 morning everybody and welcome to the 30th meeting of this year of the Rural Affairs climate change and environment committee. Before we move to the first item, remind everyone to switch up mobile phones, etc. It could affect the broadcasting system. You may notice that committee members, etc., may be consulting tablets. That's during the meeting to use their meeting papers in digital format. We have apologies from Graham Day, and we welcome Roderick Campbell, as he's substitute. Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking a business in private. This would allow the committee to decide whether to consider a letter to the Scottish Government on wildlife crime in Scotland 2013 annual report at item 6. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. Thank you very much. We will do that. The agenda item 2 is subordinate legislation. This agenda item is for members to take evidence from the cabinet secretary on the Scotland Act 1998 functions exerciseable in or as regards Scotland order 2015 draft. The instrument has been laid under the affirmative procedure, which means that the Parliament must approve it before provisions may come into force. In following this evidence session, the committee will be invited to consider the motion to approve the instrument under agenda item 3. I welcome the cabinet secretary Richard Lochhead, back to your post. Congratulations. Brian Indicott, the deputy scheme manager, and Gemma McAllister, the solicitor of the Scottish Government. I wonder, cabinet secretary, if you wish to speak to the instrument. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to all members of the committee. Thank you for your congratulations. It is a real honour and privilege to be reappointed to my position as cabinet secretary for environment, foods and rural fares. I have thoroughly enjoyed the past few years in this post. I hope that we have achieved much and that it has been good working with the committee, but I very much appreciate that there is still much to do in the times ahead and look forward to working with the committee. To meet some of those challenges and grasp some of these massive opportunities, which are relevant to many of the issues that we will be speaking about. Of course, one big challenge is implementation of the new common agricultural policy. I know that it will come on to that later on in the agenda as well. However, this statutory instrument is also relevant to that, because there are some farms in Scotland and, likewise, south of the border that straddle both countries. Quite clearly, there are different administrations in terms of the common agricultural policy, so there is an arrangement that has always been in place for a long, long time, which this order renews for the new common agricultural policy, whereby a farm would declare which administration it wishes to be administered by. The payment rate that that farm would receive, irrespective of the fact that it is straddling over the border, relates to the different administrations rates. That is really what this is about. It is a quite technical statutory instrument to deal with the situation that we border England and, of course, the different administrations of the common agricultural policy. That is all that I would like to say. I would like to thank you for your good morning, and I repeat the congratulations. Cabinet Secretary, it is good to see you back. I just really have a point of clarification that I understand that this is clarification in Scotland and England, but does it also apply to other parts of the member state of the UK? In other words, if somebody has a holding in Northern Ireland or indeed in Wales, does that apply to that, or is it purely a Scotland and England relationship? That was a remiss of me not to clarify that it applies to all administrations within the UK, so it does apply to those. The explanatory notes that we get for the subledged paper does talk about Scotland and England, so does that need to be clarified anywhere in the subledged itself? My understanding is that it is all parts of the administration, because, as you say, there are some farmers who have holdings in different administrations. I should have been clear about that, but it is a situation that is all parts of the UK. That is okay. Thank you very much. Okay. In that case, we will move to agenda item 3. The third item is to consider motion S4M 11642, asking for the committee to recommend approval of the affirmative instrument Scotland Act 1998, functions exorcisable in or as regards Scotland order 2015 draft. We can debate this for a long while, as you know, if need be, but hopefully that will not be the case. I invite the cabinet secretary to speak and move the motion and remind members that officials cannot now take part in this debate. As I explained in my opening remarks, it is largely a technical measure, so I move the motion formally to the committee. Many members wish to speak. No members wish to speak. Cabinet secretary, I take it that you do not need to wind up any more than that. I do not think so. That is fine. Therefore, I put the question on the motion. That is, the question is that motion S4M 11642 in the name of Richard Lochhead be approved. Are we all agreed? We are all agreed. Thank you, cabinet secretary. We will record the result and state that the committee's report will confirm the outcome of the debate. Thank you. We just need to change the witnesses now. I will now move to agenda item 4, the Scottish Government's draft budget 2015-16. The item is for the committee to take evidence on the draft budget 2015-16 of the Scottish Government from the cabinet secretary. It is the fourth and final evidence session that the committee will hold on the draft budget and the committee has previously taken evidence from stakeholders on the themes of forestry and SRDP climate issues and also heard from the minister last week. I welcome the cabinet secretary and his officials, David Barnes, deputy director of agriculture and rural development and congratulations on your promotion. We may not see you in this role again. Jonathan Price, director of agriculture, food and rural communities and Linda Rospra, director of marine Scotland of the Scottish Government. Good morning all. I refer members to the papers and I think we will just open questions for a start. As you know, between one budget and the next, it is often difficult to read over from one section to another just exactly what has been spent before and what is likely to be spent. It was suggested to us by the RSPB, the spokesperson, that it was very difficult to understand that it did not include the agri-environment spend under the new programme for 2015-16, as presented in the figures, be a help if the figures were better presented in the future so that we can understand what the expenditure relates to, she said. Cabinet secretary, can you ensure that the presentation of the budgets is made clearer so that stakeholders and the public can more easily understand what is being funded and when? Okay, thank you. Clearly, this has been an ongoing issue for the committee and many of the parliamentary committees, no doubt, for several years. We have, I believe, in the last few years made some changes, which hopefully have been helpful, but in relation to your comment about agri-environment schemes and the views of the NGOs, the figures that we published at the time of the announcements over agri-environment budgets are in the public domain. Clearly, when you are talking high-level budget titles, they are at that high level by definition and therefore we do make available the level of figures below that to give further explanation, but I take the point and I reflect on the comments. It helps enormously, because, as the climate change element of the SRDP is something that we are very interested in, we want to see how well we can track it. Thinking about that, one part of the budget document that is unclear is the statement on changes to the EU support and related services budget on page 95, which says that there is an increase of £30.1 million of new money to fund the domestic part of the revised European-funded Scottish Rural Development programme pillar 2. Cabinet Secretary, exactly how is this £30.1 million of new money to fund the domestic part of the SRDP calculated and what will it be spent on? Clearly, as we were having our negotiations and discussions with the stakeholders and looking at the wider interests of our rural communities as we were considering the implementation of the new common agricultural policy, there were some vigorous debates that the committee may recall that took place as part of various talks and negotiations. There were two areas in particular that have led to this adjustment. Firstly, there was the impact of moving from the historic basis of paying out agricultural support to the area basis, which of course is the radical change of the new policy. The whole debate over what pace of transition should be in delivering that in Scotland because we have the historic basis still in this country. Some significant beef producers in Scotland of course receive relatively high payments under the current arrangements. In some cases, they are deserved because of the level of activity. In other cases, they are just simply due to the historic activities of any particular farm. Because we had limited ability to link the new area payments to activity, we had to look for other ways to help the active beef sector in Scotland. At the same time, of course, the beef sector is very important to Scottish agriculture. The jewellery crown or beef farms are often the engine of Scottish agriculture, and therefore we were concerned about how we could bring forward further support in the overall package to support beef production in Scotland. That is not just an issue about the primary producers, it is about the issue of the hauliers, livestock markets and the retail sector, so it is all about the downstream jobs as well. There has also been an on-going debate of how to work with the beef sector to make sure that we are not resting in our laurels. We are constantly improving the quality of Scottish beef and the brands. Other countries are currently making big investments into becoming more efficient, looking at the genetics and so on. I use the opportunity of the budget to inject domestic money into pillar 2 under the setting for the new beef scheme, which will be delivered over three years at an unprecedented £45 million. The £15 million of that £30.1 million is new money that has been put into the budget for the beef scheme, which I think will have a significant impact on the quality of beef production in Scotland and make sure that we are up there with the best and go to rest in our laurels. That is one part of the decision-making. Another part of the decision-making was the debate over the transfer of funds from pillar 1 to pillar 2, which the committee recalls. It was also a vigorous debate with environmental organisations suggesting that we should go for the full 15 per cent of the transfer from pillar 1 to pillar 2 and put that money towards agri environment schemes. On the other side of the defence were the producers, who were clearly looking at the impact of transition, were nervous about the financial impact and the viability of many farms in Scotland, and they wanted to minimise the transfer from pillar 1 to pillar 2. Ultimately, I chose to transfer the 9.5 per cent, did not go for 15 per cent, did not go for less than that, as some people wanted, which I thought was a good balance. However, I recognise that it is part of the agenda that the Government wants to pursue greening the cap, greening the policy and ensuring that there is some resource at least available under the agri environment schemes. All our budgets are tight, the bigger issues over the overall European budget and the Scottish portion of that. I want to ensure that we have agri environment schemes coming forward in the future, so I decided to put some new money into that budget as well. The figures are made up of a variety of budget inputs. Some are just simple adjustments to some of the other headings within the level 3 figures. Even the agri environment uplift of £10 million, if I remember correctly, does not all appear in the first year necessarily, because it is the overall impact over the whole programme that we were announcing. It takes a while for the scheme to open for applications. Applications to come in and for the money to go out. Another impact on the budget figure between 2015-16 and 2014-15 was the fact that, in the previous budget, we had financial transactions budgets. If committee recalls, the UK Government created the financial transactions, which were more money for investment by Scotland, but that money has to be paid back to the UK Treasury in the future. There was money allocated to my portfolio under that arrangement at short notice, because it was an announcement from the UK Government that we had to allocate at different portfolios. At the time, I asked for a budget allocation, despite all the vagueness of how it may be used because of the strings attached by the UK Government, in case our fishing industry faced some particular upheaval. At the time, we may recall our prawn fleet. One of our biggest fleets was under pressure because the prawn stocks had effectively dried up for a few months, and I wanted a safeguard in case we had to bring forward emergency measures of restructuring. Thankfully, the stocks came back on and the health of the prawn sector improved dramatically afterwards. The Government at the time was also pursuing other policies such as affordable housing, so £22.5 million was removed from the budget line to pay for affordable housing. That