 Good morning, everybody. Can you please settle down quickly? We don't have all morning for this session. We have quite a lot to do. Welcome to the seventh meeting of 2016 of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee. Remind members that before we move to the first item on the agenda, that all mobile phones should be switched off at least the committee members and others may use tablets during the meeting because the meeting papers are in digital form. The first item on our agenda this morning is to take evidence from stakeholders as part of the committee's process of compiling its legacy report. We are glad to be joined by two panels of witnesses this morning, all of whom were asked to submit a list of priority areas for consideration by successor committees. I might say we've marked these out of 10, and those who don't know what a bullet point is are going to get 100 lines. So this meeting will be conducted on the basis of having bullet points answers, not treatise. We thank you all for sending these. We've read them with interest at great length, in some cases, and identified common themes for each panel, which will form the structure of our questions today. I will not ask everyone to introduce themselves, because many of you are known to each other and known to us for many years. Welcome here anyway, and when you wish to speak, just catch my eye, or the clerk's eye, and we will make a list of those who wish to contribute. I'd like to kick off with the theme in this case about rural development economies and communities, because this is the Rural Affairs Committee, including broadband rural democracy and decision making. I was interested to see comments from SLE about beefing up community councils. I was interested to see development trusts talking about the need to have good examples out there. I think that there are wider issues about rural democracy that need to be looked at. I would like to open this just now bearing in mind that this is a legacy paper where we are trying to use the experience that we have had to put forward ideas for the future, not to go over all of the activities that have happened in the past, but to learn from them. Is there anyone who would like to kick off with that? I think that that is at the heart of decision taking and decision making. Does anyone like to comment? Sarah-Jane, you mentioned that the SLE was interested in beefing up community councils. Why? We should look at the operation of rural community councils. I do not think that we made any recommendations about beefing them up. During discussions on the community empowerment bill, there were concerns raised about deficit and local decision making. If we want to deliver some of the rural development policy and the objectives of land reform, we have to address those so that the discussions that we are having about sustainable development and community engagement do not take place in a vacuum. All local areas, localities and communities are aware of what they are trying to deliver. I would like the committee to maintain an awareness of the next committee about unintended consequences of the very good legislation and other elements being put in place for devolution and local democratic initiatives. We have the rural Parliament, for example, the Scotland Bill, the Community Empowerment and the Scotland Act. There is also much activity around community energy and community benefit funds and community broadband. At the same time, we are all extremely welcome to be aware of inequities that will arise and already arise from those initiatives because there are assumptions that all communities are equally able to seize those opportunities, which we know from evidence is not the case. If there is increasing reliance on such initiatives to address systemic issues, we are going to have some areas doing well, some areas falling behind and growing inequity within rural. That is something that I feel must maintain a profile. Graham Dey, and then Mike Russell, want to chip in just now. Serious care makes a very good point. How would you go about building the capacity to ensure that you did not get into that situation? There are many initiatives and we have Ditas here today and other agencies who are doing a great job in that regard. My point would be that we need to have coherence around that, so rather than having pockets of really successful activity, which is often dependent on local champions, we need to have something systemic that monitors where this isn't happening, where this is happening, learning from good practice, circulating that. Much of that is happening, but at the same time today, there are communities still not able to take advantage of these opportunities. It is that systemic, coherent strategic approach that is needed rather than a reliance on sporadic work at ground level, which is very welcome. Getting to grips with the problem of depopulation in rural Scotland strikes me as one of the key issues that we need to address going forward. In that regard, investment in basic infrastructure and an understanding of what basic infrastructure is seems to me to be vital. Our Gail and Bute Council has just published a report by a task force set up chaired by Nick Ferguson of Beast Sky Bee, which draws attention to digital and physical connectivity as being the two key investments that will be required to be made to stem depopulation. It would be interesting to know the reflections of people on the panel about that. Perhaps Sarah, who has some expertise in dealing with that, would be a useful starter on that. Again, without wishing to repeat myself too much, I think that it is this need to have a strategic oversight and a coherence, so there are initiatives, some born out of necessity, to do with broadband coverage where communities have had to seize their own opportunities and create their own opportunities. We know of some very innovative and good examples indeed in your area. However, we need to map that against national strategic initiatives and make sure that there aren't these hotspots and not-spots. I was reading a paper the other day about the new arguments in information society and it's not whether or not you've got broadband, it's what type of broadband you've got and how functional it is. That's harder for those without to argue about. It used to be 15 years ago that you could agitate for broadband, those of you who are on dial-up. Now it's much harder to agitate for equality of connectivity and to know who to agitate to because the landscape is quite complex for those who are seeking to step into it. I think that it's about having this overview, recognising what's working well and also building up the opportunities in a systematic way, rather than hoping that things will trickle down or trickle across. Mike, should we take an Occam's razor approach? There's a simplest solution or the most obvious solution is usually the best. Government has a role to say there are some things which are basic services and therefore they should be provided. On the 19th century, it was sanitation that was the issue. To say that broadband is a basic service that people should have and indeed the UK Government has been indicating and Ofcom has been indicating in the last week that there is also a minimum standard that should apply to that. I think that we should be much, much simpler about this going forward and simply say that there's an expectation that the Government will ensure that all citizens are provided in this way because there are, across the continent, other Governments are taking that simple point of view. I think that for out communities to be scrambling around very often is not the least productive way. It leads to some good initiatives but it's not the most productive way of providing basic services. If I may respond, convener, there are examples of countries who have instigated a minimum standard and there are also those commentators who say that it is now a human right to have this type of access. If you can't define it as a human right with capital HNR, it enables human rights to be realised. Even in a second step, it's a human right. I think that it is incumbent on the new committee to be looking at this in all seriousness because of how it links to social justice as well. One word of caution about having a minimum standard, I know when Norway introduced its rights parole as broadband as a human right, it went to more than one megabit per second as the basic. There is a danger of lowering it to the lowest common denominator, if you like. Nonetheless, there are arguments, very strong compelling arguments at European level and European Europe 2020 about how if we don't do this irrespective of location, then we're going to have greater divergence within regions, let alone between regions. I've got Dave Thompson, Bertie Armstrong and Ian Cooke who wanted to come in. I'm sorry if we're just going to have to do it that way, okay? Right, Dave? Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to everyone on the panel. I find this quite fascinating. As a rural affairs committee, I think there's no doubt when Sarah was outlining the number of different community initiatives, there's a huge range. There is a real danger that there isn't a sort of strategic approach to it, but you can have regional, you can have national strategic, you can have regional strategic. What we're talking about here is local strategic co-ordination and a body that can help the local community to focus and to try to pull things together. That brings me back to the community council point raised by SLE, but maybe not in relation to community councils. I'd like some comment on this. I get the feel going around my constituency in the Highlands that people are very, very keen to have a really local council-type body with real power, with finance raising power and with real beef doing much more than the all-small district councils that we had in Highland and with populations ranging from maybe 5,000 to 20,000, where these small councils would really be able to help to coordinate all these excellent community initiatives. I wonder if Sarah can maybe comment on a model like that. We will need to think about moving on in a minute or two because this is a good start, but very fair points that Dave has made. Sarah, Bertie and Ian on the subject. I'll keep it brief, convener. The OECD produced a report in 2008 on rural policy and one of its headline points was the number of organisations operating within and for rural Scotland. They said that there were over 100 organisations that were focused on rural community development, and that was, what's that, eight years ago now. I'm sure that the landscape is similarly cluttered. The difficulties of navigating at local level are a real challenge, and that links to your point of having local bodies with power. The challenge of having power is linked to this difficulty of navigating the landscape and where do you hook in, who do you talk to, who do you relate to. I think that, again, there's a need for mapping for being strategic and having multi-level, because it's not either or. It's not the top, down and bottom up. They're working together in a vertically integrated way, but that doesn't happen on its own. There's a deal of work to be done there, and it would be great if the successor committee could be mindful of these really critical issues. Bertie Armstrong and Ian Cooke. Very short. Good morning, convener. Thank you very much indeed. To move away slightly from the really important and interesting area of local democracy and what can be done to enable it to the functions of the RACI, particularly the next RACI, I would make a plea, and it's the one bullet point, although there was no dot there. That is evidence and waiting when you are going about your business. This committee is going about its business of scrutiny. You will get in the evidence a great deal of evidence and opinion, and it will be very important in my view. There is an example of this term, very important in my view, that the committee takes great care to dispassionately look at evidence levels and waiting. Otherwise, you will have the unintended consequences that Dr Sarah referred to and the hopeless consequences that Mike Russell referred to of accelerating the process of depopulation if the unintended consequence is the cessation of sustainable activity. We'll leave that on the table and bear it in mind. Thank you for the structure that you've given us. Whether we respond to that as members or in this round table is another matter. Ian Cooke. From our experience of going around the country, many rural communities would say that local government doesn't feel that local. To some extent, I think that the sort of activity that we're involved in, Development Trust, the community anchor type organisations that you were talking about, Dave, operate within that vacuum. There's a space there that they've filled. A lot of that activity has been largely organic and it's been largely bottom-up. I think that the challenge for government is if you want to see more of that, how do you do that? There's no blueprint and I think that's the danger. The challenge is how do you encourage, inspire, support that development but it looks different in different communities without really suppressing the real qualities of creativity, enterprise that communities are showing, which is the essence and contributes to the success of that. So there's a real challenge there. I would draw the committee's attention to a report by Nesta called Mass Localism, where they can have tried to address that particular question about how does government support that kind of local development without doing it in a uniform way and killing the very essence of what makes it successful. Alex Ferguson? When we're talking about community development, convener of her may, which is to point to what I see as a growing inequality between communities, particularly in the area that I represent, but I'm sure that it exists in others as well, which is brought about by the advent of wind farm community benefit funds. Because we are, I believe, reaching a situation where we have some very wealthy rural communities because they have access to funding and some who are at the opposite end of the scale in terms of available funding and I think that is and will become a greater part of community development as we go forward and it might well be something that a successor committee might want to look at. The way of looking at this, which could suggest that some communities actually have more power to try and augment the funds that are available from councils in their area and indeed invest in other areas with that community benefit, but we could talk about that all day, I suspect. I agree that the imbalance is there, but in some of the poorest communities that I have in my constituency, we can see the benefits of people sitting down and making a strategy for how they're going to spend the money that they are due. In my part of the world, a lot of communities aren't getting anything at all. That's definitely something for the future community committee to look at. Jim Hume, you're going to kick us off on agriculture. Yes, thank you very much, convener. We'd just like to hear the panel's view on agriculture, what are some of the challenges, opportunities that face us in the next five years of this committee, obviously CAP, SRDP, perhaps science and research, food security and the panel members' visions for agriculture. Yes, Patrick, closer. Thank you. We submitted five points, which we suggested are the five issues that need to go forward in crofting, and one of those points was croft-proofing financial incentives. The issue we're making about this, as we've alluded to in the press quite a lot more lately as well, is that we feel that crofting gets marginalised in agricultural, particularly in the common agricultural policy, and the way Scotland uses the CAP. So an issue that we would like the next committee pleased to participate in, is in this round of the CAP we've still got the areas of natural constraint to deal with, and to develop a formula whereby areas of natural constraint get some sort of compensation for the situation that they stay in. Unfortunately, the current Cabinet Secretary has said publicly that he is minded to keep the ANC as much like ELFAS as possible, and we would argue that that is completely against the spirit of what ANC is. ELFAS is being used at the moment for paying higher amounts of money to better land, even though it's called the less favoured area support scheme, and we don't want to see ANC going the same way. Good, that's an issue for the future committee, I most certainly agree. How many of us have got several people here? So Dave Thompson and then Claire Slipper. Just on this point of agriculture, particularly in relation to crofting, I'm sure that Partick might want to comment on this and maybe others as well. We've had a very welcome increase to the Croft House grant scheme just recently announced by the minister, and just tying in with the broader issue of improving rural housing, I think the next stage to do with the addition of a lone element to that. I know that the minister is looking at that, but how important do members of the panel feel that it is in allowing people to access the grants and build the houses that we need in the crofting areas? Patrick Comeback and Claire Slipper to comment just after that. I think it is essential to the mix of grant and loan. We used to have a croft building grant and loan scheme, the CBGLS, and in 2004 the lone element was taken away. I remember at the time there being an apparent puzzlement in government officials as to why crofters were so agitated that the loan was being taken away because there was an assumption that what people want is a grant. This is completely against what crofters actually want. In all of our local consultations, people really want the lone element. That's actually more important than the grant. As I've said in our short paper, the fact that the government has reviewed this scheme at last is very welcome, and the fact that the grant levels have gone up reflecting inflation over the years, which is good. The lone element is absolutely essential, so we need it. I remind you that this committee recommended to the Scottish Government that the lone element needs to be reinstated. I would ask that this committee takes into the next phase of government and continues to lobby the Scottish Government on having a lone element. I'll take that down and note it. Claire Slipper, on some wider agricultural matters, I don't. Thank you, convener. This committee has touched on a really important theme when it focused on the dairy enquiry last year. There are some really important issues that were brought up in that that we felt were extremely pertinent to what Jim was hinting at in his question with regard to food production and security, and how we can really emphasise food sufficiency in Scotland and the UK. What we would want a successor committee to look at is the medium and longer term issues and