in terms of effort and impact. I think that there are huge opportunities at the moment. The opportunities for innovation and creating jobs and creating wealth are very, very large at the moment in the agri-tech centre. It should be a matter of more money will give us more economic return. In the James Southern Institute, for example, it's £12.75 return for every pound invested in the James Southern Institute, and that's true of other research institutes. In that respect, they're different from universities and others, and it's because we have a translational pipeline. We do strategic through to applied and translational research and give great economic return, so we're missing opportunities to help create wealth and address issues about sustainability. More money would make an even bigger difference. I could also comment that Morden's gross value added is about 10 to 1, and in terms of jobs, it's about 5.5 to 1, so for every job supported by a Government, we support another 5.5 jobs in the Scottish economy, particularly in Midlothian, where we're based. There's also the opportunity and the work that we've done over the years about translation, trying to get our knowledge out there to our different communities to make sure that the technology is taken up and used. The institutes stand out in our view, particularly with the translation of research all the way through to use in the field or in practice. I would just follow up Julie's point there by saying that one of the things that has happened as a result of the construct of Safari and Safari Gateway is the creation of a bit of headspace to be able to build on the knowledge exchange activities that the institutes were already carrying out. That includes taking the research that they produce and delivering it to key audiences of business and policy and society and so on. Given the work that you've been doing in Safari, have you thus far identified any overlap or duplication of research that might have been taken place previously? Not from my perspective, but the landscape is complex. I think that I've been in this role for just over a year now. I recognise that not only is the research landscape complex in relation to how it is funded but also how it is configured in relation to the research institutes, the centres of expertise, higher education institutes and so on. We've been working hard with all of those to try and help to understand where collaborative work works together and where we can add value in those types of areas. For me, that comes back to who the ultimate audiences should be. Those have been identified for us and we're identified in the tender that set up Safari Gateway as those three of business and policy and society. We're also working with an overarching remit to try and internationalise further the research that's carried out principally across Safari, but the more I'm in this role and the more I see that collaboration is absolutely crucial, and perhaps Julian, Colin and others would be able to tell you more about where that interaction takes place. I will come on to that in a minute, because there are very obvious examples with the more than quite recently. Colin Campbell, do you want to come in there? Yes, just an issue about duplication. I think that the research institutes have been working for a very long time now on joint research programmes. I think that one of the things that's unique in the Scottish system is that we've done that whether the funders haven't. What that's meant has been a natural alignment of our capabilities over that period of time. We're talking 10, 12, maybe even 15 years arguably, how we've been doing that. Therefore, we've naturally come to a situation where we complement each other mostly. I think that that gives us great strength in terms of delivering a joint research programme together. Safari gives us even more opportunity to do that in the future. It's really important to realise that science has changed fundamentally over the last 10 to 15 years. The nature of science means that you need bigger and bigger collaborative teams. It's not just about collaborating in Scotland, it's about collaborating in Europe and collaborating globally. Some of the work that we do, for example on the barley genome, there are 50, 60 different authors on one single paper. It's a huge international consortium, because it's big science. We have to collaborate in the nature of science's collaboration. Does anyone want to come back on Mr Scott's original point? How do you think that the Scottish research programme should evolve? You've perhaps already discussed that, Mr Campbell. You might want to go further or not. I think that there are a lot of pressing needs in Scotland around growing the economy, addressing climate change. We've got very progressive policies in Scotland, which have helped to stretch the science in terms of having ambitious targets for our environmental policies in particular. There are more policies coming in the future. We've got potentially a good food nation bill, for example, which could be equally progressive and innovative. Therefore, there will be research needs for that. The immediate needs are things that we can address, but we need to keep an idea on the long-term needs as well. We don't know what questions we're going to have to answer in 10 to 15 years' time. The strength of the research programme is that it's a long-term mission-orientated research programme. We did research in the 1980s, for example, around peatlands, for example, which is bearing fruit today because we can estimate the amount of carbon locked up in our peatlands. When we first did that research, we were interested in how much peat we would burn for power stations. The questions change. The need for fundamental information about Scotland's natural resource remains the same. We need to take a very long-term view about what we need. For that reason, we need to make sure that we have the long-term mission-orientated research and strategic research programme fully supported. It's a question of balance. We've got centres that have been very good at relating the research to immediate short-term policy-orientated questions. We've got the strategic research programme, which is about the core research that we have to do. We've got to get the balance right. We've got good ideas around the centres, but we now need to consolidate on that core research and make sure that it's there for the future. It's the bedrock of what we do. If I could just add to that, again, I would agree that it's really important that we horizon scan. We do that regularly, but I think that needs to be done with the Scottish Government, with the recess budgets, clearly involving multiple stakeholders, but trying to look into the future and to design collaborative projects that are going to deliver in the areas that we are particularly interested in. That's in the area of infectious disease of our livestock species, including diseases that pass to humans. We know that we've now got really good technologies that allow us to produce new vaccines and better diagnostic tests for animal disease, and that's going to be really important if we're to reduce the impact of reducing antimicrobial drugs, for example, but it's also within the context of improving the environment, supporting the environment and also supporting the Scottish economy and the people who live in many of our rural areas. The rural communities in Scotland are particularly important for many of our scientific outputs. It is a collaborative effort, and I think that the planning needs to be done across the whole piece, with all of our scientists working together, so lots of interactions between animal scientists, plant scientists, environmental scientists and social scientists as well. It's perhaps important to recognise that the funding from the Scottish Government of a lot of the research carried out across safari funds research, which would not ordinarily be funded, and that's one point. I guess another is perhaps to bring an example to the table where work that's done across the safari institutes can deliver both immediate policy needs and those longer-term considerations as well. If you consider the example of the rest and be thankful where we know that from time to time, Scottish Government transport ministers have to make judgments on what to do in relation to the stability of the slopes and so on. I had one of my colleagues, a soil scientist, one of the safari gateway team as well, who showed me a cross-section of a crop route, and my job can be essentially sometimes to say, well, so what. He said, well, this bit gives it its bendiness, this bit gives it its strength, and said, well, so what. He said, if you plant that in the right place, it can stabilise a hillside. So my question was, well, and so what. So there was a full stop there, and the next element of that conversation was around saying, if we get that right and we get the right people in the right room and we get that planted in the right place, we can have a direct policy impact in relation to issues that the Scottish Government, Transport Scotland have to deal with every year. And the more we unpick that particular issue, I'm finding that there are lots of other people. I used that example elsewhere, Forestry Commission Scotland. I used it at the University of Northumbria last week, where I was at a natural environment research council event, and the more I'm in this role, the more I see things like consideration of catchments as a whole, thinking about who's involved, land managers and so on, and joining those things up. And I think that safari and the research that it carries out offers a platform to think about these things in a more holistic manner. Yes, so there are three centres of expertise already established under the strategic programme funding from RISAS. There was a fourth mooted, hasn't yet been funded. I would argue that we need to continue that capacity in the translational role between the fundamental science and policymaking to inform better decisions. There's no question about how many of those centres you might need and how long they might need to last for to do that job, but I would say that that is a fundamental element that needs to continue to be funded and that generates real impact in terms of better decision making. Many thanks. Okay, let's move this on and look at the focus of the strategic research programme, and we'll bring in Dr Jackie McLeheny. Food Standards Scotland in your written submission state, there's a need to properly align the work to strategic policy relating to food protection and public health, and the SRP should place greater focus on applied research that is able to demonstrate clear policy application and is sufficiently flexible to adapt to changing priorities. In the first instance, can I ask you to expand on that and for the other panel members if you feel they need to contribute to comment on it? Dr McLeheny. Yes, thank you very much. Those comments were really about the opportunities that are for aligning the expertise that's been developed within the strategic research programme to the policy priorities for food standards Scotland, and that would be dietary health, food standards and food safety. We've had some great examples over the years of collaboration with the SRP. Food Standards Scotland has really welcomed the opportunity to steer the programme. We've seen great developments over the past couple of years, particularly with the advent of safari, which has really opened up the opportunity for collaboration. Our comments on the point that you just raised were really about the current policy in relation to obesity strategy that's recently been released by the Scottish Government, which fully aligns with food standards Scotland's ambitions for improving the health of the Scottish population. What we've noted is that over the years the strategic research programme has perhaps focused more on innovation and mechanistic research in relation to diet and health, whereas going forward we would like to see more focus on applied research, which is more around looking at the impact of interventions. I think that in the Scottish Government obesity strategy and Food Standards Scotland have recently articulated some quite ambitious goals in relation to changing the food landscape, possible regulatory interventions for improving dietary health, and there would be real scope for the expertise that is in the institutes, and we would like to see better alignment and targeting of that expertise, maybe more towards looking at the impact of those interventions. The points that were raised earlier about getting the balance right between looking at the building of longer-term research goals and building up the expertise and looking at the shorter-term policy needs, getting that balance right is really important. I think that for us it's all about engagement and having as a policy customer for the research that's undertaken. I think that we've really welcomed the opportunities for collaboration and going forward having more involvement in developing the research programme and reviewing progress as it develops would be very welcome. Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but as the customer would you not be dictating what the research was? We would appreciate the opportunity to have more input into developing that. We do at the moment, but I think that there's scope to build on that further. Okay, thanks, Colin Campbell. I think that there's always a bit of attention between the immediate needs and the long-term needs, and I think that it's a bit of push and pull, I think, as the best option. Scientists at the James Hunt Institute love the opportunity of actually trying to solve a problem today, but it's also our job to think about what are the problems in the future. If you take the food area, for example, Scotland builds its brand on high-quality food, and we've got a very ambitious 20-30 programme around doubling the size of the sector. A lot of that's going to depend on small to medium-sized enterprises, and a lot of that, and depending on that, is going to be about the provenance, authentication and safety of food. For example, we've been thinking about ways in which we can actually derisk that in the future. Some of the products from our long-term research give us some of the best soils databases in the world, so we think that we can, for example, come up with a fabulous system for actually looking at the provenancing authentication of Scottish food, exploiting the cutting-edge analytical techniques we have and the reference soils databases we have to put Scotland in our unrivaled position to protect the brand of Scotland's food and drink. That's about long-term thinking, and it's about enabling that, and we've had some very good conversations with Food Standards Scotland around that, and it's about thinking ahead. That's the push from the scientist, and you need a bit of the pull from the sector as well at the same time. I think that it's possible to combine both aspects, the shorter-term policy-driven work with the longer-term research. Of course, all of these outputs are driven by staff, so you need to be able to employ the staff with the expertise to deliver them. They are one and the same group of people, so I think that it's really important that the short-term outputs come from people who are incredibly well educated in their subject matter and able to exploit a lot of the new technologies and new opportunities, so it is possible to combine the two, but it is at two edges of the one-clone. Okay, thanks. Let's move this on Angus MacDonald. Okay, thanks. Thanks, convener, and good morning to the panel. If I could turn to the issue of centres of expertise and funding. We've received a number of submissions which have mentioned issues relating to the annual funding, and there's clearly a significant issue there. In particular, we took evidence from climate exchange, which highlighted annual funding, which is creating deep uncertainty for staff within climate exchange, particularly those funded 100 per cent by climate exchange. It goes into some detail, given an example including an issue of redundancy notices having to be issued to the secretariat on an annual basis, which is clearly far from ideal. I could ask Ms Lowe to tell us about the funding model for climate exchange, the problems that can cause and whether there are the same issues for other centres