is most useful to know. In terms of rural development, I hope, it would be interesting to see whether that is something that you can track at all, whether affordable housing is something that you notice in any of the ways that the SRDP works. Do you have an answer to that? In terms of, well, you talk about the money being withdrawn to affordable money for affordable housing. Yeah, well, it was just budget headings within my portfolio. It wasn't part of the direct SRDP decision making, but because I had to have it under a budget heading in my portfolios, because it related to potential use for some of my industries, which thankfully were not required, it was within the budget headings, but it wasn't part of what we recognised as the SRDP at some of the budget headings under rural budgets. I want to look at national performance frameworks in relationship to this now, so Claudia Beamish. Good morning, cabinet secretary, and may I have my good wishes for your return? Good morning to the team as well. In terms of national performance framework, which has been taken forward through the present and past cabinet secretary of finance's work, but also with Civic Scotland and on a cross-party basis, could I ask you about that in relation to the areas which I'll just quickly highlight that are actually within the portfolio, as I understand it? In terms of increasing people's use of Scotland's outdoors, improving the condition of protected nature sites, and the abundance of terrestrial breeding birds, and that big complex word, biodiversity, improving the state of Scotland's marine environment, and reducing our carbon footprint. Could I just ask you first, cabinet secretary, on the degree to which those indicators were taken into account in preparing the draft rural affairs and environment budget? I think that that would be useful in terms of going forward, if you're able to comment. Thank you. Well, clearly, there are a number of issues that you mentioned, so perhaps I can just touch on two or three, because I do pay close attention to them, and as the committee may recall, I'm taking some of the decisions over the budgets, particularly budget uplifts, under very difficult budget settlements. I was using the indicators as a reason for addressing particular issues. You may recall, for instance, that we've had some recent, often pretty tough discussions with the agricultural sector over greening the new agricultural policy, and one of those reasons was the decline in farm bird populations that we've seen in recent years. In terms of how we implement the greening measures in Scotland, I took that into account because of the indicators. Likewise, there are some issues that are in terms of how they appear in indicators challenging, such as the biggest stock that we have in Scotland, which is the macro stock in the pelagic sector, which may show a decline in terms of the indicators. That was largely because of the international dispute in which MSC status was removed from our effectively biggest and most valuable stock. Thankfully, that is now a brighter picture after the negotiations concluded last year, and I hope that we will see a brighter picture for the indicators for the fish stocks in the future. In terms of support for the outdoors, I was very conscious of the need to address that, but I can only keep returning to the very difficult budget situation that we had in pillar 2 in the rural development programme, where some of those measures are included. While I was able to protect some of the budget headings, such as the paths initiatives, where, if I recall correctly, there is at least £1 million each year when, at one point, we were thinking that we might not be able to afford that, so we took that into account in terms of trying to encourage outdoor activity and healthy lifestyles. There is a variety of headings in there, and we pay close attention to them. I raised them directly with stakeholders to justify some of the reasons why I was making decisions. Can I just highlight to you what you will know, but just for the wider public who might be interested in this aspect of it, the worsening indicators within our portfolio are Scotland's marine environment. You have highlighted the issue around the macro issue, but could you make any comment on that in a wider context about the worsening marine environment and also the condition of protected nature sites and just that rather large issue of Scotland's carbon footprint? Those three are the worsening ones, so I wonder if you might comment on what specifically is being done tackling those. In relation to the budget, yes, but sorry, those are within the national performance framework. Sorry if I wasn't clear, but those are worsening within our budget. There are two issues there. There is the marine environment and there is terrestrial issues. In terms of our climate change targets, I was very conscious that we had to note that a large part of the funding in the rural development programme supports agriculture in one form or another. Given that agriculture accounts for around a fifth of emissions, it was important that the budgets within the rural development programme reflected that to a degree with, again, the limited budgets that we had, so that is why I have introduced the carbon audits. That is why we have quite a substantial programme of quite a number of key measures under a greening, which I partly alluded to before in terms of natural management on farm and other measures as well, because that is all about reducing the carbon footprint in agriculture. As I said before, it is also about biodiversity in terms of protecting breeding birds and some of the measures that relate to certain seasons and what activities can be carried out in those seasons in terms of buffer strips and hedges and so on, to make sure that our farm bird populations can breed and also have access to food at particular times of the year. I think that we can at least take comfort that we have the greenest carbon agriculture policy ever that has been implemented in Scotland. I understand that many people argue that it does not nearly go far enough, but when you have a very limited budget, which is a fraction of other countries' budgets, there is only so much that you can do with your budget. At least, I think that we can now claim to have the greenest agricultural budget in Scotland than ever before. Can you say something about the wider marine environment? Clearly, we are currently working on the marine Scotland budget that is effectively flatlining, but I have done my best to protect it because of the important work on implementing the new marine protected areas in Scottish waters. We are currently working on the management measures for the MPAs. That is again about restoring our marine environment to its proper health status. We have targets by 2020 that we have to achieve under European directives, so we are trying to take into account all those issues. You have just touched a short while ago on biodiversity and the labour at the point, but is there anything else that you might be able to say about biodiversity in the budget context? Only that, because of the importance of agriculture activities in this debate, the NFU and the Scottish Government agreed that we need to put a lot more effort into environmental measures on farm in the coming years. We have agreed in principle that we should have a new environmental forum in Scotland where we can have every round the same table, hopefully agreeing how to further green agriculture in the years ahead. As you can imagine, there are often controversial issues there. As well as the greening measures that we have put in place, some of which are directly related to biodiversity and others of which are related to carbon emissions and reducing carbon emissions, we can be proud of our package, test the common implementation of it in the times ahead and months ahead, but we are confident that that will allow our farmers to sustainably produce food for the nation, protect and safeguard their environment at the same time. Of course, 30 per cent of the single farm payment is attached to the greening measures of the EU under the new greening of the cap. From day one, farmers will have to put in place their greening measures to get 30 per cent of their single farm payment. Clearly, that is another reason why the cap is greener than before. Don, just carry on that. Good morning, cabinet secretary, and it is good to see you back. Continuity is a wonderful thing. Can I just pick up on the greening issues, though, because local farmers are telling me that they perceive that there might be a problem, I guess? There is no objection to greening, but they do understand that two different crops in that relatively small area might generate a product or two products at a level that is sufficiently small to be on economic to harvest. I wonder whether that is an issue that you will be able to address with your officials. One of the debates that we had in the greening of the policy was the ecologically focused areas and the demand to put 5 per cent of land that qualifies aside, and certain conditions have to be adhered to for that land. There was a slight misunderstanding among many farmers that, in terms of the crops that Cudder could not be grown in that 5 per cent applied to the whole of the farm. That is not the case. It is only the 5 per cent that is allocated for EFA under the cap. It is more and more farmers who came to realise that they felt that they could perhaps manage that on their farm, so that we can maintain viable food production at the same time as having those ecologically focused areas. Cabinet secretary, it sounds as though there might be an exercise in communication that needs to be undertaken. I am listening to people who feel that they may be being asked to do things that are simply un-economic on a small farm. Clearly, that is not in anybody's interest, because if the product is not harvestable economically, it is not harvestable. We made some last minute changes after some discussions with the sector, which we are welcomed, particularly by the arable sector, who feels most affected by these measures. During the negotiations of the cap, we managed to secure some concessions over what was being asked for in the first place. What was originally proposed was quite challenging for Scotland to say the least. We got some changes to that in terms of the three crop rule, who would cough etc. We are in a much better place than we could potentially have been. Just on that matter, are you confident that we are going to be able to produce enough barley, for example, with the number of distilleries that are being planned and set up? Especially in the light of what was mentioned during the food debate last week, that some markets for whisky have reduced, and it is obviously a fluctuating situation, and some developments in distilleries have been put on hold because of that. Are we roughly at the right balance between supply and demand for barley? That is quite a timely question, because tomorrow I am hosting our first summit with the multi barley sector, where we are bringing the producers around the same table as the mills and the supply chain to look at this very issue. Clearly, demand for Scotch whisky is rocketing. There have been some challenges of late in the Chinese marketplace and elsewhere, but overall there seems to be a high level of confidence in the whisky sector. It does seem a big opportunity for our cereal growers in the times ahead, and for the very reasons that you mentioned, we have to understand what that means in terms of supply and demand. I think that tomorrow's summit will hopefully be significant and will pull out some of the issues that have to be addressed to make sure that that is the case. We can make sure that Scotch whisky is produced in Scotland, which, of course, has to be produced, has Scottish Barley as our raw material. I look at legacy payments now from the previous SRDP, Jim Hume. Yes, thank you very much. It is good to see your back, Richard in post. Just regarding legacy payments, I believe that there is a budget of about £21.8 million for agri-environment measures for the legacy. I wonder what evidence of effectiveness and value for money of the legacy schemes you might have and what lessons we might have learnt from the past SRDP regarding effectiveness and value for money for the future SRDP. Thank you. There are legacy payments, so that means that some of them will be paid off in the first year of the new SRDP or indeed this year. The budgets that talk about legacy payments this coming year will not be there next year, so that money will be available for investing in future environment schemes, so it is worth bearing that in mind. There have been evaluation schemes. Clearly, it is important that we do that. SNH and others are involved in those evaluation schemes. The evidence that we have is that they have made a material difference and benefited by diversity in Scotland's environment. It is difficult to pin down exactly what impact they have had, but they are having a positive impact. I am happy to send details to the committee about that. Just to follow up on that and thank you for the answer, cabinet secretary. Just looking at the draft budget, we see rural communities and rural enterprise communities dropping by about 98 to 99 per cent. Just thinking of legacies, we have realised in the past that they have supported such projects as monitor farms, which they have been quite supportive of, and leadership programmes, etc. Meanwhile, we see technical assistance going up by over 1,540 per cent to £5 million and payments and admin costs going up by about 29.1 per cent in real terms up to £45.4 million. How will that affect