things that can be implemented in which to secure food production in Scotland. We said in our written evidence that it's about developing supply chains, export potential, how we can attract further investment in processing into Scotland, and also looking more locally about how we can better promote local food and procurement. Those are some really important issues that we would like to see a committee examine in the future. Picking up on the points to do with the common agricultural policy, it seems a long way off now, but we'll be looking ahead to a new reform in 2020. We feel that that offers quite a valuable opportunity to do some pre-legislative scrutiny work and bringing together all the different voices across the spectrum to find some common ground before that negotiation does take place. We're keen to be a part of that. Sarah Boyack, Alan Laidlaw. I was just going to pick up that point of the next cap reform and doing a post-match analysis on where we are with the current cap payments and el-fast payments, which I think we're nearly at 50 per cent for some payment. There's obviously a major pressure in the farming community, but to broaden that out to think about the point that you made about local food procurement, shorter regional supply chains and thinking about the connectivity. This is the rural section that we're having a discussion with, but the urban part of Scotland is disconnected from the discussion entirely. That's a problem in terms of the priority that we give to that discussion about agriculture funding, the Norwich agenda about linking that with food poverty, food quality and getting a much more integrated approach that the committee could lead with. The cap reform is the place to have that discussion about farming in terms of food production but also flood mitigation, flood management. There's a whole raft of things buried in there. Alan Laidlaw, Mike Russell, Sarah, Jane Lang and Pete Ritchie, in that order. I just made a significant part of my point. From an agricultural point of view for this committee, it would be really good to see that all the benefits of agriculture are thought about in the wide descents, the land use strategy, flood mitigation, ecosystem services, health agenda, biodiversity and natural habitat are all important aspects of agriculture. At times, in this committee, we've seen more of it than anyone else. It's a polarised debate, forestry versus agriculture, flooding versus agriculture. From a committee point of view in the future, it would be great to see that strategy and that discussion being looked at at the highest level. It's all too easy to go down simplistic routes on that and become quite polarised. Agriculture's got a lot to offer all of those agendas, if done correctly. Patrick was very clear about making sure that support in the future delivers wider public benefits that we all believe are important rather than just minor issues. Mike Russell, Sarah, Jane and Pete Ritchie. Are we going to be dealing with crofting separately? Not really, no. Okay, fine. I just wanted to raise a point in Patrick's submission, as well as raising a point with Clare. Patrick's submission, the issue of codification of crofting law, is an issue that others, particularly former ministers on this table, would want to see happen. However, there is a quid pro quo in this, which is after the nightmare of the Shucksmith process, I think that you would have to be serious, something seriously wrong with you to want to go through that again from a governmental perspective. If there is going to be a process of codification, it would have to have the support of the crofting community and be something that they wanted to see, and that would mean change taking place. The Shucksmith process started with great enthusiasm and ended with an inbuilt resistance to any significant change, and that was deeply to be regretted. I think that that is an issue that I would appreciate your view on, because I am keen on codification, but I think that you would have to drag the Scottish Government into it, given their experience. On wider agricultural issues, a lot of the submissions deal with land use and the idea of a land use strategy, and the land commission will bring that into focus, and I think that many people are going to participate in it. However, I was very struck, and I hope that it is clear what my mind is saying. The contrast between what appeared to be five reasonable and forward-looking points from the NUJ and the type of coverage that we see in today's newspapers at the Press and Journal, NFUS in the last-ditch move to block land reform proposal. I think that if we are going to take part in looking at land use strategy, again that has to be on the basis of shared enthusiasm for getting this right, rather than simply when you get to the point, the point of change that has to take place, that everybody digs their heels in and says, Well, we are not having any of that, because that is unfortunately where we keep getting to. It is not just in agricultural matters, it happens in fishing matters, it happens right across the board. There has to be a keenness to negotiate and discuss change, as opposed to saying that we believe in change but not for us. It is not the NUJ, but the NFUS. That is a past life catching up with me, I am afraid. No bother. The fans with typewriters indeed. Sarah, Jane Lange, Pete Ritchie, Patrick Krause and Johnny Hughes will get you all. I should say that Clare said that 2020 was quite a long time away. I do not think that it needs to pick up on Mr Russell's point that if we are going to have a radical reform of cap in 2020, then it is a journey that we will all have to go on and we will have to start discussions sooner rather than later. Agriculture is about food production, but it is not just about food production. That is one of the reasons that we are suggesting that, certainly the payment for ecosystem services has to move up the agenda and move from a largely academic discussion to a practical framework that underpins and rewards the delivery of public goods. Patrick talked about moving from ELFAS to ANC. I think that ANC gives us that hook to move PES forward, because it rewards people for what they deliver. It might not be food production, it might be a huge range of public benefits, and PES allows us to move from that aid to trade aspect to delivering public goods. If we do not embed that in our ambition for cap at the outset, we will get to what Mr Russell talked about, which is that, just before we implement the next cap, we are trying to definitely keep the same money going to the same people for as long as physically possible. I think that Scotland has the ability to be a world leader in payment for ecosystem services. If we underpin our approach to cap 2020 and our agricultural strategy with the delivery of public benefits at natural capital agenda, we could have something that delivers for the whole of Scotland. I would like to echo the points that Alex, Sarah and I made about how, going forward, we need to make sure that the benefits of Scotland's land and seas are accru to everybody. The idea that, because you happen to be in a windy place, you get the money from the wind, or you're in a sunny place, you get the money from the sun, which you've done nothing to earn, I think is part of this whole problem. We need to be looking at how we look at the benefits from our natural resources flowing to everybody. We also need to be thinking about moving towards a circular economy in our food and agriculture. We've just adopted a circular economy strategy. We're moving forward on that. We need to think about how does that apply, because it's moving beyond productionism, an approach that you put inputs into the ground and you get outputs out and maybe produce some externalities, which are good or bad all the way. We need to shift our whole thinking about agriculture and food. In the next Parliament, we need to have a Food, Health and Farming Act on which we should enact new primary legislation. We haven't really had a primary legislation on agriculture since the 1947 Agriculture Act and then the Treaty of Rome. We need to have a fundamental rethink about what farming is for. We've narrated some consultations on the future of Scottish agriculture under the request of the Scottish Government. We had meetings around the country. People from communities and farmers met in those conversations and said that there were three things. There was feeding our people well, there was stewardship of the environment and there was contributing to communities by making good work, by creating good work in rural areas and by producing renewable energy, etc. People are very clear that what we think farming is for has to be at the heart of this. We have to rethink what's the purpose of farming and the EU referendum has brought into focus. If we didn't have the cap, what would we pay farmers to do? I think we should start at that point and say if we didn't have the cap, what would a blank sheet of paper look like? If we could get in early with that thinking, Sarah is absolutely right, we could take a leadership role in reshaping the cap and thinking about getting away from this idea that we base it mostly on historical payments or the more land you've got, the more money you get. Those things don't make sense anymore and we need to think about a new approach. Fundamentally, if we don't connect up what we're doing when we're producing food or we're going out and fishing with feeding our people, then somehow there's a complete mismatch between what we're using on land for and the public good. The land reform basis that land in Scotland should be used in the common interest and the public good should also apply to farming and we should be very clear about that. It's an activity that we support as a public because it delivers public good. We need a new social contract between the citizens of Scotland and the farmers and land managers of Scotland. Thank you for that sparing speech. Patrick Croser and then Johnny Hughes. Thank you. Can I just support what Alan and Sarah Jane and Pete were saying? Tying in with Sarah talked about the rural and urban divide, which I think is fascinating. What we need to be putting over to the urban population is that Scotland is a country and the CAP is all of ours money. It's not just something that is the right of farmers. We pay something like 80% of this public money to only 20% of the landholders of Scotland and we pay very, very, very little of it to reward public goods. So I would just say again, public money for public goods. And then getting on to crofting legislation, I think, Mike was certainly in a very key position in the formation of what we have now. And I certainly wouldn't refer to the Committee of Inquiry on Crofting as a nightmare. I think it was one of the most inspiring things that the government has done. If you look at what happened in the previous bill where it was very top down and crofters were left feeling completely disenfranchised by it and had no support whatsoever. And then out of that mess came the idea of having a full inquiry into crofting, something that hadn't happened since the Taylor report in the 50s. So the Committee of Inquiry was a really good thing and it took crofting forward hugely. And what came out of the Committee of Inquiry and became legislation, it wasn't entirely what the Committee of Inquiry was saying. And I should add actually, we had a revisit to the Committee of Inquiry in December. We held a conference in Inverness and Shuck Smith came and spoke with it and various other people involved in that process. And that's where these five points that I've submitted to the Committee come from. Hi. Okay. But if I could just please say on the legislation and you say any government would be mad to revisit this, I just say be brave. Because it's unfinished business, you know? Quickly to respond. After it misunderstands, two points have made. One is, I didn't say the Shuck Smith inquiry was a nightmare and indeed it was set up by my predecessor. It wasn't set up by me and I encouraged it. You know, what happened was at the end of that process. Many of the things that Shuck Smith recommended didn't happen. And I regret that because I think they should have done. And I think that it was a failure of nerve both by government and by the crofting community. The second point that I make is I do believe that it should be codified. But the point that I'm making is that that will have to have the participation by an enthusiasm, not just of the crofting foundation, if I might make that point, but of all those people involved in crofting. Because that will take it in well into the 21st century. But if it doesn't have that, then government would be, in my view, wisely reluctant. The series is not in this because you've had experience of wisely reluctant from getting embroiled in what would simply be another fight. OK, let's see. Well, we can sort this out in the next part of it. Just a very quick point to say that it's about participation. It's absolutely about participation and that's what we'll carry it through. OK, Johnnie Hughes, Jim Hew, Sarah Scarrett. Thanks, convener. I just wanted to make a few comments on agricultural economics in relation to natural capital and ecosystem services, which has already been mentioned. Just a reminder, then, that the total income from farming in 2013, which is the most up-to-date figures I have, £2.9 billion of output in 2013, but the costs were £2.8 billion. So that gives you an idea of the state of agricultural economics, if you like, in Scotland. Now, on top of that, there were £570 million in direct support payments. Now you could argue that that's £570 million of payments without a policy purpose. So I think it's probably that that we're talking about. And the average farm in Scotland made a loss of £16,000 in 2012. So that's the kind of background of it. But of course that isn't completely incomplete picture because farming delivers on a whole range of other things, apart from the production of food. And if you think of it, if you think of that money, the money we invest in the agricultural sector as being an investment in a sense in natural capital stocks to try and maximise the range of benefits that we get from those stocks and things like clean water, flood mitigation, carbon capture and storage, biodiversity. Indeed, the stimulation of new enterprises. Then you get a completely different picture, but we have not done that analysis. One of the things that I would urge the committee to do in the next session is to begin to get to grips with that analysis. We need to do that analysis as a country, the Scottish Government needs to begin to do that analysis. Understanding those stocks and flows, not just the immediate financial flows from farming. So then we can understand how to deploy that money for the public good. And that's not about either or, it's about delivery of a range of benefits. As the land use strategy says, talks about multifunctionality. So we move away from monocultures and we move away from sectors and we move towards multifunctionality and innovation, which is something I think rural Scotland desperately needs. Without boring you with any more figures, I will leave it there. Just to say that I strongly support what the Crown of State has said. Strongly support actually what Scottish Land and Estates has said about Scotland potentially becoming a world leader in payments for ecosystem services. I hope that Scottish, while I trust, has paved the way for that with the will for a more natural capital to a small degree. And I strongly support what nourish Scotland has said again about if we had a blank canvas, if we thought, how can we use that $570 million in direct support payments, how would we best spend it for the Scottish people? Not just a small sector of the Scottish people. Very thoughtful indeed, thank you for that. Jim Hume. Thank you very much, convener. I think that Jonny makes some of my points quite clearly and states that £2.9 billion output and £2.8 billion costs. Those £2.8 billion costs are money into the economy as well, of course. That's money going towards feed merchants, that's money going towards local towns, that's money going to machinery merchants, et cetera, et cetera. That's quite, I don't think, land agencies, a big part of people's costs. Anyway, obviously, everybody's showing their mice today. So it's obviously a cap, a very important part of that, and I think that has to be remembered by whoever is in that next committee. Clare Slipper also mentioned a point about the dairy industry where we looked into that and what came clear from that was that we have a lack of processing capacity in Scotland. Everybody looks at New Zealand and says, oh well, they got rid of the payments there, but of course money still goes into agriculture in a different way there where a large amount went into processing. So instead of just having liquid milk, and you could say that for all commodities down to wheat, then they were able to make their liquid milk into different products and export quite successfully into Southeast Asia. So it would be interesting to hear perhaps others' views of whether we should be looking at supporting in a different way by processing and, of course, marketing as well. We get New Zealand products marketed on our TV screens in Scotland, so why can't we do it the other way round? Okay, thank you, Jim. With those thoughts, Sarah Scarra at Sarah Boyack. Thank you, convener. With what's been talked about here very clearly, the multifunctionality of agriculture and land use demands, innovation and adaptation by the workforce, and to maintain the resilience of the farming sector, education and training of current and future generations is something that the committee needs to be mindful of. So we have the national strategy for land-based education and training in Scotland 2015, which highlights the ageing workforce, a need to upskill existing staff and also attract new entrants. We also have the exciting prospect of further rolling out of developing Scotland's young workforce agenda, which is bringing together schools with colleges and seeking to develop career pathways towards four individuals from rural and non-rural backgrounds. So there is a championing of the rural sector and the agricultural sector in particular in non-rural schools. So I think it would be very helpful and indeed perhaps imperative looking at the sustainability of the farming sector for the successor committee to be monitoring outcomes of these initiatives, the impacts they're having and what's working well and what could be done differently if we're really focusing here on the resilience of the rural sector. So three Seras in a row, Sarah Boyack and then Sarah Jane. Just a brief comment follows on from the last two speakers. Just to suggest that we might want to look at the... When we're looking at cap reform to look at the issue of markets, because that's an issue for the dairy farming community, the market support is just broken, it's just