of expertise. The answer to the last question whether there are the same issues for the other centres of expertise is largely yes, and I'll come back to that. The first five-year phase of our programme of climate exchange, we were in a slightly better position. We had a five-year budget, although we did receive a grant letter annually from the Scottish Government. The size of that grant at each year point was already determined and agreed, so there was a much higher degree of certainty on the part of the institutions appointing and employing individuals working in climate exchange at that time. Since 2015-16 financial year, we've been working again within a five-year envelope, but with the expectation that at each year point we might suffer a cut, and indeed that's happened. That obviously adds to the uncertainty and means that the institutions that are employing individuals in climate exchange, particularly in the secretariat, but also the fellows who were employed within universities, those institutions don't have that same degree of certainty, and in spite of letters of comfort that might come, they are unwilling to take any risks and they're legally obliged to issue redundancy letters at six months and at three months before the end of the grant period. That is obviously unsettling for people, and it has meant that people inevitably might be looking for other employment. In terms of the fellows themselves, so these are the research fellows appointed at universities. They have been in the past on five-year programmatic contracts. Those tend to be two or three years now, and again, the year-on-year uncertainty means that it is difficult to attract the right people in the first place because research council funding tends to be much longer term and more stable. Obviously, if you're a young researcher coming out of a PhD with an option to work in climate exchange or do something else, you will think seriously about taking the climate exchange option. Those are all problems and challenges that we understand. There may not be anything that we can do about them, but we do our best, particularly from the secretariat perspective, to build relationships with Scottish Government funders who we understand are working within a number of constraints and to work with our fellows to try to play up, if you like, the positive sides of working in climate exchange, with the policy impact that that brings. In terms of the other centres of expertise, CREW, which is the centre of expertise on waters, has a slightly different model to ours and tends to rely a little bit more on its overall budget on the research institutes. Epic has the health, animal health centre, has an issue that is very similar to ours with the one-year budgets. Have they raised that? I know that we do as well regularly. For information, the annual awards affects all of the research programme, it's not just the centres, so there's some sort of planning constraints and retention recruitment constraints on the institutes generally. Could I comment? We are in the same position. We just don't issue the redundancy notices, so if we were not able to receive our funding, we would have reserves to cover the redundancy period, but otherwise it is a one-year contract. I have a follow-up question, which I probably know the answer to already, but what can be done to reduce the problem with regard to the annual funding model? Much can be done at the moment, given the way that the budgets are set at national level. As I said, those of us working within the secretariat and climate exchange in terms of reaching out to our fellows, we do as much as we can to reassure them that centre expertise is incredibly successful, as we all believe. Therefore, it's unlikely to be pulled away completely at the drop of a hat. There is, unfortunately, no kind of cast iron guarantee, but there is a huge amount of respect for and support for the centre. We have to assume that that will be enough to keep people on board and stop them from looking for other jobs. In the past, we had a five-year rolling programme, which was hugely valuable, because the nature of other types of funding is usually one-year or three-years. Having a five-year programme allows you to be more ambitious about what you are going to do. We maybe need to get out of this model of whether it's one-year, three-years or five-years. There are some types of research. If we had a 10-year funding cycle, we could be even more ambitious about what we are trying to achieve, because we can plan with certainty and we have more flexibility to be excellent and creative than what we do. It's not one-size-fits-all, but we certainly need to get away from the one-year and it does constrain the way in which we plan ahead. Although the Government is well on their budget on an annual basis, no, I appreciate that. Just a little thing that comes out of what is being said here, are the longitudinal models that we are relying on in certain areas at risk from short-term funding, or is it really something that we are able to protect, because they are the very long-term? This is where I am referring to things such as 10-year contracts. We do a lot of long-term environmental change network-type experiments where we are monitoring the environment over decadal patterns. We have long-term sampling campaigns that might get a national dataset about a natural resource of Scotland such as the soils. Those need much longer timeframes in which to operate, and we potentially miss that if we are not having the ambition and the opportunity to have longer-term research. What is different about institutes from many research providers is that we do that long-term research. It is why we have these national datasets of great value to us. It is why we have these longitudinal datasets, which allow us to judge and put climate change in the context in which we can. If we undermine that with short-term funding, we will inevitably undermine that unique selling point. Before you move on, convener, there was one submission from SWT that suggested that there was a need for a plant health centre of expertise. The question is, would you be content to see additional centres of expertise established, given that the funding would come from existing budgets? A plant health centre would be very welcome and needed by the stakeholders in particular. Plant health would cover both agricultural crops and trees. If we take them together, there is a bigger sector than the livestock sector, yet we have a health centre for livestock. We very much need that. There is scope for more centres of expertise, but I do not think that we need a centre every time. We may need to embrace the principles and models of the centre. It could be in a smaller way, it could be integrated into the research programme and there are a number of different ways of doing that, but I would like to recognise that the Scottish Government has taken a lead here at a UK and European level. Others are looking at this model of centres. It is a very useful one, but we need to keep on reviewing it and thinking of ways in which we can fulfil the principles of it without necessarily creating a big centre every time that we have a need. I think that looking at integration of the centres might be one future way of exploring better integration and better delivery across even wider areas of policy relevance. Today, there is a lot of smart thinking going on in the sector about collaborative working, but is there anything that you are seeing from elsewhere in the world that we could adapt here and benefit from? The creation of safari was partly the result of looking at other international models where research institutes, for example, have combined their efforts to have a common branding so that they can compete internationally. That is an option for us now that we have safari. We can actually think in those ways. There has been other international models like that. As I say, international science is all about collaboration and working together across borders. I think that safari gives us that option. I think that there are other examples that we could explore along those lines. I think that you wanted to come in there. I was reflecting on the comment about integrating the centres. From our perspective, what we do is bespoke. We work with a number of policy teams in a very different way perhaps than the other centres do and than safari gateway does. I think that the other unique thing about the centres and each does it differently is the way in which they engage with the higher education institutions, so universities. That brings a huge strength to the overall portfolio of research that Rhesus funds. Mr Coop, do you want to come in there? Perhaps it is worth turning this around to think about it from the perspective of the end-user of this research and what it is designed to do and so on. Very early on, safari gateway and the centres of expertise were talking about that. We have a shared understanding that it is important that, for people who might ultimately use this research—whether they are policy people or business people or farmers or individuals or so on—they are not particularly bothered who is funding or what constructs look like. They just need the information and research and expertise that is available to them. One of the things that we are doing in safari gateway is developing a directory of expertise across safari and some of those do link in and deliver some of the work that centres of expertise deliver as well to try and shine a light on that, to try and lift a lid on where this research funding is going. All of these mechanisms are designed to improve that flow of information and we continue to work with the centres of expertise on that, too. Are the academic journals as important as the use to be for the dissemination of information with the introduction? I think that there are now open journals as well. Are we playing our part in that? Very much so. We are trying to address the open access approach and become open science institutions and there are a lot of new ideas around how we do that because it is fundamentally important that we open up and engage with all stakeholders and with the public about understanding what we are trying to do without their support. We need to make sure that we have that support. Academic journals are still incredibly important in terms of underpinning the excellence of the science and ensuring that it has been peer reviewed and that there is robust evidence. It was the same point. Everything that we do has to be based on scientific rigor and international recognition of the work that we do otherwise its value is massively undermined. It is really important that we hit outputs that are relevant to multiple different audiences if we are to remain as relevant as we have been over the years. I wonder if I could just add to the point about the collaboration. I think that it is really important because there are now big consortia right across the world getting ready to work together to really address some of the millennium and sustainable development goals, so you will know that the UK Government is moving a lot of money into something called the Global Challenges Research Fund, which again is taking UK science and making sure that it is also impacting in poorer countries across the world. I think that that fits very well with the Scottish Government's aims and objectives to take our science created in Scotland and make sure that it has impact right across the different sectors that we can influence. In the written submission, Morden said that one criticism has been division of funding into a number of streams with insufficient thought as to how these might align with the main research provider skills base or meet the needs of policy makers and others. Is this something that other panel members agree with and then a question to everybody, how would you better align funding streams? I think that to agree, yes, we would agree that there is obviously competing demands for the research budget from a wider range of stakeholders, for example. That is not always going to necessarily align with the capability that we have. There is attention there in the sense that we have lots of ideas to explore the areas that we are currently strong in. We have to recognise that there is going to be that diversity of demand from a wider range of stakeholders, but if you end up diluting it to the point that you are harming the core purposes of what we are actually doing, then there is a danger there, I think. We need to be always thinking about how do we actually do deliver to these diverse stakeholders and their needs in the future, but the more that we slice the cake, the more we are going to damage the integrity of the research that we are doing. I think that there is a danger there and it is again about balance and about the main focus of what we are actually trying to achieve. I think that, to the point that we made earlier about overlap and so on, because one of the other things that was mentioned in the more done submission was that the way that the research is constructed there is designed so that it does not overlap with other pieces of work happening elsewhere in the UK as well and to try and help to fill in that patchwork of research that is required, so that is perhaps worth mentioning too. We are at very pertinent points this morning. What mechanism, if any, exists for you to articulate these views, all of you to articulate these concerns to Government? We have got a very good work in relationship with RESAS, obviously. We talked to them on a regular basis. The creation of safari has also allowed a new forum for actually talking to them in a more co-ordinated fashion. We do raise all these issues in bilateral meetings and also in meetings with the director's executive committee, which is a function of the safari collective. We have got opportunities to raise these issues. Obviously, we are supplying research. The Scottish Government and RESAS are responding to the needs of a wide range of stakeholders. It really comes back to what is it for and what is it that we are trying to achieve. For us, it has always been about the agriculture, the environment and the food of Scotland and the three things that are fundamentally linked. As a sector, it is incredibly important in Scotland. It is probably more important in Scotland than it is in England and Wales, for example. How much do you want to dilute that to look at other things? I would argue that we do not. Not at the moment. There are too many opportunities and there are too many risks from Brexit, climate change and so on to dilute that by spending on things outside of that original purpose. I think that what we have to do is choose to be excellent in a specified number of areas. It is really important that our research programmes are co-constructed with stakeholders, with Government and with the scientists, so that we make the best of all the expertise that we have. However, if we have reducing budgets again, we have to be able to change course, we have to be able to do less in some areas and perhaps focus more on some new areas that are coming through. I think that it is very important that we have that flexibility to allow us to manage our resources as best we can over the next few years, which I think are going to be particularly challenging with the uncertainty about EU funding, although some more positive messages are coming out recently. Perhaps just to give a quick example of how that might show itself, we have been working with the Food Standards Scotland to try to develop a safari fellowship to look at an issue that is front and centre now, but might not have been so much at the time that the current strategic research programme is being developed. That is to look at the resilience of the food chain in Scotland. Obviously, there are practical and research issues that relate to that, but there are also political issues as well, which are not in place in relation to the UK leaving the European Union and so on. That is an area that we have identified collectively of something that we can offer the safari research as a platform to open up and examine, and we will be looking to work with the Food Standards Scotland over the next few months on that. Just to follow on from what Graeme McLean is saying and going back to the original question as to how we could change things for the better going forward, as I alluded to from