such programmes as monitor farms, rural leadership programmes, which have been supported to some extent from that rural enterprise budget in the past? What future will there be for such things as the rural leadership programme and monitor farms, which have been part supported by the rural enterprise budget in the past? The leadership programme has been very valuable and, for those of us who have been involved in meeting some of the participants in Parliament, we can be struck by the talent that is out there and we want to continue to support that. In terms of the monitor farms, we have introduced new monitor farms in recent years for climate challenge purposes, climate change farms to show best practice in reducing emissions. We are going to increase the number of those and, of course, the rest of the monitor farms have been successful as well. We definitely see that as a very valuable way of moving forward. Part of the budget is for knowledge transfer, which will cover those issues. Whether it is to tackle carbon emissions, whether it is to improve profitability, general efficiency or whatever, it would be important to support those. We are seeing the rural enterprise budget almost disappear and that was, in my memory, used quite substantially to help budget for those projects. Are we looking at different ways of doing that? Are other budgets clarified? For the new SRDP, it is slightly different. Yes. As the cabinet secretary said, there are some changes to the positioning of various things within the SRDP budget. Monitor farms will, in future, come under the knowledge transfer scheme. The monitor farms are already in place. They have multi-annual contracts, so they will continue. We are not able to open the new knowledge transfer scheme yet because the new SRDP is still with the European Commission for Approval, but the existing monitor farms are continuing. Once the new scheme can open up, we will be in a position to, as the old monitor farms finish their period, we can approve new ones. In terms of rural enterprise, we have changed the balance of which parts of the programme are delivering which things. For example, small rural business support and farm diversification in future will be delivered through the leader scheme, for which we are working with the local action groups to produce new local development strategies. That explains part of the change. The other element that we should not forget, which the cabinet secretary announced just about a year ago, when he has already referred to the decisions on the pillar one to pillar two budget transfer and on the agri-environment increase to the agri-environment funding, is part of that same announcement. Committee members might remember that the cabinet secretary had to announce that, in order to make the book's balance for the new SRDP, there was going to have to be a more targeted approach to capital investment. Under the new SRDP, as the published plans say, capital investment will be focused on particular subsets of the farming industry, new entrants, crofters, other small farmers and slurry stores because of the climate change link, but the generality of capital grants for every farmer across Scotland is the thing that had to give in order to live within the budget for the new SRDP, so that explains part of the reduction. Those capital grants of course do not figure very highly in the legacy because legacy generally is multi-annual contracts where a land manager enters into a five-year commitment to manage the land in a certain way, so that payment continues to flow for a number of years, whereas in the case of capital grants of course the farmer makes the capital investment, receives the grant and then that's the end of it. So there's very little capital in the legacy part of the the ongoing budget. Just to pick up on that, again that particular issue as mentioned, the other concern I think that came across to me very strongly talking to farmers very recently was that once the SRDP schemes do open up they had a feeling that the window of opportunity was really quite short and that would really be just challenging, really quite difficult for farmers actually to as it would get hold of the forms and fill them in and get the right information and get it back to be blunt about it. Is that something that you're aware of, Cabinet Secretary, and how are we going to manage that place? Well clearly we're awaiting the green light from Europe as to when we'll have the SRDP cleared and dozens of countries have submitted their SRDPs. We're trying to find out I think maybe this week if we're going to get clearance before the end of the year, feeling that that will be early some point next year. So unfortunately the farming businesses have been through this before and it's a five-year programme so if the first year for some reason they're not in a position to apply there'll be subsequent opportunities but I will pay close attention to that. We have a new IT system so hopefully that will help. It's going to be more modern and hopefully easier to use than the last time so these things should help. Thank you very much for that. It's a wing and a prayer this stuff when it comes to IT at least. I'm thinking, Alec Ferguson, about the CAP futures programme. Angus MacDonald is it? Okay. Okay, thanks convener. I'm just linking in on the comments on the IT systems. Cabinet Secretary, clearly ease of access to agri-environment schemes and other CAP schemes is extremely important. However there has been some discussion by stakeholders regarding the introduction of the CAP futures programme, not least by Audit Scotland. For example Audit Scotland has highlighted an increase in overall costs from the original estimate of £88 million in December 2012 to the latest estimate of £137.3 million. Can you give the committee an update on the current situation regarding the CAP futures programme and can you also give the committee some comfort that the programme will provide ease of access to the CAP schemes and funding that's required for the budget to be used efficiently? In terms of access, we're doing our best to learn lessons from last time and there'll be greater use of local offices for farmers and crofters to make their applications via those offices because we understand that broadband is now improved dramatically in Scotland but it's perhaps the same standard in every part of the country. So we're making sure that the offices are available to be used. The background of course is we had to renew the IT systems. This is the most complex implementation we can imagine despite the promise that was going to be a simplified policy from Europe and over and above that we had an agreement with the industry to take some decisions in this country to use some of the options which then add significantly to the complexity as well. My view is we are on track to deliver the payments in good time. The payment window of course is till June, the following December. However, we're aiming for December and to keep up our existing timetable. The industry did say to us very clearly that if it requires a few more weeks for the payments to go out as a cost for getting the policy right and using some of the options they'd much rather have a policy that's effective and have a few weeks delays in getting the payments out. So if we can't go that in our back pocket, hopefully we won't need to use that because December was the payment schedule for the existing cap that's been replaced. So we'll do our best to maintain that in the new cap, but as a new cap we have to do things like input, I think it's at 460,000 fields in Scotland and map them for audit reasons. That's a phenomenal exercise. We have a lot of people working in this. You've referred to the budget which was decided of course before we knew the European decisions. Never mind the Scottish decisions. So it does appear there's been an increase, but as the audit report said, we've done our utmost to manage that and get things back in track and make sure it's delivered in time. John Swinney, the finance secretary myself, have had a few meetings with the IT company delivering this for Scotland, CGI, and taking steps just to make sure there's a proper leadership in there. So at the moment it's a very complex system. I'm not denying it after a second. I do sweat sometimes at night time, but the signs are that we are in track and I'll take comfort from that, but we'll have to pay very close attention to it. To hear, cabinet secretary, I'm sure that a number of folk outside this committee will be glad to hear that you're on track for payments. Without wishing to dwell on operational issues, there's been some concern with regard to operational matters such as the introduction of mobile technology for field staff, and that's not going to be deliverable. Do you have any information on that at the moment? It's not really something that's crossed my desk, but it so happens that we've got the recently appointed chief agricultural officer who hasn't taken up posts yet, so it's probably unfair to put David Barnes in the spot. Since I don't know the answer, I'm just going to do that. I'll also invite Jonathan Price, because I'll ask colleagues to read. It's not coming across my desk, but it's an operational level at the offices, so I'll investigate it and you've raised it, but maybe there's some comments from colleagues. I can explain the story around the mobile technology. Audit Scotland in their report highlighted that certain elements of the original business case scope had been deferred, not taken away completely, but deferred in order to make sure that we maximised our chances of delivering the payments on time, which are the most important parts of it. They highlighted in their report mobile technology in relation to inspections of a sort. What they didn't really point out, however, is that we already use mobile technology in the fields when we're doing the land inspections. What we had hoped to do and what we still intend to do, but it will come after we've successfully made the payments in 2015-2016, is to extend mobile technology to livestock inspections as well, which we don't currently have mobile support for. Rest assured that the new IT system that we're producing absolutely makes use of the existing mobile technology. If you see our rural payments inspectors out on the farms and in the fields, you will see that they carry a large rucksack on their back with a thing sticking out the top, which is a high resolution GPS tracker that enables them to map the fields directly. They use Toughbook laptop computers, tablets that they use to do that in the field. We are making use of mobile technology. The extension of that mobile technology to what's a much smaller part of the business will come, but it's not coming as early as we'd originally intended. There's still progress. That's a good thing. Thank you, convener. I could ask you, cabinet secretary, more broadly about the assessment for the schemes, which does relate to the IT, but more about the personnel and the complexities of assessing assessments, applications rather, and giving support to farmers when you look at the multi-benefits that we're expecting from the agri-environment scheme, such as the biodiversity and climate change, whether you're confident that within the budget there is funding to support the training and further training of these officers without, in any way, disparaging what they're doing at the moment. All I can really see, and again, Jonathan said very close to the contact with this issue, is that there's been a huge amount of investment investing in the training of our staff around the country, of which there are several hundred, and it's a new policy. We clearly are urging our officials to be as supportive as possible. They're limiting what they can do in terms of advice about European regulations, but in terms of the new policy and being familiar with it and able to implement it, there's been massive investment in the training. The audit report covers some of these issues as well, the training and the costs. Time will tell, but again, the new IT system is replacing the 20-year-old outdated, outmoded system, so it's going to be modern, it's going to be more flexible, so in future when changes have to be made it can cope a lot better, whereas the current IT system we're replacing, which I said it hasn't been replaced in a long time, is putting parts for one car into an old other car when you're trying to do amendments to new schemes. We'll hopefully avoid that, but it's a huge amount of effort to make sure that people are familiar with that. Jonathan may want to come in with the actual training aspects. I think it's probably just worth highlighting the fact that the Futures programme is an IT-enabled business change programme, so the budgets that we've talked about in the business case for the Futures programme includes that training of staff in the management of the schemes, as well as the IT costs. It's the IT costs that we've seen the main increase in, but we've also seen an increase in complexity in the schemes across the piece because of the requirements of the European regulations. Some of that is picked up through the business's usual annual training that we provide to all of our agricultural staff on updates to schemes, but there's additional in the Futures programme budgets. Just briefly on that last topic, I'm sure that the minister will be aware of the recent campaign to provide appropriate support for dyslexic farmers. I raised that because it was first raised by a constituent of mine, and it's something where I've got a lot of sympathy, and I don't know if you can comment on what training is being given to field officers to provide that support. However, my principal question