irrelevant, and to look at in the 21st century what the role is of markets. We've talked about what government might be able to do with the farming industry in terms of procurement and local and regional markets, but there's a wider intellectual issue about markets. Do they work for the farming community in the 21st century? And how about when you respond? Sarah Jane. Just to add to what Dr Scarrett said about resilience in the farming sector and a plea not to focus solely on new entrants and encouraging innovation from the next generation, there's a huge wealth of expertise and knowledge from our current farmers in Scotland. We've had very successful knowledge transfer projects such as the monitor farms, and indeed we may even look at monetary states in the future, and I think that we have to make sure that they are part of an on-going bundle for supporting resilience in farming. Although we're talking about a change, you have got willingness and expertise within the industry. It's showcased every year at Carnoustay and down at the Oxford Farming Conference that Scottish farmers know how to innovate, they know how to enhance what they're producing, but we have to make sure that they're continued to be supported through projects such as the knowledge transfer scheme that the Scottish Government already has. I'm concerned about time at the moment. Claire Slipper and then Dave Thompson. You just have a point on what's just been discussed. We have the Scottish Government's vision for Scottish agriculture document, all the groups around this table will be participating in, and it's just more a plea more than anything else for the successor committee to look at this document, perhaps through the term of the next Parliament, and to weigh up how all these different initiatives, how different promotions, growth boards and visions are all tying into this wider framework of Scottish agriculture. That has to be taken alongside becoming a good food nation. That's the strategy to 2025 because that leads us into thinking about how people can share in this bounty because they don't at the moment. Dave Thompson has a final point on agriculture and crofting briefly. Thank you, convener. Mention has been made of the amount of cash available through carp and so on, but nobody has mentioned the fact that Scotland is just about the bottom of the league in Europe in terms of how much money we have to give to our farming and crofting communities. I think that it would be very useful for a future committee to look at why that is the case and can it be rectified? Can we do something even within the current structures and I'll not make any political points here within the UK to make sure that Scotland actually gets the same as other smaller countries in Europe or more because that would make a huge difference to the amount of cash available to everybody. We all know that money is a huge problem. Indeed, thank you for that point. Perhaps we should usefully move on to marine issues just now taking that on board. Claudia Beamish wants to start off. Thank you, convener, and good morning to everybody. I'd like to focus our minds on Scotland's seas, which obviously in relation to our marine habitats and the national marine plan and how that rolls out into the regional plans and how habitats per se are protected and also how we have sustainable fisheries for the future and the range of other economic interests that all fit together in that. I would ask for brief comments in view of time today not because this isn't important but because we want to be sure that we cover the range right the way through from the economy to the fragile communities to the biodiversity and climate change issues in our seas. It's really what our convener stressed at the beginning which is bullet points from those who are here today would be very much valued. Bertie Armstrong, thank you very much. Good morning, Claudia. Thank you for that introduction to the subject. I'm going to bring up our single point again and that is the use of evidence and the use of making decisions on evidence-based. The problem that confronts the fishing industry of Scotland at the minute can be summarised in a half-sentence in that everybody knows about the benefits of fish and loves fish but doesn't actually want anybody to catch any. On the matter of marine protected areas and habitats they are vitally important and it is extremely important that the marine environment is stewarded properly. However, it needs to be productive and therefore at each point of decision as to what is enough to meet the conservation objective and wherever possible to meet the objective of continued sustainable use of the sea that balance prevails. That is not being the case in a small amount of the MPA. I'm going to emphasise it's a small amount. The whole MPA process was an exemplar. For other nations going about setting up MPAs the problem was decision making in four from twenty of the first designations which were skewed in our view for political purposes and that did such a lot of damage to what would have been a truly excellent process. When we are going forward of course protection of the habitat is vital but there must be evidence and we must bear in mind the other statutory requirement of the Scottish Government which is the continued sustainable use of the seas for food production. That's the vitally important, often ignored, other half. Graham Day? I can find myself agreeing with Bertie Armstrong on his point about it being incumbent on Parliamentary committees to differentiate between evidence and opinion masquerading as evidence but I've made the point also that it's incumbent on those making the submissions to this committee or any parliamentary committee to focus on evidence rather than opinion or, dare I say, self-interest where it conflicts with the greater good. You reference the MPAs but through the MPA process and I don't mean this as a defensive point it can be very difficult for this committee or any committee to cut through the claim and counter claim that's presented to us or a case made in a way that's not altogether acceptable. The point that I would make is that we're sitting here today around this table and we're hearing measured, constructive, respectful contributions that are balanced looking at the greater good. That's the kind of evidence we need and the successor committee will need in the years to come. I absolutely agree, Graham. If we can proceed in the next session with that as the underlying basis then we'll do better. One thing that is important is the ability to differentiate between a well-stated, plausible signing opinion and evidence and I completely accept your point that if you're going to present evidence make it convincing, accept it. I see through the orange smoke of the flares that were let off outside the Parliament to get some of the evidence over the opinion. Callum Duncan, followed by Alan Laidlaw. I think that this is important. If we're talking about the point that both yourself and Bertie and Graham have made that to... I'm not asking for responses at this point but we have to be very careful about comments which, for instance, you've just made in evidence which is that, and I quote, the committee doesn't want anyone to catch any fish. That is something that, frankly, I understand where you're coming from on it and I understand fragile communities are at risk and I understand what that perspective is and that there's been a dichotomy of evidence on the future of our economy but I have to say just for the record that that is not the perspective that we're coming from and I think it's just important to put that on the record. Fishing now and the other interests in the environment that the committee's been looking at that it has to weigh up and that is the sort of legacy that I would hope that would go forward. Right, one point. Accepted, Claudia. The use of that phrase was a deliberate use of a catchy phrase. Callum and I conduct a dialogue in public in the social media which often includes phrases like that. I'm underlying that that is the fact that, believe it or not, we do have a communicative relationship. Thank you. Callum Duncan, you can now reply to that. Ten rounds, I suppose, right? Thank you, convener. I actually had the words false dichotomy written down prior to Claudia talking about dichotomy and I think that's what we've seen in the session that's just been because we all want healthy seas and the engine room of the seas often needs fragile, complex seabed habitats that the committee has done well to listen to evidence on in our opinion and that evidence has been about both the features but also the status of the seas and the benefits to the seas that those features can provide if properly managed and indeed recovered. I think that the four sites being referred to themselves were a form of compromise that some stakeholders didn't think went far enough and it's worth putting that on the record. We've made a submission about Loxinot to Sandra Duda, we support the order for that, but there are compromises in there that are now a matter of record. In terms of going forward to depolarise this, I think that the NPA process brought a lot of things to the head because a lot of matters around fisheries management has been a can kicked down the road because there were recommendations as far back as 2006 to address spatial management of fishing, scull-up dredging in particular. To get those win-wins, we all need to work together for the outcome that we want, which is sustainable, well-managed, inshore waters and I hope that the next committee will support progressive, strategic, ecosystem-based fishing management allowing equitable, sustainable access, but I'd also like to bring in the regional re-planning process and the opportunities there in order to deliver sustainable management to deliver just communities living within environmental limits. To finish, it's part of the NPA review process. We've got another round of management measures that need to come in. Hopefully, in time, we can break this false dichotomy by getting more evidence of the benefits. That's very much what we would urge to use this opportunity, this historic opportunity to research with these NPAs in place to see the benefits that they provide in terms of sustainable food provision. The scallops and the juvenile cod like complex sea beds. It makes sense to protect them in terms of some of the other benefits that Johnny mentioned, but sea, nutrient cycling, carbon capture, coastal protection. We're seeing politics aside from really encouraging evidence from Lamblash Bay and some of the research opportunities that's providing. We'd really encourage that in the next session to make the most of this historic opportunity so that everybody can, as Pete was talking about, gain benefit from this public good going forward. Can we take a couple of bits of evidence from Alan Laidlaw and Johnny Hughes and then Dave Thompson? I think it would fit that way. Thank you, convener. It's really important to think of the marine environment in its whole. The committee is extremely well-versed in discussions about land and land use and has developed an expertise in marine issues. All too often people take them at quite a simplistic view that I like the marine environment to be used for my single interest. Again, it's deer versus trees versus farming, just it's wet deer and supposed to be a dry deer. From my point of view, being involved in both onshore and offshore land management, whether it's wet land or dry land, you have to look at it in its entirety. When you look at a coastal area, it's easy to see that nothing is happening on a piece of water at the moment that you look. That could be one of Bertie's members' very important areas, or it could be one of Callum's interested parties' very important habitats underneath, or it could be a great natural capital resource, or it could be a great community resource. People very often take a hugely simplistic approach to it. Where community engagement done well with capacity seeks proper views, it can be fascinating how quickly totemic issues can disappear, because there's a greater understanding. All too often, on the marine environment, it's a very simplistic approach. Callum mentions clearly marine special planning and regional planning partnerships and that sort of things. There's a huge development task there to get communities engaged in what happens off their coasts. There's a huge capacity job there in terms of being able to service those discussions, but it's really important to get right. From a legacy point of view, I think that the Government and this committee in particular are in a really good position to say how do we draw strands together, how do we look at, I hate the word, but in a holistic view, a 20,000-foot view at what we want to see Scotland's natural resources delivering. It's exactly as Johnnie says, there's multiple benefits to be delivered from the same piece of ground, if done properly. If done in a simplistic approach, we can make a mess for everything and you'll have more dreadful evidence sessions that you don't want to be having. That's my plea. Johnnie Hughes. A couple of pieces of evidence in relation to the marine environment. In 1883, there was a map of the North Sea that showed a oyster bed 20,000 square kilometres in extent. By 1936 it could not be harvested and by 1970 it was completely gone. In 1948, 40,000 fishermen worked in the North Sea achieving a peak catch of 1.2 million tonnes a year. By 2008 there was just over 10,000 fishermen working in the North Sea and they were catching half that tonnage. You've heard the arguments for the protection of the marine environment from the environment sector to loosely call us that. In recent years, we've been increasingly making the social and economic arguments for the protection of our marine environment. I do think we need to understand the shifting baselines here. How far have we understood really the extent to which we have damaged our marine environment and the extent to which it needs to be recovered? Sometimes we're looking back on five-year timescales and thinking that five years ago we were in this situation why can't we be catching as much fish? We have a massive recovery job to do to increase production in the future. I'll put it on the record now that the Scottish Wildlife Trust wants Scottish fishermen to catch more fish. We want the Scottish Fishing Federation to enable their members to catch more fish. In order to do that, we need to recover the marine environment first. It's exactly the same with the deer issue on land. We need to bring deer numbers down to the point where we're getting primary productivity on land rebounding so we're getting forest regenerating so we have healthier, more productive, stable populations of red deer in the future. It's exactly the same scenario. We need recovery and we need to understand how far we've gone in terms of damage to our environment to recovery. Maybe that's something that the committee could look at in the round, is this baseline issue because it's often misrepresented. Dave Thomson. I agree totally with Johnny and with Collim and what they've been saying about research in particular because one of the things that really struck me in the whole debate about the MPAs was the almost total lack of any real evidence and research on the west coast in particular. We talk about evidence but there is so little evidence how can we make proper judgment. One of the things I would agree with is that there needs to be a lot more research than particularly in the west but also in the east and quite often the science lags behind reality. The seas are changing and they change all the time and sometimes the seas are ahead and science is a year or two behind and we're basing decisions on slow science. I know that science can't be ahead of reality but we need to take it a bit closer to what's actually going on so I would make a plea that there needs to be greater investment in research so that we really know what's going on in our seas. Thank you for that. Mike Russell wanted to come back perhaps on land. No, I wanted to come back on although I think we'll have an opportunity to talk about deer in a moment and I think that's going to be very important to talk specifically about deer. I just wanted to make this point about evidence-based policymaking because I think that it is incredibly simplistic. The idea that this committee or government sits in platonic or socratic wisdom deciding between very clear cases one side or another and in the end delivers its verdict is bunkham. The reality is there is an incredibly complex mix of players. Johnathan just told us about what the environment was in one part of the North Sea in 1883. In order to understand the evidence you will have to have a complete set of evidence, not a partial set of evidence. What this committee does I hope and what a successor committee should do is try and balance the evidence with which it is presented and it will always be partial with the passion that people feel about what they do and I recognise the passion of those my constituents in Tarbot for example faced with an MPA process that they thought was immensely flawed and should have been operated far better and also the passion of people in Arran and elsewhere for trying to change the marine environment and the view of the government that has a vision of taking it forward and the requirements of EU law is to play a cat's cradle and what this committee needs to do is to find a way forward so that Scotland is the better after its considerations and that's not just sitting deciding blandly or bloodlessly on powers of evidence it is engaging with what is taking place and in Patrick's words it's encouraging participation so that in the end the solutions found are those that everybody or almost everybody can buy into and that is the right way forward in my view and that's what any committee should try and do To draw this to a close I hope Calum, Bertie and Claudia for the last word for the moment Thank you, convener I echo what Johnnie said about the imperative for recovery in the sober government report Scotland's Marine Atlas which is best available evidence makes clear that need for recovery is to support the point that Alan made about wet land and dry land what we need to see is proper spatial management and just to quickly pick up on Dave's point we actually have a lot pretty much a lot of evidence of presence of features we do have quite a lot of that what we've got less evidence of presence further offshore but we've got very little evidence of benefits but we're seeing very encouraging stuff on elsewhere so we really would encourage as we all agree for the research to realise those benefits and demonstrate those to people who might be sceptical Bertie Armstrong Thank you very much Johnathan illustrated what I meant about the general nod towards you don't want anybody to fix that that's an entirely predictable narrative which is an objective tale of woe by disasters foregone and therefore an emphasis on non-specific