our perspective, and we are maybe slightly different from other policy customers within Scottish Government, as we are a non-ministerial office. For us, it is about an awareness of the expertise. There is a significant amount of expertise in the institutes. It is a world-leading resource that we have here, and it is about us understanding how that expertise can address some of our key policy questions. When you look at Food and Drink and the Ambition 2030 about growing the industry, it is about innovation, but it is also about supporting businesses, predominantly SMEs, who maybe do not have a lot of technical expertise in being able to meet the challenges in terms of compliance, meeting standards for trade arrangements, verifying the authenticity of the food chain, and Collin provided a really good example earlier on of how we are trying to explore some of the expertise that has grown up over the years and how we can use that in a different way, in a way that is really going to support the food and drink industry in Scotland. From our perspective, it is all about engagement and platforms for improving that engagement with the institutes. Safari is a great example of that. We have had some really good examples over the past couple of years of commissioning work with the Morden through the contract research fund, which has been hugely successful for us in addressing a key food safety issue for us, the work that Graeham has just described through the Safari Fellowship. Those are all about collaboration and engagement with the policy customers for the research, and I think that that is going to be increasingly important going forward. A slight sidestep on funding. Again, there are a few comments in the written submissions about the funding balance between underpinning capacity to maintain long-term data sets, producing high-quality science and also rapidly responding to emerging societal challenges. Do you think that balance is correct at the moment? It varies with the different organisations because we do different types of science, and certainly at the Morden we get a bigger proportion of our funding for underpinning capacity, because it does not just focus on the outputs, it focuses on the employment and the activity of the people doing the work. Working in the laboratories, handling the pathogens and working with the animals in our particular case, is not just about the databases or the outputs or the contributions into the programme. It is the fact that Scotland has a number of capabilities within the organisations, right across the safari organisations, which are created by that underpinning capacity. As the name suggests, the rest of the work is not possible without the support of that work, which goes on on a daily basis to support all of the research programmes and, indeed, contributions to the centres of expertise. What is your recent tie-up with SRUC that looks very interesting to bring to the table? We are really delighted by that. Our interactions with SRUC go back many years, particularly in the area of surveillance. SRUC is co-locating on the Morden site, which means that the three providers of animal surveillance in Scotland will all be in the same building, the third being the APHA, the Animal and Plant Health Agency. It makes a lot of sense for us to co-locate sheer equipment and to have that interaction between staff. The CEO of SRUC, Professor Powell, and I have discussed how we can bring our science closer together, both in terms of R&D and our knowledge exchange, but it is not because of overlap, it is the opposite. We are complimenting each other because SRUC tends to do welfare and genetics. We do a lot on animal disease, so we see it as a multiple win for all the organisations involved. I do not think that we should be cutting back on underpinning capacity in those areas any more than we have. That is fundamentally the flexible creative area that we can be innovative. Innovation is the name that has been used by everybody from across the world to Europe. Europe has just created a new innovation council. We need that flexibility to be innovative, and we also fund national capability. Having the ability to analyse samples from across Scotland has been used in a number of events and emergencies. For example, the James Art Institute did work on the MV Brair disaster when the tanker ran aground in the Shetland. We did all the hydrocarb analysis for that. We were involved in Chernobyl. We were involved in the recent volcanic eruption, which created a potential for pollution of Scottish waters, which did not come to anything, thankfully. However, that national capability is needed to deal with events and disasters, and it is part of Scotland's resilience in dealing with that. The national capability also allows us to support other industries. Many of the techniques that we use for doing chemical analysis support other industries in Scotland, outwith the agriculture environment and food sector. We are a fundamental part of the national capability of Scotland. Kate Forbes, do you have any other questions? They are fine. Can I just ask, on the subject, more than you being critical of the reporting mechanism around saying that it is complex and time consuming, cumbersome and resource consuming, can someone give us an example of what that is in practice? There has been increased emphasis in reporting, particularly in the past 12 months, possibly over the past two years. It has been due to auditing purposes. It is a time consuming process that we have to set our objectives of research in different parts of the programme, which is fine. You would expect to do that for any research contractor, but the frequency of updating the reporting is very intense, and it is taking a considerable amount of staff time. At the moment, when resources are short, I would prefer to have a lighter touch. That is not because I do not approve of auditing. I just feel that it is an excessive use of staff time, which could be perhaps better employed in innovative research. Is that echoed across the panel? I think that we all recognise that there is a greater need for accountability, especially for public money. That is a significant amount of public money, so we need to be accountable for that. We have been accountable for that in the past and shown that we have given very good value for money, but there are potentially thousands of research deliverables in a five-year framework that have to be accounted for. That does create its transaction costs. We see that with other funders as well. What is really important about the Scottish Government research funding is that it gives us this flexibility and ability to actually leave our money from other funders in the future. If everybody is auditing and accounting in great detail, you stifle creativity, and you count against excellence in science as well, because you have not got the time in which to be creative and excellent. In Lehmans terms, has the reporting requirement doubled, tripled, quadrupled? I think that it is a substantial increase. We have tried to measure it in full-time equivalents of staff, and we make it about one and a half full-time staff. Those are senior members of staff, so that is a significant contribution of our staff cohort to reporting. That is the annual time that is dedicated to this process? Is that on a weekly basis or a monthly basis? It is on a weekly update, and then it is transferred through a number of different systems to the final reporting. It is quite a complex system, but it perhaps needs to be quite extensive, because there are many research deliverables, many different parts of the programme, but it is just whether or not it could perhaps be lightened up slightly to just release more time essentially to do the work. I think that what I have seen about the reporting and auditing approaches is that it can result in better project management in some circumstances, and I think that that is entirely good for everybody in that respect. I think that resas are aware of some of these issues and are thinking more flexibly about how you do not treat everything the same. Again, there are some areas that we could be lighter touch, for example, and other areas where actually it is a pressing and urgent need, therefore we need more accountability. So it is being looked at? It is being looked at, but I think that we have started on this process. I think that it is not one size fits all. We need to have a more flexible approach, and certainly for excellent creative science, we need less. Okay, thank you for that. Mark Ruskell, thanks. Can I turn to the issue of management of buildings and research facilities? We had some written evidence from the Robotanic Gardens and I think that they identified a maintenance backlog of £15 million amongst their assets. What kind of challenges do you have in terms of asset management in relation to the budgets? For the James Hunt Institute, it is quite considerable. We have previously benefited from capital investment from the Scottish Government. In 2011, for example, we would get a grant of £3 million for capital that, last year, declined to £100,000. That has been a significant challenge. We also have an ageing capital infrastructure, particularly at our Invergowry site, with up to 40 different buildings, none of them in a modern state, probably the last one that was built in the 1990s. It is a considerable challenge. We recognise that the James Hunt Institute is our problem, and we have to solve that problem. We have come up with some progressive ideas about how do we seek alternative sources of capital investment. We have submitted two significant proposals to the Tay City Deal, for example, to partly address those issues, but partly to create new innovation centres that will increase revenue from other alternative sources of funding. It is a significant concern, and it affects retention and recruitment of world-class scientists. They all want to work in the best possible facilities. If we do not pay attention to that, we will suffer as a result. If I could comment, Morden Research Institute has received no capital grants from the Scottish Government for many years now, but we are in a fortunate position that our land and buildings are owned by the Morden Foundation, which is one of Scotland's largest charities. It has 14,000 paying members. They pay a very small fee every year to be part of our foundation, but they own the assets that are insured for about £25 million. This is a facility at the Easter Bush estate south of Edinburgh, so we are in a different position that our model allows the facilities to be maintained out with the Scottish Government budgets. Is that sustainable in the long run? I think that it is, because our foundation has created two major commercial subsidiaries that are profit making, but there are no shareholders. When the profits are generated, the money is gifted back to the foundation and gifted back into the research institute, so it is a recycling of profits. I think that it is sustainable as long as the commercial subsidiaries are sustainable, which is always a different question, but we are confident at the moment. It is incredibly important that the facilities are maintained, especially at those facilities that are handling animal or human pathogens, because they have to be completely in line with all the legislative aspects of handling those organisms. I think that you mentioned earlier about co-location buildings at SRUC. Has that been a smooth process or are there other issues at SRUC? Obviously, having a very different asset management model to your own. It is going well. It is still under way at the moment, but we are confident that it will go through. It shows that there are lots of different models that one can take. There are appropriate areas of science where co-location is an ideal situation. Other types of science can be done remotely. We can work with scientists right across the world, so we can certainly work in dispersed models as well, but co-location for specific facilities can be quite useful. That is maybe one example of where it is clear that the institutes that make up safari are different in relation to the facilities and assets that they hold and the challenges across those are different as well. It may be that we could perhaps write back to the committee with a bit more detail on each of the institutes setting out the position. One thing that I want to mention is that the safari gateway as a route to improving that information flow is also looking at developing asset register across safari, with a view to thinking about how we could improve access to the facilities that already exist across the safari institutes so that they could be utilised better and more appropriately by other actors. It is important to recognise that investment in the asset base in the BBSRC institutes has been quite substantial recently. In the past five years, more than £380 million has been invested in the BBSRC institutes, some of which are in Scotland, which is great, but there is a recognition that you need to develop that asset base if you can remain world-class and competitive. We have not seen that in other parts of Scottish research, and it is a real concern for me that we have not seen that level of capital investment to maintain infrastructure at a world-class level. To be clear, you are talking about private sector investment as there has been discussion with the Scottish Government about capital investment in your assets. Clearly, there are constraints around capital investment from the public sector, but the BBSRC is a public sector organisation of the UK Government and has invested in those research institutes. Most of them are in England and Wales, so there are some in Scotland. That is UK Government money that has been invested there. There is a recognition that you need to invest in that asset base. Some of those institutes are becoming more independent of Government, but there is a recognition that you need to let them go with a properly invested asset base. How has there been discussion with the Scottish Government about increasing the funding? You talked about £3 million dropping to £100,000. Is that fixed now? No. This year, it has gone back up to £600,000. It will always invest where it owns the land in Vigailry, for example, and it will always invest where there are any issues about compliance, health and safety, for example. However, that is not the same as developing the asset base in terms of the world-class infrastructure that we need for doing science. It is indeed the first investors in the Tay City deals. They have invested in money there to allow us to do the business case and the feasibility studies. I am very grateful for that. However, the level of investment that we need is much, much larger than resas has as a capital fund, for example. Therefore, we have had to seek alternative sources of funding. The Tay City deal, for example, is a perfect opportunity where we can bring public and private partnerships together to try to get that investment. I have a series of questions for Safari in particular. I think that you received approximately £750,000 from the strategic research portfolio. Without asking you to sing for your supper too much, could you explain what you are doing now that was not happening before? Yes, certainly. I have talked a little about the directory of expertise. That is one thing that we do that underpins a lot of the other work that we are seeking to deliver. We have a staff base that is drawn from across the institutes. That is useful because it brings in expertise from across each of the institutes but with different sectoral capabilities. The idea is that they know what is going on in their different areas across the research programme, and they can link that back into stakeholders as well. They understand that landscape too. In terms of what that money funds, it funds the staff time of those individuals that I have talked about, as well as me and a core team of our secretariat. We have three main elements that we fund on a competitive basis. One of those is the Safari think tank. This is a mechanism that allows individuals across the research institutes to take a step back from their day-to-day work and think about national and global challenges. We have five programmes running at the moment. One is on something called the systematic review of sustainability assessments of cities from a food systems