really goes back to the Audit Scotland report, which highlights that one of the main technical areas, i.e. the mapping component, will not be included when the programme is initially implemented. Now, the minister understandably mentioned the complexity of completing that programme, but my question is really how do you implement a brand new support programme CAP system that is so dependent on mapping when the mapping component won't be part of the IT programme? The system is being tested before the end of this year and then opens for applications in March, if I remember correctly. The work is on going with the mapping. The first payments will go out in December, hopefully in 2015. We have to get the auditing requirements right for the mapping, but I'll ask John I think that he's very close to the subject to address your particular point at the timescale. It's not to say that we don't have a mapping system. What we have done—what the Audit Scotland report explains is that we have deferred the development of a brand new mapping system, what we call the land parcel information system, until at least 2016, simply in order to, again, de-risk the programme and maximise our chances of making the payments on time. However, what we will be launching—we should go live in December, but it will be accessible to the majority of customers in January—will be a customer registration portal. We will be asking farmers and businesses to go online to register their details that will set them up for the application process that will follow on in March 2014. What that system will go live around the turn of the year will also include is online viewable access to the existing maps that we hold. In other words, the data that we hold on our land parcel information system will be accessible online to farmers and viewable online. That is new functionality that wasn't available to farmers before, and we expect it to be enormously helpful for them. What they will not get until we design a new land parcel information system is the ability to amend online their existing maps. That is something that will follow on. What we have done is to invest in our existing land parcel information system core to make sure that it is robust and stable for the use of payments and applications in 2015. That is very useful. Thank you. Do you have any comment on dyslexia? Yes, sure. First of all, I pay tribute to the NFU for raising this issue with the Government and pursuing it. It is very much on the qualities issue. We are very keen that anyone with dyslexia is able to apply as any other farmer. We are doing two things. We have said to the NFU that we will work with them to see what has further to be done to make it easy for help at various offices around the country, so that they will be available at the offices. Secondly, we are discussing if there are any further issues that we should carry out in relation to that. There is an advisory service being funded by the SRDP, so we will make sure that that is also sensitive to farmers with dyslexia. It is a one-to-one advisory service that has been funded by the SRDP. It is not official directly because we mentioned it previously, so we are very keen to make sure that is sensitive to dyslexia issues as well. Can we move on to the beef package now, please? Yes, indeed. The cabinet secretary earlier on mentioned the beef package that was being introduced in the new money that was being put into it. The beef 2020 report highlights, and I think that I am quoting, the need to take serious steps to minimise the carbon footprint of every kilogram of meat produced. However, it also argues that production should be increased in that sector, and I do not argue with that aim at all, certainly the second part of it. Is there a quandary in trying to reduce the carbon footprint of the sector while equally trying to increase the productivity of that sector? How do you see the Scottish beef package that will be introduced helping in that regard? Okay. I gave a wee bit of background earlier on in terms of the rationale behind the beef package in terms of how we reconcile beef production with carbon emissions. Clearly, the more efficient our beef production is in terms of higher production and productivity from, for instance, the same number of animals because the production levels per animal would increase if we are more efficient. That helps the environment and reduces carbon emissions. I met the quality meat Scotland board a couple of weeks ago and we clearly discussed parts of the beef 2020 package. Professor Julie Fitzpatrick of the Morden Institute was giving some quite high-catching statistics about the myth of waste in livestock production, not just in Scotland, but across livestock production per se in terms of productivity, animal catching disease or farmers losing animals, which is a waste of investment if the animals do not live a healthy life and can be productive. I think that these are really important issues. In terms of reducing the cost of beef production in Scotland, the more we can understand the genetics, work with the genetic, capture all the data from all farms, so that we can put the right measures in place, the more production we will have with less environmental footprint, not saying that we will overall reduce, but that we will get more production from the same number of cattle being produced. Europe pays close attention to that in terms of how we get permission to use our support schemes to pay close attention to the impact that production has on the number of animals, so we have to pay close attention to that. It is much better to have higher production from existing animals, cut their costs, get more money for better animals going to the abattoir and hopefully it is a win-win situation. That is why the beef 2020 scheme, which we are still waiting for clearance for from European officials, is in the agri-environment part of the SRDP because there are some environmental issues here, so the more efficient we can make beef production in Scotland, the better it is for the environment. Are you able to give any possible timeline for the full details of the beef package that might be made known? We have announced a three-year package, £15 million a year, as I said before, as an unprecedented investment in the beef sector, so the first year of that will be 2015, and it is two years after that. We are very much dependent on hearing from Europe about any significant changes that we have to make. I think that we are confident that we will get a scheme, so we just have to wait for the detail back from Brussels. Can I just ask on a related issue, which is constituency-based? I have a number of very large-scale beef producers who are very keen to put in place farm-sized anaerobic digestion units, which would have a hugely beneficial environmental impact, but they are being told by Scottish Power that there is no chance for grid connection before at least 2022. I appreciate that it requires investment to upgrade the infrastructure before grid connection can take place, given the amount of renewable energy connections that are already in place and others that are planned. Is there anything that the Scottish Government can do to try to encourage Scottish Power to bring forward the programme to allow faster connectivity? Clearly, the regulation of connectivity is a reserved issue, and we have made representations in the past via the energy ministers in this Parliament to the UK about some grid connection issues. I urge the committee to turn the Smith commission to look at what energy powers we can have transferred as further powers for devolution in this Parliament, because I very much favour where possible that agricultural businesses are looked upon favourably and, to a certain extent, prioritised because it is attached to the business. As food production and food security become bigger issues in the years ahead, I think that if an application is attached to a business, yes, there may be other issues that I have to take into account, but if we have extra priority for those kind of applications, then it is a good thing. Clearly, connectivity is one part of that equation. I will not delay it, but I will have a discussion about that some other time. Thank you for that. You have said that there are aspects of rural poverty that also require communities to be able to get hooked up with their own community schemes to the grid, which would strengthen the argument about why parts in the south and the north need to get better grid connections. I do not ask a question, but it is a fact that more than just farmers require that as well. However, it would be fair if farmers were able to access that on a reasonable basis, rather than through a planning system that seems to be discriminatory against some businesses and not against others. It was my portfolio that set the benchmark for the £5,000 per megawatt for community benefits. Of course, that now applies right across Scotland for schemes generally, and the energy minister took forward some measures to make that much more transparent in recent years—last year, I think. That is part of it, to share the benefits of onshore wind and rural communities with the wider community and community benefits. That is delivering significant benefits for many rural communities. It is part of the equalities agenda. If there is more that we can do, we are open to suggestions. We have some questions about that from the point of view of the forestry part of the rural development programme. I think that we will reflect on your remarks just now when we are making our comments to you and to the finance committee about the budget. Thinking about less favoured area support scheme now, Dave Thompson. Thank you, convener, and good morning, cabinet secretary, and welcome back as well. The ELFAS scheme, obviously, is very important for constituencies like my own and the Highlands and Islands generally. Maintaining people on the land and crofts in difficult farming conditions is obviously beneficial for the environment just broadly. Crofting has a very high environmental value compared to some of the other farming areas and so on. As we move towards the areas of natural constraint, as ELFAS goes out and it comes in, I wonder whether it would be beneficial to put a higher weighting on the environmental value of crofting, for instance, and agriculture when considering the levels of payment under the areas of natural constraint. It is a good question on behalf of your constituents. That is important to your constituents, Mr Thompson and others. That is why we gave the budget commitment to continue the scheme in the new SRDP, which reminds me of a third of the budget in pillar 2. When it came to the debate over the transfer from pillar 1 to pillar 2, I was reminding the agricultural sector that a third of the budget in pillar 2 is going directly into agriculture, at least. That is not including many other schemes that we mentioned today. There has been a call to better target that in Scotland. We have until 2018 to renew the scheme, so I am sympathetic to making changes to the scheme. I do not want to throw the baby out of the bathwater. Clearly, there will be a big discussion in Scotland about how we should better target it. If there is a case for that, it is something that I will seriously look at. We are pleased that we have managed to allocate the budget to that. There are on-going discussions, as you can imagine, although for some of the fine detail and understanding it, it is quite complex, so it is delivered in Scotland, with the European Commission at the moment, but I hope that it will be in the new programme, as we expect. I am pleased that you will be having a look at it and considering the issues about better targeting and so on. If you agree that, for a relatively small additional cost in relation to what crofters and small farmers in the north and west would get, you would get quite a disproportionate additional environmental gain at a relatively small cost overall, so I would ask you to keep that in mind when you are looking at changing the system. I will keep that in mind. I did make some changes to the scheme in the last Parliament, which uprated the payments to the more severely disadvantaged recipients, which was warmly welcomed. I am no doubt Mr Thomson's constituency and certainly other constituencies as well. We have a track record of making sure that we support the more fragile communities. It is premature to say what the changes will be in the future, but the committee will have a view on it. I urge the committee to come forward with a view in due course on what the changes should be. We are not concerned about being able to measure these things because we can then prove the value for money in the scheme that is concerned. We know that agriculture is very fragile in many of the areas that get all-fast payments. Do we expect to know in some detail how you are going to measure this at some time in the future? To follow up what Dave Thomson has asked for, it would seem to me that we need to be able to show the value for money. I have had representations just in the last year or so as part of the implementation of the new policy to make changes to ELFAS, but only up that kind of worms at the same time is trying to implement the new cap that has brought everything to halt. I have had employee several hundred more officials, so there is just no going there. We want to implement the new cap first, and then we have until 2018 to review the ELFAS scheme. We will do that, but I have resisted the temptation to look at it just now in the middle of implementing a very complex cap. The good news is that, as I should add, the criteria that are laid down by Europe Scotland generally fits into for the