objectives of recovery which of course implies if one MPA is good two's better, if a big one's good a huge one's even better still the evidence is somewhat different of course the seas have changed since 1880 and there's a perfectly plausible story as to why a lot of it was indeed to do with overfishing but with regard to 40,000 fishermen in the 1880s there are 5 now 1,000 fishermen the fishing mortality curves from the relevant scientific body from ISIS are all showing a 45° downward slope and the biomass of the fish stops are showing the opposite 45° up slope so if we don't get it wrong again there is distinct hope that your bottom line of there being more from a productive sea is entirely possible I would dispute Mike Russell's description of the evidence being excessively complicated and therefore rather arcane in the matter of this Scyth Arran MPA exactly where the features are is known the recommendation supported by SNH was that a zonal management take place and that fishing take place in some areas well clear of the features it's to answer the point about evidence the evidence is generally reasonably clear and the problem with the evidence presented with regard to MPAs was the socio-economics and that silly trick of grossing up was made it's only 0.2% of fishing therefore it must be small if you look at the highland smelter it was only 0.2% of GDP but it was a disaster in Inveramond it's only a small amount of damage to the Scottish fishing industry but it's a great disaster for your local constituents who made that perfectly clear to you I think we need to be fair to be fair I argued strongly their case and the way in which they'd been treated by Marine Scotland but I think Bertie you have just proved how evidence is not simple and sometimes it's difficult to understand I let the official report stand as evidence of that Claudia Beamish right, thank you convener I think this has been a helpful discussion it's shown that there is still quite a dichotomy in issues around our marine environment but I do actually believe very positively having taken a particular interest in this along with many others on the committee and beyond the committee that we're much closer from the different interests who think they are different than they actually believe and I think that research and again like with land use issues for our marine environment participation by the communities and by those who have an interest and let's not forget there's also the challenges of oil and gas and there's the challenges of renewables there's the challenges of all the other interests including marine tourism as well a whole range that I'm not going to go into now but I think that if those interests and perspectives as well as making an effort to be sure that they contribute to the evidence and the science actually make the most enormous effort to understand each other's perspectives I think that would be a legacy from outside this committee which would help the successor committee itself to actually take forward marine issues and enable the future Thank you everybody for that it's clear that some of the bases of things we do are the land use strategy we have a marine plan but a marine use strategy which kind of matches the land use strategy would be a good thing I think and there are many other things that we've learned from this morning not least that when you get a chance to speak you bring together ideas as Claudia says show that we actually can work together in a fashion that can reach what we hope are ways that would allow us to move Scotland forward and to recognise where the strengths are and also where the passions are and the ability is some people have spoken more than others but I think that each sector has a huge part to play and I'd like to thank this committee for your evidence in the past for your evidence this morning and one final point which Graham Day is going to make Okay thank you convener this committee has made a concerted effort over its five years to try and get witnesses who have worked at the co-face of organisations who understand the practical aspects of the subject they are providing evidence on and I would argue that to some degree we've been successful in that what we've come nowhere in years to succeeding on is striking any kind of gender balance in our panels and we've today we have three women and that's no blip the hundred and seven witnesses that have appeared before us since May last year 89 have been men, just 18 women that's an 83, 17% split so I wonder if I can ask to help and inform in this process witnesses why they think the panels attending Racky committee hearings are so male dominated is it the case that your organisations contain too few women in positions of sufficient authority and specialisation to be put forward to give evidence or is there any kind of inbuilt prejudice at play when it comes to selecting representatives to attend evidence sessions That is a thought that you can take away with you and I'd seriously like to thank you all for being such useful witnesses over the piece that we will have to end this particular session at the moment we have covered rural development we've had some biodiversity in it if in marine and agriculture and land use issues we've had quite a good round table in that respect so thank you very much we will now suspend the panel and change over for the next one and take a break Are we going to reconvene now so please sit down those of you who are taking part in the second session after noon this morning we'll go into the afternoon no doubt so we continue with agenda item 1 which is our legacy process and welcome back members of the rural affairs climate change and environment committee are considering legacy and we're joined by the second panel which includes some previous witnesses who I will quickly run through Sam Gardner, Andy Kerr, Ian Gilland Colin Campbell Tom Ballantyne Willie McGee and Stuart Goodall and I welcome you all here many of you have been witnesses before so we're not going to do any introductory matters just now but we are going to try and cover subjects such as the three in annual climate targets and reports forestry, biodiversity, air pollution sustainable development circular economy a lot of things to cover in the next hour and as I said to the previous panel many of you were asked for bullet points and some of you wrote treatise in this committee in this hour bullet points only not treatise so we must try and focus so that it is a legacy paper not looking at the past but trying our very best to make sure that we give the next committee a clear steer so I'd just like to kick things off by saying we need to think about rpp3 and how climate change targets and so on are actually going to work how things have worked Government should be prodded to try and make them work better and how the whole community, business private, local government public sector private sector all of these bodies need to work so with that sort of very general statement from myself I wonder if anyone would like to kick off just make yourself known to myself of the clerks and we'll bring you in so shall I turn it into a question even better and ask the witnesses whether you think the Parliament and our committees do enough to scrutinise progress on climate change as Rob said we've missed our first four annual targets we are responsible for looking at agriculture we're not responsible for housing, energy transport, business or the economy or fiscal mechanisms and in our committee reports in the last couple of years we've highlighted the difficulty of scrutinising the climate change element of the annual budget so is there more the Parliament could do or is it up to this committee and it's what should the next Parliament do is this an issue for our legacy paper or how do the other committees get involved good question Sam you're at start I'll try, thank you I think it's first it's appropriate to acknowledge just how not that it needs to be identified but how cross cutting climate changes and the challenge that presents to the committee I think there are examples where other committees have clearly taken a lead the ICI committee in its scrutiny of the budget this year and last year focused particularly on climate change and that was very welcome I think the challenge for a future committee in this role is being able to aggregate the conclusions from subject committees in such a way that the climate change act and its delivery into its component parts and lose the coherence the glue that might hold it together and that is where I see the critical role for this committee and I think it has sought to do that I think with the scrutiny of RPP2 every effort was made to try and collate and bring together evidence from subject committees I think it's challenging to do that on a continuous basis but that needs to happen otherwise we lose that assessment and the coherence of the RPP the extent to which different sectors are contributing fairly to the challenge of tackling climate change and we miss that overview of its effectiveness of its delivery so there is an important role for this committee in its future and providing that assessment of the whole and whether or not it's adequate and whether or not delivery is happening as it ought to be Graham Day wants to come in on that Thank you for picking up on that point of this committee Do you or any other panellist think that there is an argument for having a stand alone climate change and environment committee in this Parliament? Anybody? Andy? We'll have Colin. I would say rather than climate change and environment if you're seeing what's happening behind the scenes within the Government they're starting to join up RPP2 was very much bottom up RPP3 they've actually commissioned a lot of work to try and join up across the whole energy environment space with their times modelling framework and a bunch of other things which allows them to start to look across different sectors so rather than climate change and environment actually a climate change and energy thing is a more coherent thing and I know we've been there and we've moved away to me that's a more coherent thing to have going forward Thoughts on that for a moment Colin? I think there is always a danger of siloing some of these topics climate change is something that affects all the issues that you were discussing in session 1 for example and adaptation is just as important about mitigation we know we have to adapt and that's fundamentally linked to all the discussions that you had about natural capital it's a danger then that you can silo the debate and not take into account the wider aspects I think in relation to Sarah's question I think there is a need to look in greater detail at some of the new measures that are coming forward for trying to mitigate greenhouse gases so there are new measures coming forward on compulsory soil testing trying to increase the efficacy of animal health treatments for example these are new weapons in the armory that have been played but we need to examine the evidence around how well and how effective they're going to be in the future Sam Gartner to come back about Stuart Goodall coming after that It was really Andy said what I was going to say which was a climate change and energy committee makes kind of sense in the context of certainly like Andy says how the Scottish Government are approaching the development of RPP3 I think this committee's clearly been got a huge breath of responsibility and climate change with its all encompassing nature is deserving of a more singular focus if you like to allow a committee to be able to provide that leadership role on a cross cutting topic and can we have Stuart Goodall now Thank you I think both points can be linked having a committee like this putting a spotlight on climate change in challenging government I think is extremely important and being able to do that in areas such as Forestry where a big issue in terms of contribution to climate change mitigation is the planting targets by having the committee shining a light on the fact that we're not delivering on something which is achievable I think will help in terms of galvanising the agencies involved in the whole area of approving and delivering on planting targets I think that's extremely important role that the committee can play and I think that also highlights the fact that it's beneficial having climate change linked in with other parts of Scottish Parliament's responsibilities which are key deliverables so Forestry planting is one of the big positive things that government can do to generate activity economic activity as well as reduce climate change it's part of the rule affairs agenda so having that ability to look across I think is extremely useful as well and then come up hopefully with some joint solutions Tom Ballantyne would you want to comment on some of these things? I can only give a very broad answer which is that the more time we devote the subject clearly the better I feel about it but alongside that I'm very conscious of my main message for today which is about linked thinking between the cabinet, the cabinet sub-committee departments committees and the whole range of agencies that are looking at this and to me the most important role this committee or any successor can play is in achieving that link thinking pushing that link thinking and also getting read across my second big bullet point that would be my second one the idea that we have to have that read across from the RPP to the budget to delivery and then auditing of what's going on and I guess with that is the idea that I've seen some fantastic work from this committee in pushing for action on climate change and what I would like to see in the future is successor committees following up on the kind of work you've done of seeing whether the actions you suggested have actually been taken and being proactive in trying to make sure those actions have been taken Mike Russell next Tom's point is an absolutely crucial one which used to get that, joined up that link thinking and to know both in Government and in the Parliament who has the lead responsibility of forcing that issue I think in governmental terms the time has certainly come for that responsibility with the cabinet secretary taking the lead on that I know that Richard has the overall responsibility but I do think it is important to drive that and in parliamentary terms I think that this committee needs to play an even more prominent role in forcing the issue with other committees I mean certainly my own experience in government and as a member of the Scottish Parliament is that without somebody essentially taking it on and delivering it in the future year it can be done by somebody else and I think given the urgency of the matter that would be a major change that the successor committee would want to see and would want to encourage the Government to put in place very early on Indeed it might be something I don't know what the demands of organisations around this table will be in the manifestos but it's something that certainly I hope will be thought through Sarah, do you want to come back at the moment here? Yeah, I think that's been really good getting people's views and I kind of wanted to just provoke that thought just to see what people thought we could do that would be better and I take the point that it has to be both mitigation and adaptation and this committee has been looking at both thinking of flooding forestry, agriculture, land management, peatlands, there's a lot in there but the other thing I was thinking about was both urban and rural Scotland thinking about how this works regardless of where you are in the country and I think Mike's comments about the need to have a focus I think the Parliament needs to shadow that in effect and I think the last term which certainly different committee structures so it's worth reflecting on but you also are a cross-party group on climate change we haven't had that this time round so it's left everything up to this committee and I feel given the huge responsibility this committee has it's a question we should put down for the future for the Parliament both at the political level and in terms of the clerking system that we cope with this indeed we've had the problem of engaging other committees that are big carbon users such as justice health and so on and getting them to actually understand their responsibilities or even measure these things has only come through our own interrogation of public agencies like the police and so on those committees should have been doing that kind of job and those points but we're kind of aware of them yes Sam you've made a clear effort to mainstream the climate change scrutiny process in recognition of the challenge of taking it all on and the fact that committees, subject committees bring evidence that's relevant to those particular topics I think there hasn't been checks and balances that have assured that those committees have fulfilled the requirements of that mainstream so throughout the budget process I highlighted one committee that was particularly strong on it but others have paid much less heed to the climate change relevance of their budget scrutiny and there is a dilution as those different committees report back to the finance committee about what eventually appears in the finance committee's report in relation to climate change and I think acknowledging that and finding steps to try and provide that climate change features more prominently either to acknowledge where spend is right or where it needs to be to shifted but to ensure that it features prominently in the finance committee's report is going to be really important going forward because to date we certainly haven't had the confidence that the budget has aligned with the climate change act and I don't think the finance committee has taken on board the centrality of what you're talking about but the pressures are different Sarah and post Paris 2016 to 2021 those will be the critical years and the EU is not going up to 42% by 2020 so we've got a potential of a leadership role but it's the ambition in reality and I think our test ground is the reality and I think this committee could be crucial or successor committee could be crucial in following all of that through so it's really good getting people's views Colin Just picking up on the point that Sarah made about the hub and agriculture divide I think there is a great need to connect them much more than we have in the past and I mean the agricultural sector often feel very much under pressure and unappreciated by the urban community and urban community have negative views of the urban the agriculture but the reality is that in the central bell for example people are still very very close to farms in rural areas they're often not the best farms in rural areas but they're still very close to them and there's an opportunity to actually connect the urban and agriculture together much more by actually thinking about that problem because it's fundamentally important to get support from the urban population