perspective. What does that mean? It means urban food and how we produce it and how we can do it better and how we can measure it and so on. We have other pieces of work around conserving genetic diversity. That is considering the diversity of crops, of forestry, agricultural resources across Scotland to ensure that we have resilience in Scotland and ensuring that Scotland hits its targets, its international targets, known as the HE targets on biodiversity. We have work looking at how we can think about decarbonising global agri foods, where can carbon budgets have a place to play in the agri food network, and we have a couple of projects looking at alternative protein sources. This is thinking about crops that we have not used so much in Scotland, and colleagues would be able to talk more about the specifics of those. That is the think tank mechanism. Five programmes running under that. We have something called the Responsive Opportunity Fund. I will go into less detail, but suffice to say that we have 13 projects running under that. That allows researchers across safari a mechanism to carry out knowledge exchange on their research, which they would not ordinarily or otherwise have had the opportunity to do. Some of the high profile things under that include development of a cross safari film at the John Hope Gateway, at the Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. We have done other things around holding workshops. We have done things like farmer to farm or peer learning around mechanisms called precision agriculture. That is about vaccinating livestock in the right way at the right time to ensure that the systems are more efficient and so on. We have schools, soil posters and so on. We have a mix of things under that fund. The third main funded element is fellowships. We have run two of those so far, one with Scotland's Futures Forum, which Members will know as wholly owned by the Scottish Parliament. We worked with them looking at Scotland's culture and society to 2030, but we had the conversation initially suggesting that in order to have a well-functioning culture and society, you need a well-functioning, resilient environment. We were able to bring a fellow in to bring the safari research to bear on that conversation. The second fellowship that we have run was with Cairn Gorms National Park Authority. It was looking at upland moorland management. That was very interesting because it came out of a meeting that we had between researchers working on issues in the Cairn Gorms or which could be relevant to the Cairn Gorms and the Cairn Gorms National Park Authority. They had a meeting with the National Park Authority, and that was very interesting and saw information exchanged and so on. We recognised that there was potential to do more with that, and we funded a fellowship to explore how the distance between that research and decision makers within the park could be shortened. We had an individual from the Morden Institute who was able to go and talk to land managers, land owners, land practitioners in the upland moorland area to talk to them about what their issues were. Interestingly, we found ourselves—this was an iterative process—being a knowledge broker for people whose voice might not ordinarily be heard in these sorts of situations. I am talking about gamekeepers as land managers in their own right. We are developing that work based on what they told us their issues were in relation to some of the issues that they have to deal with day to day on the ground. That was a little bit of a light bulb moment. We can talk about research in the abstract and with organisations and so on, but it has to get to the people who might ultimately be able to use it in practical ways for it to work properly. Those are the funded mechanisms. I thank you for that very comprehensive answer. Developing the point that you mentioned last and referring back to your comment about the rest and be thankful parts, which is an issue dear to my heart representing the Highlands and Islands, how do you take that kind of issue and affect policy thereafter? How do you plug into Transport Scotland in that instance or local authorities? I think that you have hit the nail on the head by saying that we can plug into conversations that are already happening. We are not looking to reinvent the wheel. We are trying to demonstrate where the safari research is relevant to topics that are on-going. I have talked about the example with Food Standards Scotland, for example. We are also talking to SNH. We are talking to Loch Lomdon Trust's National Park Authority. We are talking to Scotland Food and Drink, so it is across that spectrum of things that are happening. We know that we have work to do, and it is an iterative process identifying where, within Government and so on, the right policy leads and conversations have to take place and how we can help that. In my mind, the catchment analogy is a useful way of thinking about it. I am able to work in a forestry commission office for a day a week. The conversations that they have are exactly the same as the challenges that we face. If you look at Hill, there are lots of land managers involved on that hill. How do you design a construct and a conversation that can bring them all together? The rest can be thankful to one area in which we might be able to do a mapping exercise to say who is involved here, but it is also an area in which we have been looking to link up terrestrial research, I suppose, with what is going on in the marine environment as well. There are lots of publicly funded research going on there, too, and that interaction is important. Lastly, Safari is relatively new and you represent or co-ordinate a number of very well-known brands such as Morden or the James Hutton Institute and others here today. Are you clear in your mind when Safari as a brand should be used or when the well-known and relatively long-standing names that we all know should be used instead? Where is the balance between Safari and the house of brands as you might otherwise be? That has been an interesting exercise to get to the point where the Safari collective was established. You are absolutely right that all those institutes have world-leading and well-renowned and long-standing reputations in their own right. Our view would be that there are different horses for courses with that. We have agreement at the director's executive committee level, at which Julian Collins and the directors of the other institutes and myself all sit. We believe that the Safari brand can be used in relation to the strategic research programme but also in relation to other Government funding and other funding that is able to be levered in with our recognition that the Scottish Government funding for research is absolutely fundamental to that work. The point at which it stops probably relates to commercial activities, which the individual institutes would carry out, but I would say that this is also an iterative process for us. We have been working very hard with the communications teams of all the institutes to try to build capacity and a shared understanding of when the Safari brand is appropriate and when individual institutes should look to their own reputations. Sorry, just to wind that to the other institutes. I mean, very briefly given the time, but in terms of your role as part of Safari, do you have any brief comments to make? I would like to agree with Graham. I think that it is a good name and we like what it stands for. It is a house of brands and we have to use it as and where it is appropriate. When we are working with our international collaborators who have known the name Moerdun for many, many decades, we continue to use the name Moerdun but we always refer back to Safari as our Scottish initiative trying to bring everything together. I think that it is all about interpretation and I think that it has been a very useful addition to the way that we describe our work. Sorry, do you want to come? I would agree entirely. We have got multiple levels in which we work at Scottish, European and global level. James Hutton brand has been very quickly established and has got great resonance with people already, but Safari also is working incredibly well for it, particularly at a Scottish level. Do you have toes in any way? No, no. It is actually very helpful. We have had a great response from stakeholders who like it very much. They see a one-stop shop, which is a great place to come. Excellent, right. Richard Lyle. I have got two questions. First one is in regard to the national performance framework and Mr Campbell actually touched on this subject earlier. Scottish Government website states that Scottish Government is investing around £48 million a year into a portfolio of strategic research to ensure that Scotland maintains its position at a very cutting edge of advances in agriculture, food and the environment. In your opinion, does the panel agree that this money has been well spent? The short answer is yes, but I will expand on that for you. I think there is tremendous evidence here. Just in terms of the economic strategy of Scotland, we are making a big contribution to that. Julie and I have both talked about the multipliers that we give back, anywhere between £10 and £12.75 for every pound invested. That is creating wealth, creating jobs, in our case, for every job that James Hutton has, and other six jobs. We are fundamentally contributing to the economic strategy of Scotland. Over and above that, we are also contributing to many, many policy areas in terms of climate change. I think that many of the progressive policies that we have, for example, in Scotland, are built on the sound evidence that we have provided over decades. The ability to calculate how much carbon enters in the soil is only possible because we have mapped those soils across all of Scotland. We are making lots of contributions there. We have even contributed to national performance indicators. Scotland is one of the first nations in the world to have a natural asset register and a national asset index so that we can follow what is happening with our natural capital in Scotland. We are world-leading in terms of policy because we have the science and the research there. I think that there are multiple areas where we have made a contribution, everything from water framework directive through to climate change, for example, people in restoration are doing a huge amount in that area as well. You will see in the evidence that we have submitted many, many areas. We even make a contribution to criminal justice through developing world-leading soil forensic methodologies to help to solve crimes in Scotland. I think that we do a huge range there and I think that we give great value for money. If I could comment, I would agree. I think that Scotland is internationally renowned for this area of science, for the work that is undertaken in food agriculture, the environment and rural communities, and we have had major impact, as Colin has said. Over the years, work at Morden has produced most of the vaccines that are used at livestock health across the world. Those vaccines are still selling many, many decades after the work was conducted and it is similar with things like genetics, both of animals and of fruit and vegetables in Scotland. We have a massive international recognition for the work that we have done. In a way, that is part and parcel of the fact that the Scottish Government has supported us over a very large number of years. Perhaps that has not happened across other parts of the world so well. We have been able to build up some internationally competitive organisations. That has allowed us to create spin-out companies and to commercialise our work, which, again, we have got many examples of over the years. Samo, in Mark Ruskell, do you have a brief supplementary? Yes, it is just on the work on climate change. Specifically, how has your research informed some of the policy choices within the draft climate plan, thinking in particular about soil testing, for example? One of the issues about soil testing is that we can probably manage our soils better for increasing the amount of carbon that we store in our soils. The soil pH is one of the critical factors that we can potentially manage. We are doing research to ensure that that is absolutely possible. All the theory and scientific evidence to date suggests that that would be of great benefit, but we also need to be absolutely sure that that is the case. The current research programme has a number of field experiments that are aimed at proving that that is the case, so that by monitoring and controlling the soil pH will actually get climate change benefit from that. It is about providing the evidence for the policies, but it is also about providing the logic and thinking behind why we might undertake specific actions that would benefit climate change. That is true of peatland restoration as well. There is a lot of groundwork there. Another example is the work that we do that will help to meet some of the climate change targets, particularly in agriculture. Some of the targets involve better efficiencies in primary agricultural production. That means that, from a livestock point of view, being better at breeding animals, they are more efficient and they have higher birth rates. Also, by controlling some of our endemic or production diseases, we improve the efficiency of production, so that minimises input resources and maximises the outputs. Again, we can now measure the impact of our control of those diseases in terms of carbon units. We see that the translation of this work will be very important as we address agricultural emissions. Climate change has been heavily involved in working with the Government on the draft climate change plan, the energy strategy and many other things. Just thinking particularly about the purview of the committee and the environment, food and agriculture, the work that we have done has been around looking at the realisable carbon abatement that we can achieve from different agricultural interventions, as opposed to what the technical potential might be, to help to inform the carbon envelopes around agriculture and get those as right as possible. We have been working on forestry and looking at ways in which the land use models can be integrated with the times model, which the Scottish Government uses to generate some of the insights into the climate change plan. That is something that climate change has been heavily involved with for a long period of time. Thank you. Richard Lyle, you have a second question. Lastly, is there any other piece of research in your field that would contribute to the delivery of national outcomes or the Scottish Government's purpose? I saw a few months ago a piece in regard to concern about the loss of top soil. Is there any other research across the panel's opinion that needs to be done? There is quite a wide range of issues. Soil erosion is something that farmers are increasingly aware of. Intensive agricultural productions sometimes do not favour the retention of soil after extreme events and rainfall events. We have seen some spectacular examples of that over the countryside. That is one particular issue that maybe needs to be looked at. There are probably other areas as well. In terms of policy-driven areas, for example, the good food nation bill, which is not just about food, but also about climate change, and about societal cohesion and all sorts of other things, there is lots of scope to do more research in that area as well. I could mention Scotland Food and Drinks ambition 2030 to double the turnover of that sector by 2030. I think that that is a fantastic opportunity, but it will require primary agricultural production to match its aspirations. I think that it is very important that Safari continues to work to deliver technologies that will allow that to happen. I would like to make particular mention of upland and hill regions, some of the remote and rural communities in Scotland, where I believe that they will have to remain active in food production and in providing a number of public services in order to support Scotland Food and Drinks ambition and, of course, the new agricultural strategy, which will be created by the UK, but which Scotland will have an opportunity to influence for our benefit. I can just pick up on that point, because I think that we have taken all the reverence around this issue