successor to ELFAS. As things stand at the moment, we are confident that Scotland will qualify in the way that we want to qualify. It is ironic that we go across Europe and you see some countries where they look much greener and wealthier than Scotland and they qualify for ELFAS. That is bizarre. There may be some issues that need to be addressed overall in ELFAS across Europe. We will keep that on the table, because I think that we are very interested to see how it will develop. Farming for a better climate, Nigel Don. Thank you very much, convener, as you say. The budget for this would appear to be some £400,000, Cabinet Secretary. I am wondering whether you could comment on whether it really is more than that and there are other bits in some other label under some other heading. I am also conscious that we heard evidence last week from those who generally support the scheme, but they wondered whether it would be sufficient to generate the carbon dioxide savings that were attributed to it in RPP2. I am wondering whether you can give us some assurance that you believe that this is all going to work and work as well as it must in order to reduce our carbon footprint. If the farming for a better climate is a good initiative, I am very proud of it. I visited some of the farms that have taken part in the scheme and I recommend members to do that, if there are any in your own constituencies. It is great to hear how sometimes reluctant farmers got involved, which is brave, and then saved x per cent of their energy bills or registered emissions in really good news stories. It is catching on and clearly elsewhere in SRDP we have the carbon audits where we will hopefully encourage farmers right across Scotland to get involved in these kind of measures. I am not sure how you could generate revenues from those farms that have made savings if I picked up correctly. Clearly, the purpose of SRDP is to invest in rural Scotland, to encourage transformation where possible, and then the whole of agriculture will reap the benefits. Maybe one day there will be no need for agricultural subsidies, we do not know, but I am not sure how that would work, open to suggestions, but I am not sure how you would capture the revenues from farms of benefits. I am picking up on a comment from the RSPB last week simply to the effect that, on their view of the figures, 90 per cent of our farms would need to take up the benefits that we are identifying in order to achieve the carbon dioxide savings that we need to get in our PP2. It is really a question of whether we believe that that level of uptake is going to happen, and if we do not, how do you see it working? I am keen to change the mindset of agricultural Scotland to a degree. As I said before, we want to balance delivering for food security with sustainable production, and there is a huge scientific debate going on about how to do that, but in the SRDP there is the carbon audit referred to as part of the greening measures for CAP, and there is the requirement to record your management of nitrogen on farm. These are pretty big changes compared to before, so some are mandatory, and some are there in SRDP to apply to with advisers, they are hopefully to encourage, as you say, 90 per cent of holdings to get involved somehow. On the issue of carbon audits, you cannot run a business without having your tax issues audited, if you are of any size at all. How soon is it going to be that farms do not receive public money unless they do do a carbon audit? All of these debates in Europe are against the backdrop of what should be voluntary and what should be mandatory. For the first time, we have mandatory measures, 30 per cent of your payment, which is pretty substantial, and it relies on you adopting those measures. That is a step forward. It is not necessarily the best options that we have brought forward for Scotland, and that is why we are supporting a review of the greening measures as early as possible. I want the new agricultural commissioner, Phil Hogan, to undertake that as soon as possible. He has given some sympathetic noises. Unfortunately, he was in Brussels a couple of weeks ago, and the UK Government did not let me join her meeting with him, so I cannot put the point directly, but I am hoping to secure a meeting at some point in the near future. We want that early review of the greening measures to make sure that what we can do in Scotland makes a difference and is effective, but it is appropriate for Scotland. At the moment, that is not quite the case with some of the mandatory measures that we are trying to get round. I want to encourage a change of mindset where some of those issues are taken seriously. Obviously, farming for a better climate farms are scattered around the country, but I do not know whether there is any actually in the crofting areas. The reason I say that is that, although it will be quite an interesting development to see crofting for a better climate as models, and it is very diverse, it would be interesting to see if farming for a better climate could be included as one of the places that crofters could visit in order that they could pick up some of that. I am not sure whether you could tell me about whether the actual farms are going to increase or whether we are covering the parts of Scotland that we mentioned earlier, where crofters might have to do and audit themselves for the money that they get under El Fas and its successor. I will ask Jonathan to detail of that, but it is something that I am very sympathetic to as part of taking crofting forward. I think that David Stead wants to comment on that. Yes, convener, as the cabinet secretary mentioned, we are increasing the number of farming for a better climate farms. We are working with the industry. The tranches of demonstration farms that we have already had were selected jointly between government and industry, so we will do the same again to work with industry to work out the best coverage geographically and sectorally. Two other comments, however, the farms are not the entire content of farming for a better climate. There is other material as well. There are farm walks and demonstration days and material on the website and so on. There is a lot of material that can be accessed aside from the demonstration farms themselves. The other point that I would make is that there is actually an interesting prioritisation decision to be taken here for government because the convener mentioned assessing value for money for all the expenditure that we are making. The scientific backdrop to which some members have mentioned, the backdrop to the RPP and therefore the government's policy on this, tells us that the most important thing that we need to get farmers to do, as the cabinet secretary mentioned, is to manage well their use of nitrogen, fertiliser, organic and inorganic. Therefore, we have a desire to have geographic coverage across the whole of Scotland, but scientifically it would make sense to concentrate the efforts where most nitrogen fertiliser gets used because that's where we can make the most benefit for the climate by reducing emissions. So we've got those two considerations both playing into the Government's decisions, but we will once again be working with the industry to pick the locations and sectors of the farms. Thanks very much for that. We'll move on to Equality's Issue. Oh sorry, Rod Campbell was a supplementary. You've largely answered my question. I just remembered just for explanation that you could identify for my use if everybody else may know the answer where most nitrogen fertiliser is currently used in Scotland. Or is it a specific area geographically? We have the nitrogen vulnerable zones legislation and as part of that we publish maps where the nitrates are a big problem in terms of water courses. I think that gives an indication of where the big areas are, so I'm not sure that there are other maps. I think that would be the best source. In any particular part of Scotland, or should I go and just look at the maps? Well, we want to guess. Get some headlines of some farmers in those areas that are about to be hit with some NEDZ legislation, so I better not guess. As you say, there's pockets that are much worse than others and the situation in many parts of Scotland is improving, which is good news. Obviously, we know that we're talking about a lot of use of nitrogen where there's arable farming, so we're thinking about that rather than in the crofting areas where there isn't. I know that livestock sector is slurry and all those issues are part of the equation. We'll look forward to some development there. Equality issues, Cara Hylton. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Cabinet Secretary. Just in respect of the SRDP budget, I was wondering what changes, if any, were made as a result of the equality statement assessment that accompanies it? Well, clearly across my farming, fishing and other portfolios, general economic development in rural communities, I take into account equality issues. The leader programme, for instance, has been successful in tackling disadvantage in some parts of Scotland in terms of targeting the schemes and their projects. In terms of agriculture, we've put a huge effort into trying to get new entrants into agriculture into the new cap, which is a big equality issue. Some new entrants, no doubt, will say that they're not totally equal with other farmers, but they will be in the course of this new policy. We've gone as far as we can to ensure that that's the case. The Government's got a duty to publish an equality statement, and John Swinney, his finance secretary, has published that as well. It's something that we need to take seriously across our portfolios. More specifically, how the budget will assist young people to remain in rural areas, and what it will do to improve IT skills, particularly to reduce isolation for disabled and older people in rural communities? Clearly, the digital economy budget sits in my budget as well in terms of connectivity to address inequality in Scotland in a spatial way. That's a very important part of our strategy, is rolling out broadband and connectivity. The launch of the rural parliaments three weeks ago, there was a very insightful video by rural communities from Argyll and Bute. I think it was cross-party representation of the audience for that. Before that, people came together for the first rural parliaments meeting. The quality issues, some of the rural poverty issues came out from some of the contributions. One comment was that internet is a lifesaver, so we're doing our best to roll out internet. We don't control the regulation of it, but we've got the joint project with the UK Government to fund it and also the providers. That's very much an equality issue, which is part of the budget. A new entrance is both in fishing and agriculture, which I've mentioned already, in terms of attracting young people to have an opportunity. I had a young farmer, despite all the stick that I take, from certain young farmers or new entrants, who came up to me last weekend at an event. He said to me that he felt that he was now going to the opportunity for creating agriculture because of some of the support schemes that were coming forward. It's heartening to hear that. Some of the new entrants who class themselves as new entrants, but maybe under European regulations, don't quite fit the description, are maybe not as happy. However, the new entrants will take a lot of benefits in Scotland. That's exactly the right time, because the Cabinet Secretary has obviously been talking to some of the not-quite-so-new entrants that I've been talking to who feel that they're actually seriously disadvantaged now, relative to everybody else, because they don't quite qualify. They got in just a fraction too soon and they feel that they're going to be seriously disadvantaged for some time. Is there anything at all that you can do to nuance the payments in such a way that folk who got in just too soon in the context can receive rather more? I've just frankly just a more equitable playing field. There are new measures in the SRDP and it's part of the cap negotiations that do help new entrants. Clearly, we'll only hear from the ones who define themselves as new entrants but don't qualify for support and we hear from them, but there literally will be hundreds of new entrants across Scotland who qualify for the SRDP support, which is in there, as well as being part of the new common agricultural policy, albeit we took the decision, which I think many parties supported to have a transition between the historic and the area payments being introduced, but of course that's just one part of the overall payment. The other parts of the payment are on a level playing field from day one. We are talking to those who feel aggrieved. It's a very difficult position. Europe has told us who qualifies effectively and who doesn't. If you had entitlements under the previous SRDP and you've expanded, there's lots of different people who have expanded and it's difficult to, under the legislation, to say that that's a new entrant and that's not, and Europe has said that you can't differentiate. If you had entitlements, you would get the payment. You either do it for something, you have to do it for everyone, which means a farmer who's already getting the regional average or high payments would need even more money out of the system because he's expanded slightly since last time. Every time you make a decision to help new categories, you have to take money out of the ports, which affects every other farmer in Scotland, so that's why it's very difficult decisions. I'm grateful to you for explaining that, I think, on the record, because I think some people just