for what we're doing in the agricultural sector At this stage I suppose in a way we might want to think a bit about circular economies and things like that too because it was nice to see the way from a cheese factory being used by pig producers the kind of things which are little links in the chain that we saw last Friday in Tain but I think tied in with the RPP and the annual climate targets our behaviour change and so on and the way in which that happens I suppose is something which ties very much in with the kind of policies that the Government has been taking so Ian Gulland might want to pick off a bit part of it It's quite interesting there because just to highlight what we did last year that moving to a circular economy will have a significant impact in reducing carbon emissions in Scotland far more than just thinking about it as waste management so it does emphasise them the opportunity for Scotland not just in terms of the environment more broadly and the economics but in terms of the climate change position and leadership adopting a circular economy here in Scotland because the circular economy is cross-cutting it's more than just the environment it's much more about economic opportunity for Scotland in terms of jobs in terms of stewardship as well of the natural environment and we heard a lot in the last session as well about agriculture and even fishing and the marine environment is about those assets that we have here in Scotland natural assets here in Scotland and how we use them so for me there's a lot of similarities in this conversation about how do we use cross-cutting it's not just an environmental issue the circular economy I think one of the things I was involved in obviously here in 2014 was around table discussion around the circular economy which included people from skills people from education people from business sectors as well so really trying to understand what these opposities are so I think there is still a role for this committee to not just champion the circular economy but to ensure that they are thinking about this they are responding to the opportunities that are now laid out in the Scottish Government's circular economy strategy which was launched just a couple of weeks ago clearly there are opportunities in the urban setting, the rural setting and sectors with lots of evidence about the opportunities in terms of jobs in terms of environmental benefit and now in climate change so it is about how do we get that cross-cutting theme right across the Parliament and right across government on that theme now Graham Day and Claudia Beamish I'm stripping this back a little bit Ian, how do we actually explain effectively to the wider public what the circular economy is what it means because we are a very good parliamentary debate I think last year here where MSPs made a decent fist of trying to articulate what the circular economy is we understand it, you understand it but how do we get the message out to the public and the buy-in and the behavioural change that we need because we are talking about a very high level but how do we actually get out there to the public and get them to change behaviours Interesting I think we talked about it in the session is about language the words or two words circular economy probably don't really get too many people's attention but in terms of the public I think they do understand that we did on behalf of Government an extensive engagement process in 2003-2015 not just for business but with consumers with young people the whole range of people around basically making things last I know that was the strap line but it was trying to understand how people are consuming different products thinking about what they're actually consuming so that products would last longer they would be able to repair things they would be able to access other services in a way that would be different from what they're doing now and to be honest people understood that people did really respond to that they didn't respond to the word circular economy but they understood nobody likes to waste anything whether you're a business or a consumer nobody really wants to buy something that isn't going to last people do understand that and I think people I know there's a nuance on it in terms of the language but it is actually people understanding they want to buy things differently they want to consume differently and they understand particularly things like climate change and the aspects that they can see writ large across the main media particularly in the run-up to Paris and I think they understand things like circular economy making things last longer recycling, repairing, remanufacturing and using things longer both themselves and then passing those things on I think the public do get that Thank you Claudia Beamish then The points really have been raised that I wanted to raise in the main on from the points that you were making in and also from Graham Day I would be very interested to know what the committee thinks about how to involve communities and also for our legacy paper those who are not on quite such robust incomes as some others and also households both in understanding climate change and the circular economy because often people say I would like to do something but I am not sure what I know that has moved on quite a lot but there are still ways in which we might be able to advise the future committee about how we can help them to support that so I have reviews on that Tom Ballantyne then Andy Kerr It really goes back to the point of buy into the circular economy and how do you get to buy into that idea really what I think is important for the future is that we are operating in a new context when people see the kind of extreme weather events going on both in this country and elsewhere the impacts that climate change is having on health issues on food production on all sorts of areas of people's lives that's the way we are going to get buy in is when they see the impacts of doing nothing and understand that they want to do something to avoid the worst impacts that they will face if they don't act and that's linked in of course with the outcome in Paris which is looking for that intention to go to 1.5 degree rather than 2 degrees so I think that's another push and another bit of momentum for getting a buy in from the public and from government Andy Kerr, Dave Thomson, Ian Gilland I'm going to challenge that a little bit Tom because we've had a long a lot of years where the assumption has been if you can make people believe and buy into climate change they will then do something about it and actually we know that a lot of people do buy into climate change but they don't do anything about it and the issue it seems to me is always we've got to make it far more real for them which comes back to the point that Ian has just made about the circular economy so if you take things like the energy system we've still certainly over the last couple of decades still treated people as passive consumers rather than what we're trying to do I think now over the last few years and particularly in Scotland we've got some really good exemplars which is to say how can you actually get people to take a stake in the energy sector whether that's through actually buying into a community scheme or whether it's actually just taking an active part and saying and understanding that if you don't want a wind turbine locally then what do you want what are the options it's not a thing that you can't have nothing at all you've got to have something so I think there is a sense that we're actually moving in the right direction around getting people to start to address what will make a difference to them what are the issues for them on the energy side and I suspect the circular economy is the same thing but I think this notion that if only we make them believe in climate change then they will do something I think we've got to move on I'm being slightly unfair on you Tom there but we've got to move beyond that and I think we have got some very good examples around Scotland and I'll just pick one particular thing very quickly we know that in the rural communities a lot of people use electricity for heating we know 50% plus of people are going to be in fuel poverty in those situations there are things we can do to support that which involves bringing in biomass for heating bringing in other forms of things working as a community, working with farms and so on which are not being done at the moment so there are actually very positive things we can do and we're starting to see bits of it but we need to scale it up and that to me is the issue but it's got to be very real I'll just bring in Tom before I come to Dave I want to be quite clear I'm not talking about buy-in to the idea of climate change I'm talking about buy-in to the effects of climate change and an understanding of the effects of climate change and actually seeing the effects of climate change on the ground so people are experiencing flooding in rural communities and in towns they are seeing the health impacts of climate change around the world and understanding that may have implications for them to be flying into is this happening or is it not I actually think that argument is pretty much over people understand it is happening what they don't or haven't up until now seen is the effects on them and their lives and that's what I think is happening that's where the momentum is partly coming from Dave, to take this forward a bit Thank you very much convener and welcome to the panel I'm just thinking how we encourage folk to re-use things and so on I've got a lovely pair of boots where the souls are worn through now that leather up their uppers are perfect they're very comfortable and I can't get them re-sold because they're not designed to be easily re-sold and I think it's a terrible waste and I can't bring myself to throw them out how do we ensure that companies who make things like that actually make them in such a way that it's on taxation and if we think of housing is there a case and again it's on taxation to reduce the amount of whatever kind of tax there's going to be on properties for properties that have a very, very high thermal positive thermal impact do we adjust whatever's going to succeed the council tax so that people get a 10% reduction is taxation one of the ways that people in the panel think we could go forward with in relation to this bearing in mind that we only have limited taxation powers in the Parliament here Ian, first of all, while you're thinking about that I just cared to jump around the community because I always think that there's great alignment and I was looking to hear the first session around energy and communities I mean what was waste now resource and it's an asset that's flowing through our communities both right across Scotland and I think it's the similar aspect of putting up wind turbines and accessing economic benefit and therefore also engaging with people in tackling climate change as well that's a same opportunity of tapping into that waste stream what was the waste stream flowing through those communities realising those as assets whether they set the sale of them but more importantly what can be done with those materials repurposing them, remanufacturing them reusing them locally in terms of employment opportunities that's the real opportunity for Scotland that's what I think would really engage communities it's trying to understand how we can get them to see this material as something that will bring them economic benefit social benefit and other things both in a rural setting and in an urban setting as well and that links to the aspect of how do we encourage reuse incentivise it not trying to avoid the issue about taxation but similarly we have very successfully in Scotland got a huge renewables industry because I hate to use the word subsidy but there was a subsidy put in place to make that attractive in the marketplace where burning fossil fuels was still more competitive that's possibly why we could start to look around recycling, reuse, reprocessing materials although we have a very high recycling rate in Scotland going forward people are engaging it both at a consumer level and businesses we would still export the majority of the material to be reprocessed outwith Scotland that's a huge economic loss to our economy so how do we make sure that the materials that we're collecting for reuse, repair, recycling are done in Scotland how can we incentivise that here in Scotland and maybe something like a renewables obligation certificate that was put in place for winter wind and wave etc is that a solution perhaps that we need to think about here in Scotland to really make sure that we get those economic opportunities for the environmental dividends for our communities Andy Kerr, Colin, Tom and Sarah sorry, Sam I will try and finish up I can't read we should be using taxation to support but only taxation is part of a wider set of tools because in Scotland like most of Britain we obsess about upfront costs not about running costs and so we need to be aware that in itself that isn't the only thing what you can also do though is the point at which you want to change behaviour is the point at which there is disruption in somebody's life and so if somebody's moving house that's the time to get in and do up the house so if you use tax as an incentive to improve the quality of the house and ratchet it every time that house is sold you can actually move and retrofit houses really quite rapidly up through the system but not on its own because we will buy houses because we can afford them in another place that we want Colin and then Tom Sam on the tax aspect I think that making people realise about the whole system approach can help a great deal and you gave the example of the shoe but if I can give you an example from agriculture we've been very good at breeding new crop varieties which have increased yields enormously over the years and part of that process ended up sort of barley which was much shorter the problem with that was there was less straw then for livestock farmers to have as bedding material whereas if you had started from the point of view that you were trying to supply two products not one product you would have a very different approach that's a very sort of simple example if you take a wider perspective you might design something very very different and I think that back to the communication is about how do we design for the whole system and think about the whole cycle of the economy and you need to be able to quantify the economic aspects at every point in the cycle to get that understanding and the other aspect for agriculture I think agriculture actually is quite good at circular economy we already recycle a lot of materials on the farm but there needs to be a precautionary approach in relation to receiving byproducts from outside of the farm cycle because they may have started out being natural but they can get contaminated and they can become unnatural and we need to have a precautionary approach about how we connect the farm cycle to the wider economic cycle Tom and then Sam it's all about taxation and it's kind of for me a no-brainer reward the behaviours you do want to see disincentivise the behaviours you don't want to see and on that front I'll be interested to see what happens on something like air passenger duty because to me it's self-evident that if you want to see changes in behaviour you have to reward the behaviours you want and disincentivise the behaviours you don't want OK Sam and Sarah Boyack Just to follow up on that the Scottish Parliament had the opportunities I recall to very stamp duty to incentivise improvements in energy efficiency in the housing stock that's been recently given more profile by Energy UK the energy body revisiting that and I think it's an area that the Scottish Government might want to return to in the future but I just wanted to highlight the role of regulation to complement tax and particularly there are three key areas I think growing consensus and evidence for the need for regulation to create markets so in district heating where we don't really have a district heating industry in Scotland the introduction of regulatory measures are absolutely critical to incentivising that reducing the costs giving investment industry confidence that they'll get a return on that but also protecting the consumer in the long term in the housing sector the Scottish Government's done an awful lot of work around modelling what the introduction of minimum standards is like, there is cross-party support for that and we hope in the new parliamentary term we expect in fact in the new parliamentary term that there will be consultation on the introduction of those minimum standards and he says that the point of sale being the opportunity to increase the energy efficiency of our housing stock regulation being critical to doing that and finally in the urban environment particularly where air quality is low and causing so many consequences on public health for regulation there and I think all of these fit within other committees perhaps but there is a role for this committee in its monitoring of the RPP which we might come back to where there's often a data deficit to be able to highlight just the extent to which regulation without providing the specifics challenging the subject committee to do that identifying where there is a regulatory need because the current package of policies of monetary measures aren't proven to be adequate and we're going to get Sarah Boyack and Jim Hume Thank you convener I suppose this has prompted a thought listening to people talking about this round the table that one of the things this committee hasn't done a lot of has been sending individual members off or sending people off in groups to go off and do many reports and come back and if we're thinking about the we're just adding more and more new things to do when one of us speaks a light bulb goes off my head and thinks that's a great idea so maybe one of the things the committee might want to recommend is for the next committee to think about short term committee inquiries that come back rather than sending us all off around the country at the same time together because the comment that Andy made about you could change some of the fiscal measures we actually did change in the climate change act and the tax rate for energy efficiency or renewables installation it's virtually never been used I've asked some PQs on it so your point about it has to be something that has leadership, Government has to buy into it and it would need to be part of an overall strategy and I think that's the point that people have been making are really interesting about the kind of reality check, Dave's boots I'm wearing a similar pair of boots it's really frustrating we've got some recovery mechanisms but there's a gap in terms of repair, in terms of the economics and the skills and just this year making that work in the market so there's a few things that we could quite usefully go back and have a look at beyond