about the development of such policy, but there is possibly a disconnect between creating that information and having it implemented. Are you conscious of that? Not especially. You do not know what future questions and policies you might need. A lot of the approach of the research institute is to take a long-term view and build up fundamental knowledge and understanding around how we manage our systems and quantify them. That is a very useful basis for anything that we might do in the future. Is the agricultural sector hungry for this information and ready to implement it? Absolutely, and they have great need. They are under a lot of pressure at the moment from all sorts of things, and there is a great need for actual information and knowledge. There is also great opportunity in what is known as agri-tech now, tremendous innovations. One of the things that we are doing at the James Sutton Institute is about vertical indoor farming, which is about growing. Vertical indoor farming is using a convergence of technologies, photonics, tunable LED lights, robotics, artificial intelligence, energy management systems to grow food crops inside of a vertical tower. That is very aligned with Scotland, because the two things that you need are renewable energy and abundant high-quality water. That is potentially a disruptive technology. There are new industries that could be getting born here in the next few years, and Scotland needs to be aware of that and how it fits in with our existing agricultural and environmental and food ambitions. I think that it is very important that the communities take very seriously about the implementation of strategy. I think that there is really good evidence from National Farmers Union Scotland and Quality Meat Scotland in the areas that we particularly impact, that people are taking research outputs very seriously and adopting new technologies. I think that I am getting ready for that productive efficiency, but also maintaining the environment through a number of different strategies. I think that there is evidence of it happening, but knowledge exchange mechanisms need to stay in place to make sure that implementation does occur. Again, I think that Safari takes those pipelines from research all the way through to the end-user very seriously. John Scott, please. I musta day is right. We have heard queries about the ability to disseminate knowledge from our various research institutes. I know that the modern already does that. Graham Cullen, do you see opportunities for further developing that knowledge transfer model? Perhaps road shows or how might you see that happening because there is undoubtedly a need for greater knowledge to be disseminated to our... Very much so. Safari Gateway is here to build on knowledge exchange mechanisms that already happen. In terms of road shows and so on, more done in SREC already do a lot of that type of work with farmers on the ground and so on. One of the things that we can do is bring the strengths that the different institutes have to bear on the wider collective. The Botanic Gardens, for example, have a particular model of engagement with wider society and so on. They are able to bring people into their gardens, into their sites, but also to take their message out into the community and so on in relation to gardening and those sorts of things. There is a lot of work to do here. When you start to design a matrix that looks at what is happening across the research programme and what does the business policy and society audiences actually look like, it starts to get complicated quite quickly, which is why it is important for us in Safari Gateway to try and prioritise around some of the key issues that we know are drivers for government and for individuals as well around climate change, around the idea of good food nation, but bearing in mind that there are issues that transcend those in relation to European Union questions and so on that we have talked about already. There are lots of mechanisms, and I have described some of those that we are funding, but that is building on what is already happening as well. The James Hunt Institute has done this for a very long time. We have had many award-winning ideas around how to reach out to the general public and talk about science. And even some of the research that we have done and education that we have done has been better than the curriculum for excellence, for example. We have got exam questions and materials used for various subjects in schools, but I think that we can do a lot more of that, and I think that Safari represents an opportunity for that, so we can join up together, do it more efficiently, share materials and ideas and reach out to people much more effectively than we have in the past. Your open days in Bulgaria are always very interesting. Good fun, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that. Quite. David Stewart. Thank you, convener. What effect is Brexit having on your ability to attract and retain top-quality scientists? So, I mean, there's a lot of concern around us. We've got something like 12 per cent of our staff are citizens from other European states, and that maybe doesn't sound like a huge number, but actually it's had a big impact on all of our scientists and staff because there's a concern about what's going to happen with Brexit. I have to say that we've probably only lost maybe two members of staff who have specifically said they're going back to Europe for those reasons, and I'm very sorry they've gone. They're excellent scientists, but we haven't seen any massive turnover of staff yet, but it is having a big emotional effect on staff, actually. They want to feel welcome. They've come to Scotland because we've got a high-quality environment and we do world-class science. Anything that affects that is going to change things in the future, and we need to be very careful about that. Brexit also has an impact on funding potentially, although I think things are calming down a little bit on that. It's certainly up until 2020, and thank goodness, because it's an area where we've been very successful and want to continue to be successful. But it's not just about the money, it's actually about the scientific co-operation. It's the opportunity to do a scientific experiment in Scotland and compare it against a scientific experiment in Spain or Germany. You'll learn a great deal more from that than you would if you were doing it on your own, so it's really important that we keep that international co-operation going. Particularly in relation to advice and information and sharing of expertise, I would suggest that we keep involved in all the expert advisory groups so that we're sharing international knowledge around key issues such as disease threat and climate change. We have about 14 per cent of our staff are in the same category, so we have the similar concerns. We haven't lost any yet, but many of our PhD students are from EU countries, and they are a really important resource for us for future succession planning and just for building up our science knowledge. Our EU funds at the moment represent about a fifth of our income into the Morden Research Institute, and that's because we've been really successful. We've held 2.9 million Euro grants over the past four or five years—one finished, one halfway through—so we will be able to finish that project as an EU co-ordinator, but it's losing that opportunity to do it in the future, which is significant. It's very important, then, that we try to find other funds. Hopefully, again, from the EU, if the UK comes to some arrangement, we can access those funds, but if not, we need to continue to try to find alternative sources of external funding. Although not a research institute, you've got quite a substantial EU national presence. Well, there are a number of implications with EU exit in relation to protection of the food and drink industry in Scotland. We discussed the ambition 2030, and I pointed out earlier the importance of making sure that innovation is important, but making sure that we don't forget the implications in relation to protecting the safety and the provenance of the Scottish food chain. All of those things are only going to become more important in a post-EU exit landscape when we're exploring new trade deals, there might be new regulatory standards to comply with, new methods that might have to be developed to demonstrate those standards, and also the value that's placed on the safety and provenance of the Scottish food and drink industry. It's a worldwide reputation that we're talking about here, and I think that there's a huge opportunity within the institutes and the programme to support those challenges going forward. Of abattoir workers in vets? Oh, absolutely, yes. That's another key consideration for Food Standards Scotland in relation to the delivery of official controls. Is there a danger then that the effect on uncertainty is a big factor, and it could affect Scotland's great tradition of scientific expertise? I think, in theory, yes, it could. I mean, the uncertainty has been slightly changed here up in terms of the horizon 2020 programme, but the development of a next programme of research in Europe has already started, and I think it's really important that we're involved in that going forward as well. All the active work to develop a post 2020 research programme has started already, and we need to be part of that. We're going to continue that kind of international co-operation, and if we don't have access to all these international co-operation things, it will damage our ability to retain and recruit the best talents from around the world. As well as the Scottish-based talent and the UK-based talent, they also want to work in the best possible place in the world, and many of them do in the United States of America or Australia, so we're competing for our own home-based talent, as well as the other European citizens. Mr Campbell, you talked about the importance of having longer funding streams, such as 10-year, for example. Yes, there may be a case that, after 2020, the structural funds are taking home, both by the Scottish Government and the UK Government, but there's no absolute certainty on that, and you've talked about the level of finance that you currently have from European funding. That's going to be a big gap if you suddenly lose 20 per cent in the case of Julie Fitzpatrick, 20 per cent of the hearing. There's uncertainty there. Obviously, there's potential replacement funding through the industrial strategy, for example, which is very much geared towards the innovation agenda, but it's not covering all research topics, for example, and we don't know exactly how that's going to pan out in terms of how that money is going to be spent, what areas it's going to get spent on, how it might come to Scotland, for example. There's still uncertainty, even though there's positive moves to increase investment in R&D, and there's still uncertainty around what's happening, even with the UK level. Thank you, convener. Sorry, Professor Fitzpatrick. Just going back to the clear and interesting memory of the BVA, anecdotal evidence suggests that up to 95 per cent of the vets in our abattoirs are from the European Union, and many of them are no longer available. Is that—could you confirm that figure? I couldn't confirm an exact number, but I can certainly provide you with that figure after the committee. It's a significant proportion of our veterinary staff in abattoirs are from other EU countries. It's a big concern for us in relation to retention of that workforce. It's a specialised workforce. It's a difficult working environment, and it's very difficult expertise to access from within the UK, so it will be a concern for us going forward. One of your inspectors are also EU nationals, aren't they? Excuse me. A proportion of your inspectors? The veterinary inspectors within abattoirs, yes. But directly employed by yourself? Yes. Yes, right. Okay, thanks. Sorry, Julie Fitzpatrick. Sorry, it was about the previous comment. On you go then. Well, sorry, if I can just support Jackie, it is my understanding that it is a very high proportion of abattoir veterinary inspection that takes place by EU qualified people. The point that I just wanted to make was about the collaboration again. I think that it's incredibly important that we do plan to try and keep engaged with the EU as much as possible, because although we are a small country, if we map our international linkages, there are huge numbers of interactions at all levels with all continents. As we mentioned before, the big signs that we are challenged with, the grand challenges globally, all require collaboration, so anything that reduces collaboration is a challenge for us and something that needs to be addressed. In terms of future employment of EU nationals or EU funding, which you very mentioned, do you formally put a risk register that takes on this as a threat to your organisation in terms of looking at your overall strategy, Mr Campbell? Yes, we do. In fact, it's in our risk register. We also look at means to mitigate that risk, so we've been investing in giving advice and help to our existing EU citizens in terms of how to apply for visas, arranging legal help, for example, through our own solicitors at a discount, for example, trying to provide supporting mechanisms to ensure that we can keep them as much as possible. We would be exactly the same. It is included in our risk register, both the staffing issue and also the funding issue. Just to wrap this up, Mark Ruskell and then Donald Cameron. Just to push that a bit further, I'm just wondering to what extent international treaties and obligations actually drive some of this collaborative research and whether you see potential front trade deals and co-operation agreements that may come alongside that. Will it be bilateral or multilateral to drive the research agenda? Or is it all wrapped up in Europe at the moment? There is beyond Europe a lot of disruption around global trade. I think that those could raise all sorts of research questions, particularly about primary production in terms of food, where it's grown in the world. If you couple that with climate change, we could be looking at a very different scenario of the types of food products that we actually have to produce in the future. I think that there are some uncertainties there, but there are also opportunities to do more research on novel crops, for example. We've started doing that. It's partly to meet the localism agenda, as well as the globalisation agenda. This year, we grew soybean, for example, in Scotland for the first time. We've grown the first crop of hops for the craft brewing industry in Scotland in the last two years. I think that there are lots of opportunities to look at alternative products that we can produce in Scotland, which will depend on the how things pan out and the sort of macroeconomics, which is somewhat disrupted at the moment. Sorry. As of last Friday, I think that it has been agreed that EU citizens in the UK can continue to live, work and study as they currently do under the same conditions as under union law. Will you be updating your risk registers to take that into account? Yes, to a degree, but it's also about the opportunities to do world-class science. Retention recruitment staff is always in our risk register and there's always pressures on it. It's about the level of investment in our science generally and the levels of funding that we have and the infrastructure and world-class facilities to have all those things affect retention recruitment. The European risk is maybe slightly reduced at the moment, but we would still consider the bigger picture in terms of the overall funding uncertainty. A comment just to say that collaborations internationally are something that has taken place across the safari institutes for a very long time and there are tens of countries that collaboration has already been undertaken with. That's a platform to build on and there are conversations within the safari gateway that we are looking to have building with others, having this sort of dialogue with people like Scottish Enterprise, Scotland, Europa and those sorts of organisations as well that we will be looking to demonstrate the relevance of the safari research to. I just make a comment in response to Mr Ruskell's question. In the livestock side, I think that the EU situation is very complex. We