unfortunately probably just need to be told that. Thank you. Just to continue that, this committee was very keen that the starting point for the new cap should be the acreage farmed and claimed in 2013. Now, I understand that the commission has said we basically can't do that because it's creating a false limit or some such more technological language, no doubt, but am I right in saying that if Europe basically insists that the starting point is 2015, that genuine new entrance between 2013 and 2015 will be ineligible for support? Well, the choice of our 2013 date in these discussions are obviously under way with the European Commission. You're right in raising this issue with us, and we'll have to make an announcement shortly as to what the final position is, is that you can only include those who have expanded if you choose 2015. I think that there's limitations there suggesting on who could be included in the new cap if you choose 2013, and that could have a counterproductive impact for some farmers. So, there's mixed views out there of whether or not we should be going to 2015 now, but we'll make the position public soon. How soon, if I may ask you? Well, we've got various timescales we have to meet for getting the final changes into Europe. The commission's still looking at this issue. So, the commission's still looking at this issue, so until we get a very clear steer from them, we won't exactly know what situation is. Okay, thank you for that. At just a final point on the cap futures programme, we're talking about being designed to think about the age profile of farmers. If we've got that in mind, then it's quite a high age range for farmers at the moment. So, are there aspects of the programme on track, given the risks associated with the programme that are being discussed above? So, dealing with matters related to sight and physical capacity to continue farming and things like that, is the futures programme proof for people who are obviously ageing in the farming world? I just clearly want to say something, but the answer is that we're ensuring that local offices have a bigger role to help those. We have to be careful, as I said before, in terms of advice. There's an advisory service being funded through the SRDP when they come directly from our officials at local offices, but in terms of accessing the computers and getting some guidance about how to fill in the forms or the on-screen options, is something that we recognise as important. Jonathan, I saw you indicating earlier. It was to add to that that the area offices will be available, as they are at the moment, to support applicants. It's also to emphasise the fact that while we're encouraging an increase in the use of IT systems for customers to actually apply online, we are absolutely maintaining the option for doing paper applications. So, we're not taking anything away from people that they've already had. We hope that the new IT will feel such a good interface that more people will use it, but those that choose not to or indeed have issues that mean that it's not easy for them to use IT. We'll still be able to use paper. That takes us round a range of questions that we had for you. Thank you Cabinet Secretary and your officials. We'll be reviewing our report to the Finance Committee after this. Thank you very much. We'll end this session at the moment with a brief suspension for a comfort break, and we'll restart about 11. So, we'll restart now. So, agenda item 5 today is the Community Empowerment Scotland Bill to take evidence from stakeholders, and I welcome the panel. Peter Peacock, Policy Director for Community Land Scotland, Sandra Holmes, Head of Community Assets, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, David Prescott, Chair of the Board of Home Hill Community Buyout, Duncan Byrd, Rural Affairs Sub-Committee of the Law Society of Scotland, and John Watt, Specialist in Community Land Ownership. Welcome to you all. The sound systems work via the sound technician, so you don't need to press any buttons. I'll indicate who I'm asking to speak, if you want to speak, just indicate to me on the particular areas concerned. We look forward to gaining the benefit of your wide experience in these matters, and I'm going to kick off myself by looking at the way in which the dialogue and consultation on the community right to buy and crofting community right to buy has been conducted. We're told there's been various elements to this, but unlike other parts of the Community Empowerment Bill, part four provisions have not been, as far as we know, consulted in the same way. Do you think that the consultation on this has been suitable to the matters in hand? Does anyone want to start, Peter? I think that, from Community Land Scotland point of view, we've been making submissions about part three, the crofting community right to buy, right back to, I guess, 2012, when the first consultation was taking place about the Community Empowerment Bill. We made representations on the need to undertake work on part three, and that was followed up by the more formal consultations, where, again, we made representations on that. From our point of view, we've been active in making the case for change for about two and a half years, and there's been dialogue with officials and Government about that. Currently, as you'll be aware, the Scottish Government has published a short consultation paper on part three, and that's out for consultation. We've made written submissions, and I know that others have, too, and there have been a series of meetings taking place. I think that, in fact, Sandra was probably at one in the last week. There was one in Inverness, and one in Harris earlier this week, so that consultation has been happening. I think that we are not unhappy about this at all. We're very pleased that it's actually been picked up in the bill, because this is a matter that requires attention, and the consultation is well targeted. Actually, what's being proposed seems pretty much spot-on, frankly, with one or two things to be tidied up. We're talking about part three of the 2003 act. That's what I'm talking about. I know you are, but just for the benefit of my members, because we're dealing with part four of the community empowerment bill. That's why, in the evidence, it's necessary for us to have a copy of the Land Reform Act of 2003 beside us, as well. Does anyone else want to comment on the process so far? Sandra Holmes. I would like to maybe add to what Peter's said. Throughout, since the community empowerment bill was first being talked about, and even before it was drafted, High has engaged strongly and actively throughout the whole process. I've kind of lost count of all the submissions that we've put in at various stages, but we very much welcome that. Like Community Land Scotland, we very much welcome the recent developments to include amendments to the crofting community right to buy at stage two. Last week, I took part in a discussion that was hosted by Highland Council, along with civil servants in the Scottish Government, looking at the proposals, and we put in a written evidence in relation to the crofting community right to buy amendments. We think that it makes a lot of sense to pull everything together, particularly when parts of the community right to buy, in particular with 3A, is based on the existing crofting community right to buy, so it makes a lot of sense to pull them together. Very good. Okay. If that's the case, it's opened the question about whether it should be part of the land reform legislation, but Sandra Holmes says that it should be, naturally, a part of this bill. Are we agreed? Yeah, absolutely. So, in that case, we can move on to policy memorandum. Just a sort of background question this, but back in June, the convener of the Scottish Parliament's local government and regeneration committee wrote to the minister for local government and planning, looking for some clarification on some points relating to policy memorandum. In what could be looked upon as quite critical language, he did say that the policy memorandum appeared to be a little more than a superficial overview, as the expression he used, that didn't really supply sufficient material to allow for this part to be properly scrutinised. Correspondence took place and some further detail was provided, but in total the policy memorandum at the end of the day diverts less than three pages to part four of this bill, and at one point summarises 20 sections of the bill in just seven bullet points. My question is really to explore whether you are truly content that you were provided with enough information to fully explain the purpose and policy aims of the bill. My guess is that you'll say yes. I repeat in a sense what I said to the convener earlier that there's been dialogue about this since 2012. In fact, I've been frank about it. I was quite surprised by the letter that went from the committee to Government, and it was principally a surprise to me in this sense only. I can understand why the local government regeneration committee may have been less cited on the matter than this committee would be, but, as you know, in a past life I was sitting roughly where you were, and this committee carried out an independent inquiry into the land reform act working. The debate has been going on since 2010-11, effectively. For our part, we were not unhappy with what was in the policy memo. It gave us enough to work on, and it was clearly reiterating what is the purpose of the land reform act, which is about furthering the achievement of sustainable development and removing barriers to sustainable development. That's the core concept. Once you get that, all the provisions that are proposed in the draft bill—sorry, and the bill is introduced—makes sense in relation to that. We are not unhappy about this at all. Obviously, some members felt that there was a case to be made to say that there weren't enough to use it, but basically you guys in the field were content with what came your way. It was quite complex in terms of looking at the proposed changes, looking at the existing act, when you're going through your cross-referencing and looking at lots of documents, but we're very satisfied that there's a lot of good stuff that's in the proposals, and we're very keen to see it progress on that basis. Once you get through all what's in, what's out, what the proposed changes are, the actual outcomes that we're seeing, we do see them as being helpful and enabling, and we're really keen to see them taken forward within this timetable. In that case, we move to financial memorandum. Jim Hume. Good morning to everybody. Just regarding the financial memorandum, there seems to be a degree of uncertainty that the Highlands and Islands Enterprise stated that they agreed that it was difficult in estimating demand, for example. Bearing that in mind, I'd be interested in what the panel thought, specifically what costs they anticipate for communities and landowners, and what costs, of course, public bodies might have to bear also. If I'm wearing my hat as the chair of the Scottish Land Fund committee, obviously that committee has the responsibility of managing the Government's Scottish Land Fund, and a lot of the cases that communities actually want to acquire property and land assets come to us, and I've tabled some information prior to the meeting just on where we are at the moment in terms of that, and the number of cases which have come to the Land Fund, which have gone through the community right to buy process to date, and I've also included the national forest land scheme, which is a kind of community right to buy of a public asset. At the moment, the detail is in the paper, but we've got a healthy pipeline of projects coming to us at the moment. We've got £9 million over three years, which includes the last tranche being £3 million for the next financial year. We've got a healthy pipeline. There is pressure on the budget, but we're managing that at the moment. Clearly some of the changes that might be brought through if this legislation is enacted may increase that pressure, and extending the community right to buy to urban areas, for example, will have an impact. At the moment, we are projecting that we will manage the pressure on the budget. We're very careful about assessing each case carefully in terms of the outcomes that bring us in terms of sustainable development and resilient rural communities, and we'll continue to do that. I'll just explore further. I have that paper in front of us all of us. It gives the broad outline of what the budget is, but I would like to bore down into what that budget goes to, so what I'm really looking for is what the actual four public bodies and for communities and landowners, et cetera, what the costs are to them, not the overall budget, which is appreciated, but what costs do they face going forward? What types of costs? The applicants or the landowners? Applicants, landowners and public bodies for the whole panel. Well, if I stick to the land fund at the moment, there's a whole team of people who are public sector officials who assist communities in the process of developing good projects, and Sandra, in your heads, is up the team that helps them to do that. There are obviously public sector costs involved in that development and application process, and maybe, Sandra, you might want to comment on that. We put in a submission to the finance committee and from Hy's corporate perspective in relation to part four, the community right to buy, we don't see any real significant direct costs coming to Hy. What we would be doing is updating some of our guidance so there'd be a one-off, modest impact to us as an organisation. Clearly, we support communities in their