the headline of circular economy all the bits that I've yet really to come to fruition Thanks for that Jim Hume to kind of be one of them Yeah, thanks I'm very sorry to hear that Dave Thompson's so down at heel but I'll do a wee quip around to see if we can get my pair of new boots since they can't get them resold I think Dave made an interesting point to you about do we penalise or do we incentivise I would always promote incentivising regarding our hard to heat homes across Scotland I think it was just a timely reminder that the Scottish Rural Colleges did some work and found out that in Scotland we have 51% of our housing stock in what's called fuel poverty so we have a lot of action to do so I'm glad to hear these words today We do without opening up that particularly but we're going to have a look at forestry and biodiversity next so Mike Russell is going to lead on that Thank you, convener I want to pose four questions which are not compulsory do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at the same time The first of them comes from Conforce submission and it is a question of the planting targets it is all very well to say we must meet the planting targets they haven't been met in the last whatever number of years how do we meet these if we agree that the planting targets are essential and I think most of us do how do we meet them and there are obligations on the commercial sector which ties into the second of Conforce points about the availability of grant funding I think that grant funding should be available and should be simpler to get but the commercial sector perhaps are using it as a strong excuse not to plant rather than finding ways to plant The second is the role of community that actually features quite strongly in the submission of forest policy group and I think they're right to argue in forestry and in biodiversity matters that there should be public good from public money Johnny Hughes this morning made some very good points on that which we didn't get the chance to explore fully how should we structure the payment of public monies in order to get those public goods in forestry and more widely and what should our strategy be in terms of involving community or increasing democratic accountability in these sectors The third is dear management why we didn't get to touch on it this morning I think it's absolutely crucial in terms of where we're going on biodiversity and tackling the issue of dear management at last after two centuries of failing to tackle it would be a noble ambition for the next committee I would have thought even if rather a big one and the final point ties it all these together which is the question of a land use strategy we touched on it briefly in the first section but it is an important issue here too almost, well certainly half the submissions we had were mentioned in the need for a coherent land use strategy there will be a land commission established by the land reform bill presuming that goes through it at third stage next week what is that commission going to do to bring about that strategy and how will that strategy affect not just forestry but the wider question of ensuring that we have a healthy thriving biodiverse Scotland and also one in which those sectors are contributing to the issues of climate change I think that that's probably enough to get started with well indeed I think and as you say dear management is certainly a part of that something which the committee had a united view upon when we recommended the government take tougher action but thinking about forestry and deer together are often quite a useful combination John Stath of Stuart yes thank you very much for that I think that the planting target will be vital and not least in the context of the climate change discussions that we've had it's a major plank if I can use that pun in the government's attempt to deliver on climate change the planting and also the products that come from that which lock up carbon and are a low carbon building material we've done some calculation to say that we hit our targets then we would be sequestering another 55 million tonnes of carbon in Scotland's forests it also allows us to secure a sector which has grown by over 50 per cent since 2008 it's now contributing £1 billion to Scotland's economy and employing 25,000 people across Scotland's rural areas providing often high quality skilled well paid jobs in areas where opportunities are limited for alternative employment it's definitely achievable as far as we're concerned I think that what we see is the issues are that there's a lack of drive through within the agencies responsible for delivering the policy they've got lots of different objectives they're trying to deliver lots of different challenges they're facing and it can be quite easy to put this to one side because it's seen as difficult and I think part of that difficulty is perception there were forests planted in the last century which are not what we're creating now but it's visually what people see and what they think is going to be created and I spend a huge amount of time responding to people saying we don't want those forests that you planted in the last century and saying that's great because that's not what we're asking for but it's still what's expected and we found when we've taken environmental conservation organisations out, local authorities and others to see a modern forestry planting site they've been really taken aback by how different it is and the benefits that provides Mike Russell was pointing about biodiversity as well, not just about forestry these forests that we're planting I've yet to see one which has more than say 60 to 70% producing timber as its primary output which in itself is a very positive thing it delivers on climate change it's a low-carbon material that supports the economy but those other parts of the area being planted are open space they're different types of trees they're hugely biodiversity so those are providing an increase in biodiversity from the previous land use so delivering on those targets and delivering these modern productive planting is going to deliver a whole wide range of benefits and we want to do that in a way which does work with communities we are agnostic on the whole issue of land ownership but we recognise that if we're going to deliver these modern forests if they're going to be managed and people are starting to see them harvested they're going to see lorries on the roads they need to understand that there's a purpose behind that and therefore we do take on ourselves that we've got a responsibility to explain that as well we've recently produced a film which is on our website so if you've got 10 minutes spare I encourage you to watch that we're also producing an animation which links how we have wood all around us as we can see in this building and how that relates back to the growing of wood and the sector that we represent and we're keen to step up to the plate on that but what we want to do is to see the people that we engage with who are dealing with applications which are coming forward to talk to us and listen to about the benefits we want to see the agencies providing quick decisions on these at the moment if you put an application in it can take 2 to 3 years to get a decision which is just ludicrous and completely off-putting and takes up huge amounts of resource so I could go on and happy with some of the other things but what I don't want to do is hog everything just now if we're going to have an opportunity to discuss a number of these points Indeed it would be very useful for you to tweet something about your film that would be very positive indeed Graham Day Can I just see clarity Mr Goodall bullet point 3 on your 5 points for the future forestry says replant forest harvests supply wood this is an addition to new planting so it's what you're saying 100,000 hectares by 2022 plus that in which case what is the plus that and if we're not hitting the planting targets now how are we going to get to the point that you're indicating we need to get to I think it's a very important point for us and maybe not something which is really easy to explain in a bullet point but essentially in terms of carbon in terms of future wood supply when we're harvesting forests of water or carbon and you turn the tap and you're draining some away but you also need to keep filling up and if you want to increase that tank you've got to be putting in the new planting but what we're saying is that we are losing areas of forest for example to past and wind farms there was planting which took place in the past in areas such as the flow country which was seen as inappropriate we're not contesting that but there are also areas where we're seeing and we're working with the Scottish Government on this at the moment to identify there appears to be an increasing area of Scotland where there had been forests and there should still be forests again which is not being replanted and understand why that is and that's really concerning to us so it's absolutely vital that current Government and next Government gets a handle on that so that where we expect there are forests which are going to be producing wood and we're getting the new planting as well sorry just to be quick the other figure in mind do you have a figure that says by 2022 it should be 150,000 hectares have you got something like that there? well in terms of the planting we're happy with 100,000 hectares target absolutely we think that's fine in terms of the areas which are not being restocked at the moment there are figures that are right then I wouldn't want to quote them because there's a danger that it could be alarmist so she's been very good at saying yes we've got to get to the bottom of this we've got to understand it and that's what we want to do and I think that by the time there's a new Government in place we should have those figures and we can have that conversation okay Willie McGee welcome to the committee thank you yes I'm not going to say anything about the targets the numerical value of the targets but what the forest policy group has been working on is looking at the different ways that you can achieve greater forest cover greater carbon sequestration capacity more benefits to communities more biodiversity and especially rural development and we think in terms of the plantation targets that there's an opportunity which if not being missed isn't perhaps being exploited to its full and that is to actually involve communities in this drive for greater forest cover we have this target of a million acres under community ownership which the Scottish Government has signed up to and I think it's something that the next incarnation of this committee would do well to look at is in what way can these grants that are available now but which don't seem quite to be getting the results how could they be restructured in such a way that communities could take advantage of them and to plant forests which to our mind can be potentially more diverse and by diverse I'm talking about not just the species but also the aims of forestry we tend to have this kind of pendulum in Scotland where we've swung between so for example in times gone by Stuart me on one side, native woodlands, you on the other side commercial conifer and it's like Ian, sorry Alan made the point in the first committee meeting about integration if we can strive for more integration in land use and forestry so that we don't end up with great slabs of monoculture of one thing whether it's sport, sheep, Cyspruse or native woodland but think a little bit more constructively I think that the message would get through to more farmers and more landowners who at the moment possibly, I'm not saying they do but they possibly look at the grant incentives and think well that kind of forestry or that that's on offer is not for me and that's a portion of my holding Jim Hume I'm looking at you because we tried to put this sort of thing together in the southern uplands and it worked very well and we got estates, tenant farmers, owner occupiers all who came in they weren't planting 500 or 1000 hectares at the time but they were bit by bit by bit and perhaps in terms of the actual targets themselves if we look at a little bit of innovation and also greater community involvement and looking at local development, rural development goals then perhaps that might be more attractive Jim Hume and Alex Ferguson I should say both of us were trustees of Borders Forest Trust in the long distance past which did do a lot of integrating farming with forestry rather having farming versus forestry which is quite often what we hear at this table so to follow on from Willys point there, it would be interesting to hear from as many members that are around this table as possible what their views are on rather than competing for land look at opportunities for diversifying land and that could be as Willys already alluded to farmers actually getting opportunity to perhaps plant blocks of forest which could be productive or could of course have wider benefits also Alex Ferguson and then Claudia Beamish I could make two points which are like bees in my own bonnet one of which was prompted by something Stuart Goodall said which was about the loss of forestry to wind farm development my understanding is that it's supposed to be a policy that ensures that compensatory planting takes place I've asked several questions over the years to try and find out whether that is being adhered to my understanding is that it's not but I think that something a successor committee might want to look at in terms of helping to meet some of the planting targets that are being spoken about the second point I would make and I'm not sure if we're coming on to flooding and flood mitigation later, convener, are we? in which case I'll leave it but I'll just make the point that I do believe the private forestry sector and indeed the public forestry sector has a huge role to play in how we address flood mitigation going forward has been enormously involved in these discussions at this point in time but I think it needs to be and again that's for the future but could I just leave this with just one question to William McGee I think is that your vision of how forestry planting takes place in the future is I totally understand but how do you tie that in with the need and I think it's agreed there is a need to maintain a sustainable and vibrant commercial forest industry which is what it is which is hugely important as well to rural employment I'm very glad you asked me that question I think that again if we're talking about timber we know from the last 5, 10 years how susceptible our trees are in this country to attack to pest diseases at the moment Sitka is one that's kind of got away with it if you like but it's only a matter of time and I think that there is an appetite amongst the somillers amongst the processors to look at different species and I think that certainly the forestry commission who I would applaud for their diverse conifer grant which is an attempt to get people to plant albeit often exotic conifers but to try and move away from this reliance this very heavy reliance on Sitka Spruce I have nothing personally against Sitka Spruce but I think that we are putting a lot of our eggs in one basket so it's a question of applying if you look at the resources that have been expended in the last 30 to 40 years on understanding Sitka, its properties, its growing its milling, its engineering if we did that with other species then we would be making a start if I could just finish that off By asking Stuart and yourself Stuart Goodall on yourself can you to work within the holistic vision that Alan Laidlaw was referring to in the first panel as we go forward? Yes, I mean absolutely and I think quite simply for us integration is the way forward it's not about forestry or farming for example we've got a very good event it's not us I should say it's the national cheaper association event on next week which I'm going to which is about how sheep farmers can look at forestry as a way of adding value to the land it's about how they can put shelter belts in of a scale which will deliver a forestry or a commercial scale whether that's commercial softwood forestry or native woodland or whatever without undermining sheep production it can be done by thinking over the decades reinforced by the way the cap is structured to create that separation but if we have those conversations to bring that together we can do that and equally as the same when we plant new woodlands a significant percentage of that is of diverse species whether that's conifer species or native woodland species it's part of modern forestry to continue with us just now was that all right, Alex? So, Claudia, Colin, Mike and Andy Thank you, convener what I wanted to raise has been touched on but the actual term agriforestry seems to have a resonance here and that might take us later on to dealing with flooding and climate change as well but as we've talked in terms of climate change already about about incentivisation and I'm just wondering the extent to which agriforestry which has come up in this committee might have a value in the future so it's a quick point if people could just respond very briefly on that in terms of time I'm sorry, I do have another question for the legacy we've touched as well on plant health so the committee has done a great deal on and I do think that that's a very important issue if there are any further comments on that before we move on So Colin, Andy and then Willie Thank you, this actually falls on very nicely from what Claudia has said one of the options we've got for more trees is on farms and unfortunately this is what we sometimes call a squeeze middle there's many demands on it and we need to understand the reasons why farmers don't want to plant trees on farms and there's a lot of good work being done in this area already but there are multiple benefits there's a lot of scientific evidence for everything that Stuart has said about the benefits of trees and the flooding one is another one that's going to come up but I think we've got less scientific evidence of that yet we know theoretically that actually there's a lot of potential benefits for it so there's potentially lots of good reasons to grow trees on farms we do have a long-term agriforestry experiment at the Glensoch Research Farm at the James Arden Institute has and welcome the committee to come and visit that it's very provoking to actually see it in the field the next committee in the next five years because it does raise all these issues about how do you actually integrate trees on farms but it is about selling those benefits that there are undoubted benefits and it's getting that across to farms that actually helps our business to have those benefits on the farm sorry just one last point is that the Royal Society of Edinburgh commission of facing up to climate change actually made this point that we had this polarisation of agriculture and forest and we needed to break down those barriers and we