have all the issues about export, tariff and trade, but much of our legislation about animal disease control comes from the EU. Again, there will be changes and it's not clear yet what will happen, so biosecurity and prevention of disease in the UK is critical. Obviously, Scotland has a very important role to play because we're combined with other administrations and the third area is about registration of veterinary products, how we develop and register products in the future, so the EU issue is quite complex and important in the animal sector. Well, thank you very much for your evidence this morning. It's been very, very informative. If there's any points, jump out at you once you've left the building, please feel free to write to us. As I say, we very much appreciate your contribution. I'm not going to suspend the meeting briefly for the changeover of witnesses, as we'll resume in five minutes. Good morning. Welcome back to the committee's scrutiny of the Scottish Government's draft budget 2018-19. We now move to evidence from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage. We're joined by Terry Ahern, the chief executive, and Martin Clockwin from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Francesca Olusovska, chief executive and Alan Hampson, the acting head of corporate services of Scottish Natural Heritage. As with the first panel, we've got a series of questions. The first questions are particularly directed at SNH, so can I welcome you to your new role before we start off? Your new corporate plan, I understand, will have an emphasis on, and I quote, connecting people with nature through leadership, influence and partnership, particularly in towns and cities. Given that you can't spend the same pound twice, what impact will there be, potentially, on the rural environment and communities with this changing emphasis, or apparent changing emphasis? Thanks very much for the question and thanks for the invitation to appear here today. I think in terms of our overall spend, you will have seen from our annual report last year that our total grant in aid is £47 million and we also have funds levered in through a range of other sources. Much of this is spent in rural areas, so the maintenance of our various sites, national nature reserves, marine protected areas and a lot of the work that we carry out through the SRDP, is directed at rural areas. However, as you've identified, we are a national organisation. We want everybody throughout Scotland to have the opportunity to enjoy nature, and we've recognised in the past that perhaps those individuals living in either urban environments or in deprived areas do not have the same access to nature that others have. What we will do if the corporate plan is approved in its current form by the Scottish Government, and as you know, that's still a process that we need to go through, we will look to emphasise some of the placemaking work that we're involved in, for example, via the Green Infrastructure Fund to ensure that urban areas and those living in deprived communities have the access to nature that we feel everyone in Scotland should enjoy. I'll just pick up on that point, because you're talking there about access to nature, which is all very well and good, but surely the priority is to ensure that we have that nature to enjoy in years to come, and shouldn't the focus primarily be on protecting endangered species, for example? We will do that as well. In terms of our overall budget, as I said, we allocate a lot to the maintenance of our protected areas. We also allocate significant funds to ensuring that protected species continue to be protected. As you say, generations to come can enjoy nature, but we also want to ensure that those in our more urban environments and perhaps that don't have the opportunities are able to do so. I think that in terms of the priorities for the years to come, as I said, we're still going through a process with the corporate plan that will be followed by a more detailed discussion on the business plan for 2018-19, both through the senior leadership team in SNH and the board, and then with the Scottish Government to ensure that priorities are aligned with the Scottish Government priorities. To what extent is this changing emphasis being driven by budgetary considerations? To what extent is the view of SNH the way to go? I would say that it has not been driven by budgetary considerations. I think that it has been driven by a number of factors which I would trace back to some of the areas that the Scottish Government has highlighted in the past. For example, I mentioned placemaking earlier. We really see that we have a strong role in placemaking. In addition, we also want to combat inequalities across the piece and access to nature could be viewed at the moment as unequal. That is about trying to equalise opportunity for Scotland's citizens. To what extent are you or can you plan for what you anticipate might be additional workstreams that come your way? For example, the work that is currently being carried out, looking at the future methods of tackling wildlife crime, deer management, could lead to an increased workload for SNH. How aware are you of that? To what extent can you anticipate or plan for that happening? If I can give an example from this year where our budget for peatland increased significantly, thanks to additional funding from the Scottish Government, we were prepared for that because, from previous years, we had a pipeline of projects that allowed us to take forward the peatland action restoration programme this year. Similarly, we do not know what our budget is at the moment. We feel confident that, by having the discussions about priorities with the Scottish Government, we will be able to address any new priorities that emerge. That will be a conversation that we will have with the Scottish Government once the budget is clear. Focusing particularly on the peatland work, which is an excellent programme, based on the take-up that you have had of that funding for this financial year, do you believe that the demand will be there to take that up this coming year? We have a very strong pipeline of projects. Again, I know that this is a little bit hypothetical. If there was funding allocated to peatland action in future years, we would be confident of being able to satisfy that funding stream. We have seen a declining quality of urban green space, partly because of council reductions in investment in those areas. Is there a danger that you just come in and backfill what councils have already cut? Our approach in many areas, including through the green infrastructure fund, is to work in partnership. We work in partnership with a range of councils and then other bodies who are active in that area. I do not believe that we are replacing council funding. I would say that what we are doing is enhancing what local authorities are already doing through our expertise. Just to add to that, another part of the equation is making sure that the councils understand the benefits associated with the green space. We have been working with four councils to develop green health partnerships, which are essentially promoting the benefits of outdoor recreation activity for people and thereby reinforcing the importance of maintaining good access to green space. Let us move on and look at the work of SIPA, Kate Forbes. Thank you very much and welcome to the committee today. As Graham Day mentioned, I would like to focus my questions on SIPA and your budget and your services. In terms of your core services of regulation and flood risk management, have you analysed the resource implications of developing sustainable growth agreements or reforming the permissioning system? If you have, what would those resource implications be? We would not have detailed figures and breakdowns on those two areas, but the work that we have done indicates that what we will be doing in those two areas, for example, the permissioning reform is following better regulation principles. This often gets misunderstood. It gets badged sometimes as either your pro-regulation or anti-regulation. In fact, when you reform your permitting system and what we are doing is this, if you have clearer, simpler permits, then it is easier for a business to know what the law is and what its obligations are. It is easier for us to know whether they are meeting them. It is easier for us to take enforcement action that will actually work in the court and it is easier for the public and others such as parliamentarians to hold us and the industry to account for whether we are performing. That permitting reform, we think over time, will lead to much more effective work and will lead to much more efficient work. We would not have figures on how much more efficient, but we would expect, for example, that the number of people writing permits will go down over time. We will have a period over the next couple of years as we reform the entire permitting system where there are resources devoted to doing that simplification. Once we have done that, we should have fewer people doing it because it should just roll out. Those resources can be diverted to working with business on enforcement, compliance, et cetera. The sustainable growth agreements are an innovation which we think contributes both to people getting to compliance and people going beyond compliance. I will give you a practical example. The first one is with superglas and insulation manufacturer in Stirling. Before I joined a couple of years ago, that was one of our poor performing businesses. New management came in, both HSE and SEPIS said your compliance record is very bad. The new management said, well, give us a list of what we need to improve and progressively over time they have got to full compliance. Signing the sustainable growth agreement takes them further, so they are going beyond the standards in terms of environmental performance. One of the highlights in the agreement is that they are now going to work with the local community. At the launch of the sustainable growth agreement, a community member said to me, I have to claim my own car now, and it is your fault. I have been accused of lots of things as a regulator around the world. I do not understand that. He said, because the air pollution was so bad several years ago, superglas paid for people to wash cars in the local area. The air pollution has come right down to the standards. In the sustainable growth agreement, they are now looking at how they can work with the local community on partnership work to improve environmental performance. That agreement will entrench their compliance performance. We would hope to spend less time because they have signed up at CEO level. You do not get a sustainable growth agreement unless the CEO signs, so the I signed and the CEO signed, to say that we will maintain our compliance performance and will do better. They now have an additional incentive on top of just our potential enforcement. They have gone out to the world and said, we have signed this agreement, we will comply and will go further. We think that sustainable growth agreements will contribute to beyond compliance performance and entrenched compliance certainty for the community. That may well have answered my next question, which was one of your other actions was to investigate new approaches to enforcement to tackle non-compliance at an earlier stage. I presume that that is an answer to that point as well. Are there alternative ways? There are alternative ways. In our one plan of prosperity strategy, we have a clear statement that compliance is non-negotiable. I do not know any regulator in the world that achieves 100 per cent compliance, but that is what we are aiming for. I do not see why the people of Scotland should get anything less than 100 per cent. We may never get quite there, but that is what we are aiming for. That will mean everything from the sustainable growth agreement entrenching compliance because it leads to executive and board-level commitment from a regulator business, but in addition we will use the full range of measures. That is one thing we can do. We have a new set of enforcement powers that the parliament gave us two or three years ago, fixed monetary penalties, variable monetary penalties, enforcement undertakings, so we are starting to roll those out. We will use a broader set of enforcement tools in addition to this new and broader set of encouragement tools. I guess there are all forms of encouragement. Some are encouragement through a penalty, and some are encouragement through signing up to say that we will be exceptional citizens. I presume that you think that all of that will lead to savings. Yes. Over time, what that should do is mean that we can get compliance more effectively and powerfully, and then there are either savings that can be passed back to people paying charges if we lower our costs or can be diverted into other public uses, either for our budget or someone else's. I do not back away from that. Talking about charges, how do you set to your charges and costs? Has income from the charging scheme remained static over the last few years? The charges are set through a process of saying there is two parts to it. What are the costs of our regulation? That means writing permits, doing inspections, et cetera. The direct work we do, the indirect work that supports that is say monitoring work. If we are regulating businesses that affect a lock, then we will be monitoring the lock and we will recover part of that cost. It is making sure that the work we do that is for direct regulation is costed. We then assessed that and we had a major reform a couple of years ago against the level of effort that we need to put into each business so that it is proportionate for the costs that we have. Scottish water pays a lot more than a small operator. The other part of the question, the idea of that was that it was revenue neutral. It goes up and down a bit, largely dependent on economic activity, but it has remained reasonably static over the last few years. Pick up on that issue of proportionality. You are going to have a piece of work just now to take to Government around charging. We take examples of agriculture where I understand that there has been some suggestion of substantial increases around abstraction. How do you take account of whether a sector can actually bear substantial increases in cost, as is the case with agriculture currently? The principles that underlie the charging scheme are about cost recovery. The core principle is if you use the environment to run your business and generate income, then you should pay the proportionate cost of what society spends through us on regulation. That has been a principle that has been adhered to. We will then look at, in consultation with Government, whether there is any need to make progressive changes or allow for that ability to pay, but we try to stick very much to the core principle because the more you break from it, the more you start... We put a lot of work into the last few years into trying to get it to be more accurate and fair to everyone, so the more you start breaking from that, the harder it is to maintain the fairness and equity in the system. I get that, but whether a sector like agriculture, which right now is under a great deal of pressure, surely that needs to be a factor that is taking account of, or is that something for Government to take account of when they make a decision on whether to agree with what you are proposing or not? We would have good consultation, as we have with NFUS and others, as well as individuals that make representation. We take that into account and then put positions to Government. Ultimately, it is a policy position for Government to make. Moving on to budget allocations, I wonder if you could provide any examples of where budget allocations have impacted either positively or negatively on relevant indicators in the national performance framework, which presumably guides those allocations? I will give a very general answer, but for me it is a very clear answer to this. I have moved around the world and everywhere I go there are budget cuts. It is a part of life, so like any administrator, I would like more money or at least to maintain my budget, but my approach is to work with colleagues and say, whatever money we get, we will look to make maximum effect. If you think about the messages that the Government