aspirations to own and to manage assets, and that's where the bulk of our efforts are, but we're doing this with communities already, and most of the support that we're putting in are for communities that aren't looking at using the legislation because they've got other routes to ownership. John mentioned that we support the Scottish Land Fund, which is a Scottish Government programme that we deliver on their behalf in partnership with the Big Lottery Fund, and at the moment the Scottish Land Fund extends to rural areas only, so that's communities with a population of up to 10,000 people. Proposals in this bill are looking at extending the application of the community right to buy to all communities, so it's going to take in significantly more of a population. Our sense is that there will be a rise in interest in using the community right to buy and there will be a knock-on effect there in terms of demand. I think that some of the difficulties in trying to articulate what the overall costs are is that it is so demand led. I think that the key thing for us is to put it into perspective when we think that the Lund Reform Act was enacted in 2004. We've had it for a decade and there's been about 18 less than 20, I believe, applications through the process. In that time, there's been, from my rough calculations, about 110 acquisitions on top of that throughout the whole of Scotland, so the act itself is very enabling. It creates a very positive environment, but most of the stuff happens outwith the act. However, a key thing here will be extending it from rural to urban and it is pretty challenging to quantify what the demand is likely to be. I think that a limiting factor would be if communities are requiring public funds to actually enable the acquisitions to be progressed because you get the right to buy is one thing. It's then securing the funding and we were definitely seeing that since the Scottish Land Fund came on stream in 2012, that we've actually, as John's mentioned, we've got a very healthy pipeline. That's really the enabling factor to actually instigate communities to be proactive as seeing a route and a means to generating the finances required to enable the purchase. Within that, increasingly, we're seeing private financing featuring. Communities are getting commercial borrowing to make up the funding packages. Can I just add one point, convener? It was to assume that the only thing that I would add to what's been said is that, in evidence that we've given earlier, although we want to see all of this advance and, as John and Sandra indicated, if urban communities come into this as they will under the proposals, then the potential demand on the land fund would grow. We're under no illusions that that has to be cash limited at some point and that's a budget matter for governments over time, so we're not arguing for some open-ended checkbook on this. We recognise that there are public expenditure constraints and, if we might argue to have that budget nudged up, we recognise that it competes against other things, so I don't think that there's an open-ended checkbook from our point of view that we're seeking. That's useful. I'll just comment on that. So, in the Land Reform Act 2003, Cara Hylton. Thank you for being here and the morning panel. Given that the primary objective of land reform is to remove land-based barriers to the sustainable development of rural communities, I'd like to ask the panel's views on how well you think the 2003 act has worked in practice. Have aspects of rural Scotland changed as a result of the act and, in your view, have the experiences of the 2003 act and land reform today informed the process, informed the bill as drafted to the community empowerment bill? I think I'd start by saying we tried to buy, the legislation didn't work for us, but it did make us form a group, so there's a huge positive that came out of that, and we celebrate our 10th anniversary in January with a Caeli. We're not giving up yet. The legislation didn't work for us for a variety of reasons, which I can go into, but they're well documented on our website and a little bit in the submission we put forward. As far as I can tell, and I'm no expert, the kinds of changes that are being proposed in the community empowerment bill look to seek to deal with some of the problems that we had in securing our registration or failing to secure our registration. I must admit, I think, some of the things that have come out of it subsequently are things that worry me about how we will go forward, and we are continuing to go forward positively, but unless we can secure ownership of the land, we don't have any community control over it at all, and I can go into that in more detail, but we have taken it through the planning process. We've retained the designations it originally had as public open space in spite of somebody buying it at development value, which is a seriously big financial concern, in my view, in valuation. We have secured it in the new local plan as public open space, and we have defeated one planning application, had another one withdrawn, had supported the council planning department, but we haven't been able to move forward and make use of the land as we would like to do as a community, or even be able to engage with the community to have the dialogue as to how the community can best deal with it. We've got ideas, but there will be lots of others, so I think it's a really good start. I'm pleased, and the group were really pleased that you invited us in spite of it being a bit frightening, but we would like to work with you on the basis of our experience and help, if we can. If you could say briefly to the committee the couple of things that got in the way of making it work for you. The first one was that we refused in the first instance because we weren't timious, we didn't register beforehand. The land was in the local plan as public open space, it was always treated as public open space, it was sold by the owner with development potential, somebody bought it with development potential, he thought he was on about a five to one win, but he had to overcome a group, so the failure to secure that, that was our first failure. As you probably know, we used the appeal process, that was pretty hairy, and that didn't take us very far forward. The second piece, we were encouraged to re-register in Orfernes, and the process was, I don't know if it was easy, I didn't do most of it, but we managed it. The thing that then killed it for us was that the owner had let an option, sold an option. We saw a piece of paper with option on the top, and practically everything else redacted out, apart from the solicitor's name. We know not to whom it was, for what value it was, what time it was, whether it still extend, and as a result of that, we've taken a view that we would not seek to re-register until we were in a position to know that we didn't get back into that same process, because going out into the community, going through all of the support processes, right in the document, it's stuff you have to do, but it's a big exercise, and going to the community too often is not a good idea for something, you really need to go when you have to. So I think those were the two big issues that our experience has brought forward. Now, I believe that you're seeking to do that. I'm not qualified to say whether you'll be successful or not in the way you frame the bill. Evidence is very valuable. Peter Peacock wants to say something there. John, what? The three points that Cary Halton was asking about, has the 2003 act worked and has it changed rural Scotland, and is the bill informed by that? My experience of community landowning goes back to a past life with the Ascent crofters, when I was involved with Neuder, an egg being bought out prior to the legislation. As you know, I got diverted into other things, and I've come back to it 15 years later. I can honestly say that the landscape in the broadest sense is transformed from what it was at the time of the Ascent crofters buy-out. Community confidence in certain places is much higher than it used to be. People are doing the most remarkable things that I would never have believed, frankly, were possible a way back then. Part of why that has happened is because the 2003 act has given consent to communities to want to own their own land and given them a legal framework to do so. In a sense, what Parliament and Government are saying, we want you to do this, and here's the law to help you to do it. From that point of view, I think that it's been transformational, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of people don't use the act, it has changed the whole environment in which all these things take place. That's been excellent. The act that we know from experience is hugely cumbersome and difficult and bureaucratic in a whole variety of ways, to an extent that communities find it almost impossible to deal with. That's why we're back where we are now, with a bill seeking to revise that. For the most part, I would say that it's well targeted. It's trying to pick up on the things that communities have been expressing concern about over time. I've got quite strong reservations about aspects of part 3A that are not potentially as helpful as they could be. In relation to part 3A, I want to relate it back to part 3 of the land reform act, which gives an absolute right to buy. It's not actually an absolute right to buy, but it gives a community a chance to buy land when it's not for sale. That has completely changed the environment in the Western Isles. This is for the crofting right to buy, where we've now moved from a position where communities were thinking about exercising their rights to compulsory buy land and going through the process, which itself is horrendously complex and mapping requirements attach to that, which you might want to come back to in particular, horrendously complex. Nonetheless, what's happened there, because one community did take their case forward, another one started taking their case forward, there's been a complete change in the environment and now landowners and communities in the Western Isles, where this is happening, negotiate the future. They don't use the act, but they wouldn't be negotiating, but for the act, so it becomes hugely important as a backstop to allow negotiation to continue. I can pick up other points of detail, but I think that's the context that I would suggest. I feel very soon, I suspect. Just before I bring in John, Dave Thomson wanted a quick supplementary on that point. Thank you, convener. It was really Peter Baker's references to complexity and so on. I noticed in the submission from the Law Society that the Law Society states in there that part 4 multiple amendments to certain sections of the act, rather difficult to follow, does not seem to sit well with the aim of empowering communities and the society suggests it would be simpler to repeal and re-enact part 2 of the 2003 act. Slightly concerning if the Law Society are finding it difficult to follow. I don't think the Law Society members find it difficult to follow, but we've tried to put ourselves in the position of the common man in Scotland. When he sits down and looks at the piece of legislation that is so cumbersome and cross-referencing different acts, it does become difficult. We're trying to encourage you to make the legislation as simple as possible so that the man in the street, the lady in the street can pick it up, because, as the other panel members have said, with the bureaucratic process, if you start off with a piece of legislation that is very heavy and cumbersome, you're going to frighten off a lot of people and you really don't want to do that. Can we just follow up and would you stand by the suggestion there, or would you be recommending that it should be repealed and re-enacted rather than the route we're going down with the amendment? I recently attended the WS and Crofting Law Conference, AGM, in Loch Maddi, where we were looking particularly at the problems that the 2010 act has created in crofting. What we're seeing is that you're adding layers and layers of amendments to pieces of legislation that eventually break down and become a money making exercise for my profession, which is, again, something that I take it that you don't want to do. John Watt? I think that Peter has said almost everything that I was going to say. I'm almost as old as Peter to remember the Ascentcrofters process. With the Land Reform Act of 2003 coming in, it was soon found to be a difficult process. My colleague here, Sandra, has been through a lot of these with communities to help them through that process, especially part 3. Many of the big projects didn't use it at all and didn't even attempt to use it, but as Peter said, it was a useful piece of legislation to have in the background if other things hadn't worked or you could use it as a potential backstop. I haven't got the exact statistics in front of me, but in the Scottish Land Fund number one, which was established in the early naughties, very few of the cases had gone through the community right to buy process. Most of them were negotiated several months in negotiated sales. As you see from the figures for the more recent Scottish Land Fund, only four or five out of 28 have gone through the process as well. It's useful that it was there, it was complicated to use and it's good to see that some of the difficulties are being addressed now. I suspect that we'll have some more detail to talk about in that. Can I firstly thank any of you who managed to find something positive about the 2003 act to say that, given that I was the convener of this committee at the time that it was introduced? I can assure you that any impediments