have demonstration farms for all sorts of climate change mitigation options we don't have a demonstration farm for trees on farms and that's maybe an option going forward it's not a research farm, it's a real farm where a real farmer is helped to grow trees on the farm a couple of the points have already been picked up so I'll leave those I just wanted to leave one legacy issue for the committee which is that if you look at the emissions inventory energy sector typically is the biggest single sector after this year rural and the rural sector essentially will be the biggest sector that will mean the attention for the next committee will be very much on what people are doing because at the moment we have the forestry sector which is the biggest sequester, huge benefit to the country's emissions targets and you have everything else which is and people will start to say why aren't you being imposed on and the industry being imposed on so I think that the next committee needs to be aware of that as being a real rising issue as a legacy point and the other point I was going to bring up was actually being picked up already about the flooding so we'll come back to that later okay, Wally and Maggie am I still on Mike's questions yes at the moment I mean there are a couple of other things I'd like to try and wrap two to community if that's okay made points about community well it was really to tie it in with the land use strategy and also the grants I think we've talked a lot about the integration what another thing that we are very focused on in the forest policy group is small scale enterprise in rural periurban areas opportunities that forestry can bring and that is for anything from climate change related whether it's biomass, firewood harvesting and that enterprise which relies on being able to get access to these small areas now the Scottish Government has been very instrumental in pushing one initiative through the Scottish Woodlots Association that's a great boon to allowing people to access more land the public community and monies going into grants for small woodland owners feeds its way all the way through to things like social justice greater control over local resources and partly links to our point about management of the state forests we're not touched on that I'll kind of I can park that but we would like to see if you like the community in the same way that implantation targets that if we kind of give communities the levers to take control over local enterprise and rural development and part of that will come through the grants system then I think that we could have a renaissance in Scotland where other European countries are experiencing decline we know that for instance in Sweden that young people have moved wholesale from rural areas and forests are now under managed in Scotland we don't have quite that probably we've got a problem of getting ownership or access to land to manage so in terms of public benefit the point about monies, public monies and public benefit we would endorse and we would like to see much more access for communities to small woodlands areas whether they're private, they're in private ownership or whether they're state we've worked very well with forest enterprise when they put land as part of the national forest land scheme on the market they have listened and they've subdivided they've put small lots so that local communities or businesses could access these areas has played its role in that and that to kind of move forward Thank you for that Jim Hume's got a small question It was more a point to just following up from Colin Campbell's point that the James Hatton Institute doesn't have any demonstration farms where agriculture has integrated with forestry bit two past directors of borders for the Strust, Willie Meaghey and I could have probably 20 years of farming so there's a plethora of farms so contact the borders forestry we'll be on the go for 20 years they're celebrating tonight their 20 years anniversary in this very parliament which I'm hosting in the member's room at 6 o'clock so you can all come along to hear how that's actually been happening for 20 years Back on these farms as is No, no, no, no OK, well None precuneious interest That's useful information to move us a bit into biodiversity but I want Mike to be able to come back just on the forestry but before you do my point and it leads to biodiversity we need to be growing timber for building purposes that means timber that makes a lot more looking after one of the species is under threat large Douglas fir, maybe less so at the moment so we need to make sure that we're growing as many of these kinds of species in the commercial forestry as possible so that we will have a chance to move away from concrete and move into wood building because in the land reform discussions we've talked about having more models of buildings for crofters and farmers to live in which would be eco-friendly in the way that the crofters commission did in the past they had models for houses which they offered to people to be able to build, to buy so we need to have the up-to-date versions of these if you read back the official report you'll see that but my point is are we doing enough because they are more expensive to actually look after stewart and raise I simple response is I think we do all these things and we are doing all these things but just quickly on the issue of diversity and diverse conifers we had done somewhat recently to look at the area of spruce that's being felled and what's been replaced and we reckon that only about 40% of the spruce that's been felled recently has been replaced so I think that there is a lack of appreciation of just how much change is going on out there when it comes to producing something which can be used in construction which is hugely keen to see, it's a very high value it's great in terms of climate change because it locks up that product for a long time and wood is a very low carbon building material so therefore it delivers enormous benefits and it can deliver high quality housing as well we've got a lot of work that Willie alluded to around spruce which allows us to use that and grow that for the future so that can be used especially in volume housing but then there are more opportunities to use woods such as Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, Larch is still around and will be around for a while but it's not going to disappear in the next couple of years and these are all things which we can build with what I would say is that absolutely want to see small scale local construction using small amounts of wood but at the same time we want to ensure that we still feed the mills on the others which are the ones which are providing the overwhelming number of those 25,000 jobs and the billion pound contribution to the economy and there is an ability to look at different tree species but they've got to be planted in volume what we can't be saying is let's plant a couple of hundred here and a couple of hundred there you've got to do something on a strategic basis which means if we're delivering those planting targets we are looking at the forests that we have which is greater diversity it's got to be on the basis of producing a volume of those trees and not just a sprinkling of different types because it won't work Mike, do you want to come back on some of this just now? Yes, I have to say that meeting the target seems to me the biggest objective and I hope that the successor committee will examine very closely why that target hasn't been met and how it can be met because everything else really pales not only jobs are at risk but the contribution you're making to climate change is greatly diminished I think that Willie's strictures about involving the community are where things will need to go that is a personal opinion but I do think that involving the community in more creative and constructive ways meeting the objectives of increasing the amount of land under a community ownership whilst contributing to the targets and using public money to do that and I think that it can be done constructively without losing sight of the strong needs of the commercial sector and there's no reason why the community cannot be a key player in the commercial sector as well and that adds another dimension to it so I think that there are all sorts of things that can be examined and supported by a successor committee but I do think that it's a matter of urgency year on year we say oh gosh we haven't met those targets again I think that there now has to be a determination to meet them in the early part so it will be part of the land use strategy issue which we need to get a grip of because there are so many issues coming in there whether or not that is all done by demonstration on Jim Heumann's farm or not I really don't really care as long as we get it done and we understand how those things can be done and we will now move on convener I think to dear management which I'm happy to contribute to I think we need to do something about that too we do indeed well very much the biggest predator growing trees but also nature directives the way in which they operate biodiversity requires us to be thinking about how we practically apply these things because we're always under pressure to make sure that we aren't getting into infraction at European level and you know I'm not going to give any leads in this but I really think that the dear management thing requires this committee this panel to sort of give us some of their views about how they think we're done and how what more we should do so who wants to start about that Willie? Willie is point number four I hope we stuck to our bullet point layout well and our our majoring on deer control we've been at it for the last half a dozen years we do not believe that the current system of deer management plans is enforceable we don't believe that SNH is equipped to either provide policy support or the resources to use its powers effectively we do recognise the very positive role that this committee has played it is the if you like from our standpoint anyway the star achievement of this committee because without intervention we wouldn't have gone as far down the route as we have done we know that there are deer management plans the standards are supposed to be being improved this year but we don't believe there are any prospects of meaningful follow-up so what we would urge is that the successor to this committee continues to hold the baton of deer and to continue the good fight because we firmly believe that this committee has been instrumental in moving deer policy along Thank you for that Erwin, I can assure you that it becomes more complex when you look at it in particular pieces of ground as I know to my interesting regret Graham Day Thank you, if Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr McGee I visited Gwnaela Forrest last Friday there and I was struck by hearing about the challenges that the forestry sector faces in regard to deer management but I was also struck in the wider biodiversity aspect where they are constructing habitats for wild cats so briefly we can touch on what has proactively done in forests to look at the wider biodiversity issue but on a negative I hosted an event in Parliament last night where most of the discussion the use of neonics in forestry was referenced so I just wonder if you could comment on that it was a new one on me also I don't think I can comment on it and just quickly on the was it wild cats that you were talking about I mean I haven't heard about the work that's being done but I think that Johnny in the first session had a deer problem fairly and squarely on the head and the issues that were in many people's papers about restoring the uplands or regenerating forests would all fall into place if we had greater deer control Neonicotinoids in forestry I'm sorry I'm not really Stuart I can't I can't add much on to that either unfortunately I mean what I would make the point is that this chemical use in the forestry sector is something that under the standards that we operate against and we have standards which have been for forest management, development, environmental organisation recreational access sector as well as the commercial sector and government are designed to ensure that we provide variety of benefits in all the forests that we plant not just a commercial output and part of that is about how we reduce chemical usage and the forestry sector is tiny in compared to other land uses so we are bearing down on that interesting in terms of biodiversity and what can be offered I said earlier on that we tried to take people out from conservation organisations and others to demonstrate what new forestry looks like and what we are trying to achieve and one of those was in Southern Scotland and Johnny Hughes was part of that group alongside John Muir Trust and others on the RSPB and we showed them a forest that should have been created which retained the high quality farmland it had an area for Caper Caley to help to restore and support that and we geared ourselves up for three hours of intensive interrogation and being the spotlight on us and having a difficult time and in actual fact everybody came away from that saying this was just the kind of land use that they wanted to see on site we had bear hill land on the other side we had a 1970s commercial forest and we were saying no this is what we want in the middle which is an integrated land use which is delivering all these benefits and I think we need to do more of that and if we can then we'll help to deliver those planting targets Sam Gardner and then Alec Ferguson Sorry no, I think I'm looked in your direction can mean about having anything to do Don't be so modest Alec Ferguson thing to do convener look in your direction at the wrong time I just wanted to make one point about the restoration of biodiversity particularly in upland in Moorland Scotland if I might which is I hosted last week and Jim Hume kindly attended a briefing from an initiative called the understanding Moorland predation initiative which we've been talking about holistic ways of approaching things and this has brought together such diverse organisations as the RSPB and the Gamekeepers Federation who don't always meet Gamekeepers Association but on this occasion do and I think it would be a good marker to put down when we're talking about predation and the impact of forestry on biodiversity because commercial forestry in particular plays host to a number of predators that do have an impact on ground nesting birds I think it would be a good marker to put down that the successor committee might well touch base with that initiative from time to time when looking at biodiversity Colin Carroll That in relation to the upland biodiversity is a very significant issue that has been recognised in fact in the next five year research programme funded by the Scottish Government sponsored through Rhesas there is some significant new experiments being done to look at this issue about upland biodiversity because it may be more than one factor it may not just be all about predators and land management etc and it's difficult to tease that out and there are new experimentation proposed to investigate that in the next five year programme We're right to say that this committee has been on the ball in terms of deer management and it is a big job for the next committee to do but I think we are on the right track but it is a huge matter because we've got to get the deer numbers down to a level that they're in balance with the ecosystem and that is a huge job and it's probably going to have to be a compulsory job but the points have been made quite well on that but we need to move on to sustainable development just now and Sarah Boyack wanted to pick off on that one because this is the last major part of what we're doing but it might well include urban matters like air pollution and things like that too I was thinking of flood management air pollution Let's do that first If flood management works because it's a natural fall on in some ways from the forestry issue and I'm just looking at the reforesting that uplunns comment from the forestry policy group we've got the sepa maps that are in place and the action strategies will be coming out this summer and I'm thinking that's presumably quite a good issue for the next committee to be looking at 108,000 households at risk of flooding and the money in place to help 10,000 of them so we're going to need a much more upstream approach and a mix of forestry, flooding land management agriculture it's going to be quite a big change there so I don't know if people have got comments on the different contributions that could be made there Good point Anyone else want to make a comment? OK so I think we all appreciate that adaptation in its widest form has been the Cinderella in this space and there has been some good initiatives what we are seeing at the moment obviously is the national centre of resilience coming into being which ought to be a coordination point for going from both the end users from the emergency responders to the communities and the businesses but also to try and join up much more effectively so that we learn better from what works in one part of the country and can apply it to others so I think there is a sense that we now have a tool that will allow us to do that I think we have to be very careful about going down the line of saying if only we plant more trees there will be no flooding downstream if there's enough rain it's going to flood and the issue then is how do we best use that land management which comes back to wider land land management understanding across the country but we also have two or three almost independent parts to what's going on we've got a climate change risk assessment which is a statutory duty which we have to do we have a Scottish risk assessment coming through which is focusing on natural hazards as well as other things so we've actually got lots of different elements which at the moment are not particularly well joined up and I think that next committee needs to be able to look at how do we draw together those both on the land management of the land planning framework the Scottish risk assessment the climate change risk assessment as well as the seaper maps what we do have now because we've been working quite closely with a number of different partners is we're finally starting to get some hard data about how many houses are at risk what are the issues so we've got a whole set of indicators which allows to see change as it starts to happen so we are starting to be able to quantify it whether it's very generic, qualitative we think there's a problem, we ought to do something about it so I think we're actually starting to see all the bits come together but I think that the successor committee could actually start to really pin down who is delivering what in that space to ensure that we have more resilience within both downstream urban communities as well as the upstream frameworks Billy McKee and then Stuart Yes following up on