has and that an organisation like SEPA has under Government policy about abstract concepts like the circular economy or resource efficiency, we are saying to the world, for example, that SEPA says, if everyone in the world lives like Scots, we would need three planets as only one, so we need to become much smarter and cleverer as a society to use the natural resources. I have the same approach with our financial resources, working with my colleagues. Compared to some other jurisdictions I have been in, we have not had huge budget cuts in my time at SEPA. We have had cuts and they are difficult, but our focus is how do we use that money much more effectively to deliver against the national performance income indicators. I could not say that we have had any impact that is negative on our ability to contribute. That may change in the future if cuts keep coming, but our focus will be on how do we be more innovative to deliver against the indicators. Great, thank you. One last question, which is quite cheeky. In terms of other portfolios and their priorities, at the moment, do you identify any particular priorities in terms of spending priorities, which will exacerbate environmental challenges in Scotland? The way we look at it is that every human activity impacts on the environment, so we take more of an approach of if Scotland is to be prosperous like any nation, things will happen. So whether it is transport, development and education, how do we work with those portfolios to minimise the environmental impact so they can achieve the mobility aims that the transport portfolio will have or the education aims at the education department have? There are obviously areas like transport, which if you look at, say, the carbon footprint for Scotland is significant, but it is more that we would say everything needs innovation, how do we get in and support people being innovative? Where it is a regulated sector, again, we would be very clear, we would say, well, there are legal standards, you have to comply. If you can do that through innovation and it saves your money, great, and we will help you with that, but if it is going to cost your money, the only way to meet the standards is to do that, we will get you there, whether that is transport or anything else. Beyond that, we are looking for the win-win because beyond the legal standards, there is no reason for anyone to do anything unless it improves transport outcomes or education outcomes or commercial outcomes. Thank you very much. Okay, let us move this on, Richard Lyle. Beyond staffing and gender balance, so if you bear with me. To SNH, first, in the submission, you said that you have made a 25 per cent reduction in staffing over the last six years. How many staff did you have six years ago and how many staff do you have now? So our head count for 2020-11, which is the baseline that we usually use given significant organisation change at that point, was 907 and the FTE in that year was 770. Our latest head count of the first of April this year was 711 with FTE of 603. Thank you. To both SEPA and SNH, what percentage of your budget relates to staffing? Is staffing level stable or will further cuts have to be made? So our staff, the percentage of our budget which is taken up by staff costs is 49 per cent. And as I said earlier, in terms of future budget, we will look at the potential for any reduction or who knows increase in staffing levels once we know what the Scottish Government budget allocation is going to be for 2018-19. SNH, there's a clear drop in the number of staff, but you have people like volunteer wardens assisting you in your work. You've wrapped your study groups assisting you. Are they in any way filling that staffing gap? In terms of our volunteer workers, and you've mentioned some, but also through the national nature reserves, we have a range of volunteers who support us. I think it would be quite difficult to say that they're filling a gap in terms of our paid staff. Where we've looked to make efficiencies in terms of our pay bill is around some of our kind of corporate work, for example, and some of our kind of planning and case work. So for example, on planning, we're now doing a lot more what they term upstream work with developers, which can release staff to do that. I simply want to make the point, because you talked earlier about access to nature. We'll volunteer wardens, for example, to do a lot of work to enable that to happen. In terms of tackling wildlife crime, the work of their active study groups, by and larger, is quite important. I'm just going to try to get a feel for the extent to which, in addition to the workforce that you employ, you actually have considerably more people assisting SNH in its work. That's absolutely true. In terms of the number of volunteers that are involved in SNH, I don't have a precise figure on that, but I can maybe come back to you. That's fine. I just wanted to get that on the record. Sorry, Mr Lyle. Yes, Mr Aham, can you tell us about any staff? So it's just under 1,200 FTEs, and it's about 67 per cent of our total budget. How are you simplifying primitive processes, proving enforcement, and what does this mean for operational staff costs? Can I be cheeky in asking how many staff you have in your HQ, and I maybe have to declare you, actually, in my constituency of Oddingson and Bellsell, and how many staff do you have in the field? In HQ, the sterling office we have, I think, around about 200 staff, but some of those are the field staff for... Sorry, that was me in your office in Maxham Park. Oh, okay, it's about 400. Right. And some of those are field staff, so we have the labs at your essential. Yep. But there's also a lot of the people who do the regulatory work out in the west. I think the staff in the field is around about five to six hundred. Okay, thank you. We're on that point, Mr Aham, because you and I have discussed this before in previous sessions, about the strength of SIPA being its local footprint. You've given undertakings to try and protect that as much as you could. Have you managed to do that? Yeah, so we're at 26 different offices, a lot of those are shared around Scotland, and we've got a commitment to as much as we can keep those officers in that local presence. We've strengthened it in various ways, so we're introducing a system where we'll make very formalised that the local officers are in charge of local relationships. So, for example, we've never had managers, people responsible for the management of a company relationship. So if you take, say, an aquaculture, marine harvest or Scottish seafarms, we have local officers who will look at the four, someone in Thurso will look after four fish site licences or permits, but we haven't had anyone looking after marine harvest. So all those people will be from the local officers, so we're maintaining the officers and we're giving them strength and responsibilities, because for me they are the front line of what we do. But do you then collate the information that they gather? So say, for example, a major company in any sector that perhaps is not discharging its responsibilities quite as it ought to, do you collate that national information to get that picture to allow you to take a more strategic view of their activities? For a number of years we've produced an annual compliance assessment scheme report, so you can get that sort of information there. The permitting reforms, the client management reforms, the sector plan approach that we're taking will enable us to do that in a more, in a stronger way, take that information we have and be able to say to companies much more clearly, you know, you've got 40 sites that are compliant, you've got six that aren't, it's on these parameters, let's agree an approach to quickly get you into compliance. Okay, that's good here. I'll let Mark Ruskell in before we come back to Richard Lyle. Are you able to, this is the question to SIPA, are you able to actually focus your resources on particular areas? I'll give you an example, I've met with the communities around Mossmorran on Friday, and there was a real concern that their demands for detailed residential noise monitoring had been turned down by SIPA because they just simply didn't have the staff available. Now that's an anecdotal case, but it does point to a concern out there that, where there's a particular set of problems that SIPA needs to address, communities often find that the resources, the boots on the ground actually aren't there to take a more enhanced form of regulation that I think your stakeholders at community level would demand. So the sectoral approach that we're taking, where we'll have a sector plan for each sector that we regulate, so the first six areas like aquaculture, whisky, landfills, we'll have a very clear and public explanation of how many sites there are in that sector, which ones are non-compliant, what the beyond compliance opportunities are, and then that will enable us to devote more resources to say if there's 10 non-compliant sites, how do we target our resources effectively to get rid of those 10 and get them all up to compliance? I would hope that that would mean that in the sort of example you talk about, we would be able to have a more focused approach to solve problems, work with communities on what they see the impacts are, and knock things off more quickly and powerfully. Miss Ollil, to finish up on the gender issue. My last two questions together in regard to gender balance, overall gender balance of SIPA and SNH staff, whether there's a difference across fuller part-time workers and what is the gender balance of senior managers and boards, and lastly, what work has been done to address gender imbalance across both your organisations? So in terms of SNH, the overall balance of staff, male to female is 40 per cent male, 60 per cent female at the board is the same, so actually we have more female board members than male. For our senior leadership team, which is myself, three directors and three heads of service, it's 50-50. In terms of the work that we're doing to ensure gender balance within the organisation where we promote flexible working very actively and we've got a good take-up of flexible working and we're also doing some work on gender pay issues. A shining example for others then. So at SIPA it's 54 per cent of staff are female, 46 per cent of male. At the board level we've got seven male and four female, so it's 64 per cent, 46 per cent. There's a focus on changing that as we have recruitment over the next couple of years. The executive team, when I joined, I had five executives, four male, one female, I've split one role, so six and I've now got three male, three female. In the next year down it's pretty even and we've got a programme in place to try and ensure that that flows much more strongly over time so that we're starting to get much more even spread right throughout the levels. So an excellent example in work and progress? I hope so, yes. Alan Hampson, you want to come back. I'm just going to come back on the scale of volunteering effort that you're asking about. So on our own national nature reserves it's about four and a half thousand days of volunteering per annum and through our grants we support volunteering opportunities in the region of 85 to 90,000 every year. So it's quite substantial. It is substantial. Can I just pick up on Francesca's point? You talked earlier about flexible working. Do either of your organisations participate in the care or positive initiative? Not that I know of, but forgive me, I'm still kind of day 40 something. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think it's, I would encourage both of you to look at that because it allows carers into the workforce and it's a very important sector, so I can just, I've got that on the record. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Moving on, David Stewart. Thank you. Can I move us on to Brexit? Have you assessed the financial effects of leaving the EU, particularly for your respective organisations? Can you start with Sipa? Well, we've looked at the various impacts of Brexit, as you know, it's huge. We have some funding, particularly in the waste area that's EU-based, so we're looking at how we can maintain that. The other financial impacts on us, like direct financial impacts on budget, are not really significant from Brexit, except in the sense that there are specific areas where there will clearly need to be some alternative like chemicals management. So are we going to stay in the reach programme or do we come out? How do we replicate that? But what we've done is work with officials to focus on the very specific areas where we think we have responsibilities where there are clear urgent needs, reach what happens to the emissions trading scheme, et cetera. At the moment, we wouldn't necessarily see huge environmental impacts, sorry, financial impacts for our budget, with the caveat that there's so much uncertainty. Yes, as you'll be aware, we leave significant funding through EU programmes at the moment and part of our preparations for EU Exeter to work with partners to think through alternative sources of funding should that funding not be available. Obviously, again, we don't know how those future EU schemes are going to be taken forward by the Scottish Government or by the UK Government, but we're working with partners to ensure that we understand the implications for them on future funding decisions. You had a quick look through SNH's European funding and I make it around £57 million if you include SRDP, ERDF and EU life. Is that figure accurate or is there more funds that I haven't identified there? That is the majority of the funds. There's a tiny amount that we receive through leader, but £57 million is a good headline figure. For SRDP, that is a significant chunk of the SRDP budget. At one level, congratulations for managing to leave it as much of that in. However, if that doesn't continue after 2020, that could be a big gap in your future programmes. Is that part of your risk register as well? Yes, it is. That is very substantial. It is substantial in terms of the EU exit work that we're doing, and the continuity of funding is one of the main issues. We're discussing that with partners. The other issues that we're looking at are around day 1 readiness, such as making sure that our documentation is up-to-date and working with the Scottish Government on some of the legal issues. As far as employment is concerned, do either organisation have significant EU nationals employed? We have 23 staff with EU and EEA nationality, which is 18 female and 5 male. It's in the same range, so we've done a lot of work with them to support them, etc. Have you picked up any sort of anxieties about future employment as far as EU nationals are concerned? Yes, I would say all our people in that category have some anxiety, some more than others. The Scottish Government has a working group across the public sector for EU nationals, and one of our EU nationals participates on that group, which is a helpful line of communication and support. As Donna Cumann identified in the last session, clearly there's some negotiation around that, in respect to Crossity, which we would all welcome. It's also thinking about the future generations from the EU who might wish to work in Scotland. That point is still vague, so I think there's still some issues to be worked out there. However, my final question is around—I think that you've touched on this partly—is looking at alternative sources of income if you suddenly lose that big chunk of EU funding? What sort of work has been done by both organisations around that? We've set up what we call a commercial services team. I'm not sure, in retrospect, that's the right name for it, but it's looking mainly at overseas work. It ranges from accessing EU funding, other forms of international funding, other forms of UK funding through to general commercial work, where we will advise people internationally. We are very deliberately not competing with others in Scotland. We don't think that's appropriate for a monopoly regulator to do, but the job of that team is to say whether we're in the EU or not and budgets will become increasingly tight. What are the opportunities to bring in other forms of revenue over time? Presumably you're focusing particularly on outwith EU countries in terms of new markets? We're doing both. We're a minor signatory to an agreement in India last week, but we're also—a major project is a funded project in Cyprus, so we're continuing to look at both to trying to harness and exploit the opportunities, whether it's inside EU or outside. Would be for it effectively ensuring that you've got extra income because of your expertise across the world that would draw income into your organisation? Yeah, it's multiple benefits for Scotland, so yes, income is clearly one of them, but it's also staff development. We learn when we work overseas from others and enables us to maintain and build relationships with others, so we're out of formal processes, having other ways of interacting with people or colleagues in Europe is very important as well, so it has a multiple set of benefits. Yes, Enich? Similar to Terry, we're working with our partners to identify alternative sources of funding. Obviously, we're also in touch with similar bodies across the UK so that we have an understanding of the UK picture and I think throughout this process being clear in terms of our priorities and where we can lever funds for some of our key priorities such as biodiversity, but Alan, do you want to add to that? We've just completed an initial review to help us look at the opportunities to diversify our funding. That covers both generating income for ourselves but also sources of funding that can support the sector as a whole. We will be, over the next few months, looking at that general review, identifying the opportunities within that and looking at the impacts of those, taking forward those opportunities as well as the resourcing around taking them forward. So it's an active area of work for us that we're pursuing. Thank you. It's perhaps a little bit unfair for a relatively new chief executive, but if we go back three or four years ago to the point where people in restoration was more about ambition than it was reality, there was a lot of talk then that if the Scottish Government put up a degree of funding, there would be external funding to be leveraged in. Are we starting to see that yet? I mean, you know, there's about 10 million pounds of Scottish Government funding but we all know that the demand may well outstrip that. So what other sources of funding, if any, are being identified to support this work? That is one of the areas that we've identified in this review of diversification of funding. What's the opportunity to bring in not just third sector money in terms of the restoration work but also potentially private sector money in terms of utilising some of the benefits of carbon capture? It's early days but we've had some initial discussion with some quite big players about what the potential might be there. Do you like pension funds? We haven't approached pension funds directly but that's one of the areas that was identified in our work. John Scott and then Mark Ruskell. Declaring an interest as a former SNH should be aware that landowners and farmers are having difficulties accessing the IX scheme. Is this a function of budget reductions or staff reductions or for other reasons? In terms of the agri-environment scheme, you'll be aware that it's quite a complex process and we've been working very hard with the Scottish Government to ensure that farmers and others are able to access that scheme through the complexities. Again, I'm not trying to use this as an excuse but my understanding of the trajectory here, some of which predates my arrival in the organisation, is that the processes have improved recently and that's taken quite a lot of effort by our own staff but also by the Scottish Government. If you had any particular cases that you'd want to bring to our attention, I'd be very happy to discuss those in more detail. Mark Ruskell. How might your work change post Brexit once we lose the European Court of Justice and the Offices of the European Commission? Difficult to speculate because we don't know what's going to come in their place. We know that the UK Government has made an announcement on potential future regulatory regime. It's not clear whether that applies to the devolved administrations or not. We know that the Scottish Government is pursuing that actively with DEFRA. In terms of SNH's role, obviously, as an NDPB, we will be guided by whatever regulatory regime the Scottish Government puts in place. I wouldn't have much to add except that whatever system is in place, I think my earlier answer about the clearer simplified permits is important because the more as a regulator you make it very crystal clear what law requires of people, the easier it is for whatever institutional arrangements exist to work. I don't have any any insights into what will come to replace that forum but I would hope that our system will be even better to be scrutinised. Have your boards discussed this and do they have a preference? In terms of regulatory regime? In terms of what replaces both the commission and the ECG? No, they haven't. I might now board and get a regular update on Brexit but we haven't had a discussion about that particular issue. Okay, let's move on to Donald Cameron. Thank you. A couple of questions for SNH around biodiversity. There's clearly going to be a transition between the framework grant structures and the new challenge funds. My question is really when will there be greater clarity around those new challenge funds? We had a meeting with the key recipients of the framework grants just recently to talk through in some detail. The move to the challenge fund should say that these discussions have been on-going for some time. I hope that there would not have been any surprise to the bodies in receipt of the framework grants. We're confident that that will be a clear process from the beginning of the financial year when we start the challenge fund or maybe ask Alan to elaborate on that. The idea of the challenge fund is to target the money that we have at priorities in terms of the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. Just to put it into scale, we're talking about around about 5% of the money that we make available in grant funding going into these challenge funds. In the past, we've held open grant rounds where people were able to just pitch in. What we found was that it was increasingly difficult to target that money to where it was being best used and therefore the challenge fund approach is really more like a sort of mini grant round which will enable us to better target the priorities and also to ensure best value for money in terms of those that we're offering to contribute. One of the points that are made to us is that there is a feeling that there is a lack of funding support for biodiversity in general. Can you offer any assurances to interested organisations? I think that we've got to change how we offer that support. There are some big challenges out there in terms of biodiversity. What we need are bigger, more strategic partnership projects which pool people's resources, get agreement around the common priorities and lever in as much external funding as possible. We're looking to help to lead the way to develop those bigger, more impactful projects. I just maybe comment on that. I think that it's important to focus on the outcomes that are being delivered. Certainly, in terms of biodiversity, the committee will be aware of the route map to 2020 and we published an interim report on that earlier this year. We hope to publish a second annual report next year. In terms of the 12 priority projects, two were rated as complete, eight were rated as on track and two were areas where we did want to see more progress. Since that document was published, which I think shows very good progress on biodiversity targets, we have done some further work and I'm hoping that the second annual report will show an even better outcome. I want to explore briefly your relationship with the royal botanic gardens. Ultimately, they are doing a great deal of the work that SNH might get the credit for, ultimately, as endangered species are saved and biodiversity is enhanced. What is the relationship with the botanics? It's nice to feel that we do get the credit for some of our biodiversity work. Not just the criticism. The Scottish Government has brought together a range of bodies in the environmental field under the leadership of Bridget Campbell in what's known as ELG, which is not a very pretty acronym, but it's the environment and economy leaders group. That brings together bodies such as SNH, SEPA, the botanic gardens, the two national parks and so on. Through that mechanism, I think that that's been a really excellent mechanism for collaboration. The botanics and SNH do collaborate on a range of biodiversity scientific studies and research. Given that there's been a decrease—we've already spoken about that—in agri-environment funding, as well as spend on SNH management agreements declining, as well as site-condition monitoring funding declining, what impact will that have on biodiversity in your view? I think that I would refer back to the point about outcomes. As Terri said earlier, as a Government body, we will work with the budget that we have. If the budget decreases, then the key for us is to prioritise to those areas of greatest need. In terms of the biodiversity work, we have good outcomes on the route map, on the HE targets, and we will continue to focus on those areas where we feel that biodiversity needs to be enhanced. Isn't there a danger with the challenge funding that just leads to short termism, though? I would use the example perhaps of Hogweed where you need a long-term approach, a catchment-wide approach, but if the funding comes for a couple of years and it stops, then one or two years later you just back to square, one again the Hogweed is taking over the catchment and then you're having to reinvest. In terms of adopting a preventative approach to spend, are there challenges with your challenge fund? That's where the bigger and more strategic projects that I'm referring to become essential, because dealing with an invasive species like giant Hogweed, you can carry on putting the same money into the same area year in year, but unless you're actually teaching the root cause of that, all you're doing is treating the symptoms. The money that we're now putting into addressing ends, we're working with a number of partners through a national steering group to ensure that we are investing the money in treating the causal origin of these things, rather than just constantly treating the symptoms, which is what was tended to happen probably more than it should have been in the past. Is that going to be long-term enough to actually tackle the problem? You can't tackle it within two years. I'm just using that as an example. It maybe needs a 10-year approach on a catchment basis to then eradicate if you ever can eradicate a non-native invasive species. I'm just trying to understand exactly what's in the budget this year and exactly how you're going to address that over time. In terms of the issue that you highlight, I would say that I wouldn't distinguish between challenge funding and grant funding because they're both the annual processes. What we try and do in either scenario is make sure that we understand the long-term impact of the Hogweed example, what is going to be the recurring need for funding, whether it's through grant or through challenge fund. As Alan has said, looking at a much broader scale intervention allows us, in terms of future budget considerations, to understand the pipeline of funding that will be needed. I touched very briefly on the dreaded D-word. I will return to Dior and its management. The direction of travel, as the committee heard during its scrutiny of Dior management, appeared to be SNH-cutting funding to DMGs. There were a couple of examples that we were given where DMGs had been asked to step in and provide the funding to continue one project to develop another. I'm just wondering how you see that progressing and how we can expect Dior management groups to start to do what they ought to be doing if the funding support is going down. The overall funding support for Dior management has not reduced. However, we know that there are some Dior management groups, and this came out of our Dior review. There are actually managing Dior in that locality very well and actually don't need as much support as they might have been given. There are other Dior management groups who are either facing a more complex set of issues or need more support for whatever reason. We have tried to target our funding on those Dior management groups who need it the most. We have written to them asking what sort of issues they face and making it clear that we will be taking a more robust approach to addressing the issues in the future. I think that you have indicated to us that you have secured an additional £175,000 of funding from the Scottish Government for Dior management. How is that being deployed and is that in any way adequate for the task that you face? In terms of that deployment, that funding has come available through some recycling of SRDP funding with the Scottish Government's agreement, and that is being used for habitat assessment and control measures in particular areas where we are confident that through the work that we do with Dior management groups that we can make great strides in addressing these issues, we prefer wherever we can to have a very good dialogue with the local community. In the majority of cases, we do have that very good dialogue that leads to voluntary co-operation and voluntary agreements in terms of management of Dior in the locality. But not in every case? Sometimes not in every case, but some of the more well-documented areas where it has been a more challenging situation have worked with all the partners in those areas to arrive at a position that all stakeholders can agree. However, we understand the challenges, but part of our role is to appreciate the different views, the different needs and the different outcomes that are sought from different partners and try to negotiate a solution. In terms of the costs associated with policing Dior management, how expensive are section 7 orders if they work if they don't? What are the costs associated with section 8, although we know as a committee that some of the SNHs seem reluctant to move to? I think that our reluctance to move to section 7 and section 8 is not simply a cost equation. It is back to my earlier points about actually we tend to get much better outcomes when it is a negotiated settlement, if I can use that phrase. In terms of the actual costs of section 7 and 8, I do not have that information, but I will be happy to provide it. What you are saying is that cost is not the determinant. In fact, there is a bit about how robust we are to pursue this. No, cost is not. We would much prefer and we see that we arrive at better outcomes when we have voluntary agreements that all members of the community and all stakeholders can sign up to. That is not a strict budget question, but you are missing me to pass up the opportunity, given our interest in the subject. What progress is being made around section 7 since this committee produced its report? Are we seeing any further progress? In terms of their use? Well, not just of their use, but of their effectiveness, because there were considerable questions asked about the effectiveness or elements of the effectiveness of section 7 at the time. I do not have that information, but Alan, or we can write to you. That is where some of the additional money is helping, because it is paying for habitat assessment so that the impact of the deer can be made much clearer. It is also helping to support control work. It is a bit of incentive to get out and get on with the work that has been on the table for a while. Okay. No doubt we and you will return to the subject in due course. If members have asked the explored others subjects that they wish to, I thank all of you for your time this morning. That has been very useful and helpful. I wish you all a good Christmas when it comes around. At its next meeting on 19 December, the committee will hear evidence from the Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform as part of the committee's scrutiny of the Scottish Government's draft budget 2018-19. It will also at that point consider its work programme. We will now move into private session and I ask that the public gallery be cleared as the public part of the meeting is closed.