Andy's point trees will not solve your problem I would concur with that and I think Colin probably has some opinions he's nodding we talked about evidence and opinion in the first session I could get you two hydrologists in this room and one would give you overwhelming evidence that grassland was the best cover and the other one would give you trees I think what from experience certainly again in the southern uplands and there's a lady sitting behind here who was involved at an early stage where we were looking at the aparatric and floodplain mitigation, we know that if enough rain falls it will flood there are ways of making that gentler and softler if floods can ever be thought of in such terms and that the landscape, the mosaic of land use that you have and this comes back into the land use strategy which is where its home in part should be if you've got a mosaic of land uses and the water is not all being funnelled down the etrich, yarrow, tweed whatever then you will get buffering I hesitate to bring up Beavers in this conversation but they are part of biodiversity I'll just throw that one in at the end but in terms of in terms of catchment management in the southern uplands Tala and Games Hope and the Moffat Valley a large-scale native afforestation will help buffer the water coming down Nia I agree, and one of the challenges that we've seen in different parts of Scotland particularly around the central belt has been when you've got different councils covering different parts so we're not treating the catchment as a coherent environmental unit and that has been a big problem Alex Ferguson was going to make that point If I could just expand on it briefly I absolutely think that this is hugely important that we start looking at whole catchment management when it comes to flood mitigation and recent events in my constituency, absolutely bring that home frankly Willie said trees will not solve the flooding flooding problem, indeed they won't but the management of them and the management of their extraction I would argue can have a significant impact as I believe it has done in one particular area in my constituency on how quickly water flows off the hills I think in terms of we need to bring all stakeholders together because we're not going to stop floods of course we're not but I do believe that we can mitigate some of their worst impacts I hate the word holistic too but we keep coming back to it in the roundest table if we have a genuinely holistic look at how this can be managed better I do believe that results can be achieved not necessarily that expensive either Stuart Goodall I think that there's a lot of consensus in the conversation there and I'm just going to reiterate that we've done a lot of work with forest research and others about the role that forestry can play slowing the flow so that flood defences aren't overwhelmed but that's not replacing flood defences you need hard engineering we've also got a design where those forests are because what you don't want to do is then have a number of different forests which are all holding back the water at the same time and then releasing it at the same time so there's an awful lot that needs to be looked at what I would say is that that doesn't mean that it's something you then kick into the long grass so to speak for 50 years you can look at this there are models out there we've done a lot of work with forest research we've looked at this in Northern England where they're equally afflicted by flooding events and I think there's a lot of positives that can be taken forward so we're very happy to be able to do that I'm going to try and broaden this out just now into the subject of sustainable development and that can be urban or rural I think we've had quite a lot of specifics in the last session there but thinking about fuel poverty appropriate sustainable work the kind of services we require as well as the services for the environment all those things that go together to make what would be sustainable development what is it that the next committee has to focus on amongst that basket of issues that would help us to actually take Scotland forward Mike, do you want to? Well, you can prompt them as well prod them I think that that is almost impossible I don't want to disagree with you on that at this particular stage because I don't think that the committee is also just as we were having this discussion earlier on about what committees do and how they operate the committee is also a creature to some extent of government and time and I think the political issues of the election the issues presented by bodies around this table the issues that the new government will bring forward will dictate to some extent to some great extent what the successor committee chooses to do there are some core issues that the committee if the committees are constituted in the same way cannot ignore and I think the most important of them is to go back to where we very much started here which is I think driving forward the issues of climate change and action about climate change within this Parliament and I think that that is the most important responsibility of the committee and strangely enough that's probably not been in terms of time that the committee has spent probably the bulk of its time has not been spent on that action for a variety of reasons so I think we have to find a way that that's done underneath that comes a range of other issues which need to be actioned I mean certainly laterally that could be said to be so the first half of this is probably was the other way round because we had to deal with RPPs and so on so Colin first of all I think the point I would like to make is about the steno development goals that we had up to these I think in terms of rural Scotland we're not necessarily clear exactly how they map on to the livelihoods and businesses in rural Scotland I think there are two things that are different about the steno development goals that we didn't have before and that is about involving the private sector much more in the development, sustainable development goals and that's going to have a particular flavour for rural Scotland I think and I think the other thing is small business of small farm units and there's a great deal more thinking going on behind that that could actually look at in relation to rural Scotland but how we map on to those international sustainable development goals it's a big opportunity to co-ordinate because none of these things happen in isolation just in Scotland they scale up across Europe and across the world so I think there's thinking about how they map on to rural Scotland is an important thought exercise and we agree with Colin, those are crucial issues survival is an issue in many parts of rural Scotland for example in the areas that I represent sustainability we all understand or I think we understand what the words mean depopulation an ageing population lack of economic opportunities increasing cost problems with local government those become issues of survival in rural Scotland and the committee will need to be in a position that's not to say that these high-level and they are high-level discussions are not vital but at very much at grass and islands root level there are some really crucial issues that have to be decided about how you sustain and make rural communities survive Thank you convener I just wanted to build on what Mr Russell was saying around the focus on the climate change act and I think it's convener you were right to reflect on the fact that there was an awful lot of focus around RPP2 and its development I think the challenge and trying to bring this back to the implementation or the achievement of sustainable development is the committee having the capacity within all the other demands that incur on it to take a view of the implementation of that document and proactively engage with its strengths and weaknesses the areas where it's seen to be struggling and I've been able to identify specific sectors where there is significant opportunity to further sustainable development goals such as in urban air quality and transport particularly where our emissions are languishing about what they were in 1990 so there's a clear climate change agenda but there's also public health agenda social impacts and similarly in the housing sector where fuel poverty is still way too high over 40% so I think the committee has a challenge in terms of data provision the access to live data I think RPP2 has been too much of a static document which hasn't allowed for adaption, reflection and change so what I would hope in the future is that the future committee engages with the new governance structures the government have put in place the Cabinet Sub-Committee requests and tries to put that on the government to provide live data as to the effectiveness of different policies because its greatest contribution is this committee or its future one with a focus on climate change will be ensuring that everything is being done to deliver on that climate change act that will be the biggest single contribution it can make to ensuring that we fulfil our sustainable development goals Claudia, yes It's just a very brief point following on from what Mike Russell said that in my view and maybe I'm missing the point if it remains a rural affairs committee should be exactly looking at the sustainable development goals and seeing how those underpin and indeed are overarching for all the issues that we should be dealing with and that sort of goes back to Colin Campbell's point and I think looking at those and seeing how they can help our fragile communities and our biodiversity and how it all fits together and fuses into one positive future for rural Scotland might well be helpful That's just a good point Well, the UN Development Goals and Forestry and Woodlands Willie and then Stuart for nearly the last words I would like to agree with Mike I think that sustainable development as a phrase is both enormous intimidating, difficult to get to grips with and I would caution against trying to deal with it as a single issue within a committee I think that it's one of those things that's probably cross cutting because it's got economy, because it's got social because it's got environment that whatever committee comes next would want to be very careful about how it understood what view it took on the meaning of sustainable development and which bits of it that it tackled and it could play a role in somebody mentioned baselining in the first session or benchmarking looking at where you were with fuel Sam's talked about fuel poverty specific issues and it may be that the role that the committee played was in that prodding role that you alluded to Rob earlier on of other committees that had some of the social and the economy elements under their power if you're like Stuart Goodall and Ian Gulland It's very specifically on the point that Mike Russell made about how sustainable development was like locality, an area and a community scale it's something that we found very interesting we've been looking at over the last year and I had an excellent visit to the North West Mall community Woodland where you have a group there that's taken over a 1960s commercial forest and it's now up there to be harvested and they're maintaining the heart of that commercial component so it's going to continue to produce income but having that resource they're able to deliver new housing, increase numbers of jobs what we're saying is would fuel to support and tackle fuel poverty so there's a community there who are benefiting hugely from that asset and that's the kind of thing that we were very keen to look at how can we recreate and willy was saying more of those I think that there are real opportunities to look at those as practical examples of local community-based sustainable development Ian I'm really just going back to the idea of the circle economy which we talked about earlier which is obviously very exciting for Scotland but I think that there are huge opportunities to do that across the whole of Scotland not just to consider the opportunities in the central belt the work that we've done in the key sectors, the agricultural sector the beer and fish farming the whisky industry are across Scotland and I think that's really possibly something that the future committee should bear in mind as we move towards this idea of a circle economy in Scotland is how do we make sure that we get those jobs and economic opportunities in the rural parts of Scotland because they are there this is not about sucking all of the materials out of Scotland into the central belt this is about real opportunity for jobs work that is carried on at both Scottish level and UK level sees opportunities upwards of 17,000, 18,000 jobs these are in communities up and down the breadth of Scotland including repair people fixing shoes all over Scotland not sending them away to some factory or processing in the central belt that's what this is about this is what the opportunity is all I'm listening to is the challenges in agriculture in forestry and how do we engage communities and get them to understand that there are real benefits in doing things differently and it's the same for me in the circle economy I think that shouldn't be forgotten about going forward I think that's a very good way in which perhaps to wind us up just now I, like Mike Russell represent areas with some of the most endangered species and the most endangered species of all are human beings and fragile communities who do feel responsible for their environment who do feel that they've got a capacity to do much better and to make sure that there's a place for the young people to grow and so on and that they will provide services for bigger communities in due course but that's a sustainable development goal at the world level and a sustainable development goal that we see in this committee does reflect right down to the most local areas such as the north coast of Sutherland that I was visiting once again last Friday so thank you very much for all of these AIDS memoirs because the next committee will have an exciting chance to take these forward it's been a pleasure in receiving your evidence and my role as the convener of this which I will no longer have after the 23rd of March so thank you very much all of you we have to move on to some other business so we'll have to suspend just now but we can't have long conversations in the room it is in public it's about some secondary legislation thank you all very much hello everybody we're just going to finish off the business it is in public but it is the business of agenda item 2 subordinate legislation and this item includes four pieces one, two, three, five pieces of secondary legislation and I'm aware that Dave Thompson is not back yet so I don't want to make that mistake because he may wish to comment on at least one of them but I'll read them out as I have to do the seed licensing and enforcement etc of Scotland regulations 2016 SSI 2016-68 the seed fees at Scotland regulations 2016, SSI 2016-69 the plant health Scotland amendment order 2016, SSI 2016-83 the Wester Ross marine conservation order 2016 SSI 2016-88 and the Loch Sunert to sound of Dura marine conservation order 2016, SSI 2016-90 I refer members to the paper and I'll take them in turn Does anyone have any comments on the seed licensing enforcement on the seed fees on the plant health on the Wester Ross marine conservation order plant health thank you it's actually a matter of process rather than content I did attempt to read it and page 23 to 24 I would ask the authors of such reports to really consider how they're presented it's one of the most difficult things I've had to read it's one paragraph that goes over for more than a page it's just almost impossible to read that matter is now a matter of record we'll tell them indeed thank you for that any more on the plant health on Wester Ross marine conservation area Dave Thompson very briefly thank you very much it's really just a point to note an error in the policy note in the business and regulatory impact assessment on page 44 of the committee papers it refers to the of trolling and so on that can be carried out within the Wester Ross marine conservation area and it mentions vessels of under 150 gross tonnage in that note now the actual order itself at prohibited and regulated activities paragraph 4 refers to the engine power not exceeding 500 kilowatts which is a better way to deal with these matters so it was just to point out that there appears to be a contradiction there that the 150 tonnes are still being mentioned in the note whereas the order itself deals with engine size and that can be quite a crucial difference it can indeed so we will point that out to the Government but I think probably it's correct to say that the order itself is in order yes Claudia Beamish on relation to the Wester Ross MPA along with the points that have been made on other MPAs how important the continuing science and socio-economic research in the future will be in terms of making sure that these have been got right for both the protection of habitats and their recovery but also for our fragile communities based of course on evidence we know that it's essential that we have the information and the research to do so thank you I very much welcome the Wester Ross marine conservation order and I believe it's going to work very well and that there will be integration between the different sectors and we'll have to see that they are reviewed of course so that we make sure that there is unintended consequences the Loch Sunert to sound of Dura marine conservation order Mike Russell and to put on record two points the first of which is this is the final order affecting my constituency MPA affecting my constituency at this stage and whilst I think everybody welcomes them the process as adopted by Marine Scotland and putting them together in my constituency was not acceptable and people found it unacceptable because they understood things were happening or being done which didn't happen that must be avoided and in the future I would hope that the process of making changes to designations or creating new designations is a collaborative and participatory process for all those involved and particularly those who are making their living in the area rather than an imposition if that can be achieved and that's the right way to achieve it then I think that what we have gone through might have been a useful learning experience very painful if it was if it can't be achieved again and again thank you very much for that so we've made comments as we wish and I thank members for that so has the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to these instruments no we are agreed thank you so future meeting details at our next meeting of the committee we'll consider several items of sub-ledge and the petitions on wild goose numbers and conserving wild salmon we will also consider drafts of our annual report and legacy report and I'll close the meeting thank you everybody for your participation participation