that were put in were not placed there on purpose, but that's a slightly light-hearted comment. Listening to what Duncan Byrd has just been saying, slightly—actually, come back to the question that the convener asked first, because I thought what you were saying rather highlighted that this might have been better if it had been introduced as a separate piece of land reform legislation rather than tacked on to this bill. I just wonder if you could comment on that. No, I think that the overall aim of this bill is such that this is the appropriate place for this to be in and not yet another piece of legislation, which will again simply frighten people away. But correct me if I'm wrong, you were saying that what we are doing here is sort of adding amendment on amendment to existing legislation, which you didn't think was very satisfactory. That in itself is not ideal because from my own practical experience of having acted in a lot of these biotech situations, people are incredibly nervous of the explanations that we lawyers give, whether it be to the landowner or to the prospective community group. Okay, no, that's fine. I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you, Goodwin. Right, can I move on to some of the more detailed issues now of the nature of land in which interest may be registered? I think that it's McDonald. Okay, thanks, convener. Good morning, panel. As a panel will be aware, the right to buy provision in part 2 of the 2003 act applies only to community bodies representing rural areas. Now, section 27 of the bill amends the definition of registrable land and the power of the Scottish ministers to define excluded land to allow the community right to buy to apply throughout Scotland. Now, in written evidence from the Law Society of Scotland and perhaps Duncan Byrd may wish to expand on this, the state marked differences between a right to buy exercised in rural Scotland and one now to be exercised with regard to land in an urban setting, which may well have a higher acquisition and development consequence costs. Furthermore, there's a requirement to restrict the application of community right to buy in urban areas where there is an active development proposal. If such provision is not made, then an unrestricted community right to buy could have unintended but significant adverse effects on investment decisions. Can I ask the panel how you think community confidence, cohesion and sustainability will be affected by extending the community right to buy and could there be different issues in an urban context? Society membership obviously represents land owners in all different spectrums, rural and urban. The concern is that, in an urban environment, you might have a small community who are interested in a particular asset, but it forms part of a larger asset that could be capable of development that the development might become blighted so that there could be a competing scenario there. It's important that U.S. legislatures possibly put in a safeguard to see how you balance out the greater development good to the individual community organisation, which is why we've suggested that there might be one or two technical measures that you could add in that would give a developer a comfort. These projects take quite some time to reach fruition in the commercial world. Time is important. Anyone else? I'd like to see parity of opportunity extending to all communities, our communities, whether they are an urban community or a rural community. It just seems right that those opportunities apply to all communities and we welcome the opportunities within the proposed amendments to have some more flexibility around the structures to extend the opportunities even further. It's quite right that you could argue that land building costs in an urban area might come at a premium compared to a rural area, but I would say that that's a secondary issue. What we're talking about here is giving communities a rightful opportunity to engage and to become empowered and to where they can take control of assets to add to their empowerment. I could add one point if I can, but if I can come in or two to that, I think that that's fine. Sorry, what will go round the table then? Just quickly, I mean, I think that if this can work, as it seems to be working in many rural areas, why shouldn't the same opportunity be available more generally? I can't see a reason in principle why it shouldn't. In fact, I can see a reason in principle why it should. Is it going to be played out differently in the urban context? Almost certainly. I think that communities are much more complex in the sense of defining boundaries of communities. You're probably talking about much smaller land holdings, individual sites that may be clearly, we're going to come back to this, but clearly abandoned or neglected or in need of further development. You can think of individual buildings or gap sites that might fall into that category. I think that it will play out differently, but in principle there's no reason why it cannot play out properly in that context. It's a very interesting question about blight. I had this question put to me at a conference I was speaking at last week. I think that I'm trying to answer it in this way that the blight that we experience in the areas that have bought their land in rural Scotland is not being caused by the community purchase. It was actually the community's purchasing to get round the blight that they feel was on the land because it wasn't being developed to its full potential by the current ownership structure. The communities that Sandra and John helped with through their different roles are very much about developing their assets because they feel they haven't been able to do that in the past. I'm quite sure that there are technical reasons that Mr Bird has raised that are worth looking at, but I think that we're wrong to characterise community as causing blight just as a sort of obvious characteristic. I don't think that would be the case necessarily. I'd like to follow on with the blight point as the first point. I think the land that we sought to buy and certain other sites in Dumblain have been blighted by inactivity from the owners over in some cases many years sites that are in the high street that are left completely empty for the 17 years I've been living there. So I think that's a key issue that the rural urban split we are considered as a rural community. We have I think just under 9,000 inhabitants. I don't think we thought of ourselves as a rural community until we engaged with the act and certainly the population isn't substantially involved in rural activities. So we were fortunate but a slightly bigger community wouldn't have been in the same position and yet I can't see why they wouldn't have had the same role. My real feeling is that the fact that this has come forward in the community empowerment bill tells you why it should be there. This is a means of enabling the communities to empower themselves and the planning process is what will govern the value of a site. In our case we believe it has reduced its value which is going to be one of the issues I perhaps like to explore at some time as to how that's reflected from a gamble by a developer inflating a price against where the planning provision is. But it's about making sure that the community engages in the whole wider process of managing its community which in all fairness a number of us have done having become involved in this process and are continuing to do so including some aspects of build development around the site that we are interested in but trying to work with the developer housing association in this case to secure the best outcome for all parties. It has made us much more inclusive in the process. I think that we'll be interested to see in some of the further questions where you'll be able to come in on that. John Watt? Again, Chairman, just wearing another hat that I have, I sit on the Scottish Committee of the Big Lottery and through its growing community assets programme it already assists communities to acquire properties in urban contexts as well through negotiated purchases and already we're saying that that has significant benefits in those communities and often the properties are small areas, usually small areas, and sometimes there's even single buildings that the community can see could be put to a more positive purpose than is currently the case. But I agree with Peter, it is more challenging in terms of defining communities in urban areas but we need to have structures that are broadly representative of the community and still the acquisition has to be in the public interest, it has to be for a positive community purpose and certainly the cases that we process through the Big Lottery assess that public interest and that positive community benefit and it certainly will be interesting to see that if communities are given more rights in terms of registering interests in these kind of properties whether that will significantly increase the demand in those areas. Thanks, convener. Picking up on John Watt's comment that it's a wee bit more challenging in urban areas, can you foresee any practical problems or unintended consequences if you can foresee such a thing in extending the community right to buy? Well ensuring you always have to deal with some legal entity in these situations and the nature of the legal entity in terms of open membership, democratic control, there are certain basic rules that you would need to have within and we do have within these bodies which do not bring about personal gain and they can't distribute profits to each other and the like and these kind of principles I think have to be there. Communities can I think, as in rural areas, begin to define their own boundaries in urban areas as well as in rural areas and although it is more challenging because there's a lot more people in these communities. The unintended consequences I suppose can be that you get minority interest groups potentially trying to usurp this process but I think you can build safeguards into who can apply and what kind of structures they have to apply which can overcome that particular unintended consequence. Okay and these safeguards would be, can you give us any examples just now? What sort of situation has that? Well I meant in the type of legal structure in which the applicant has to have open membership, democratic control, non-profit distributing, these kinds of principles. I think that we might continue in that vein with Claudia Beamish. Good one to the panel. Obviously the meaning of community and definitions of community are very complex issues and I'd like to explore that a bit further with the panel because I think that would be helpful for our discussions. You will know that in section 34 of the 2003 act this provides that the only type of legal entity building on what you were exploring John that can apply to register community interest in land is a company limited by guarantee. In terms of this this bill could I ask you as a panel for views on what type of entity you would see that should be able to register a community interest in land and are there any practical implications that you see in relation to extending the bill to skills and what other types of bodies should be included by regulation and or specified in the bill and I would after that like to move on to issues around post codes and the extension of or or limiting of those but first of all on on what types of bodies we welcome the proposals to include skills we feel that the skills structure can exhibit the same characteristics that are exhibited in the existing community company limits by guarantee and as John mentioned the key tenant there is the open membership and in terms of the skills we'd be advocating that it's a two-tier skill because there's two different kinds of skills and a two-tier skill is one where you've got a wider membership and that membership would then elect the board of directors to do the day-to-day running of the organisation and that again reflects very closely at parallels with the company limited by guarantee. We're aware that there's been some discussions about potentially extending it further to include bincoms and we're definitely seeing more bincoms being considered by community groups as an organisation. We haven't thought that one fully through but we will do if it comes in at stage 2 but the principle of extending it where it's appropriated and where the safeguards of community control and democratic control we would certainly welcome that and one of the benefits of a bincom is that it can actually generate private finance from its members and I think looking ahead and even currently you know communities are looking to raise funding to enable to develop the funding packages required for the purchases and there's a significant benefit I think in some of the funding coming through a bincom structure locally is that you're actually building in loyalty and you're building in that stake in the overall success of the business people feel connected and feel part of something when they have contributed to it so I think whilst we haven't looked at it in detail and it's just a in principle position at the moment we certainly welcome it but we will give it further consideration if it does appear at stage 2. I think perhaps it'll make it easier in terms of the discussion if I just highlight one or two of the other areas that you will know have come up as possible meanings of community which they are means they are of course definitions of community but whether they should be considered for the bill in terms of communities of interest and perhaps a wider definition of geographic area in relation to some of the equalities groups such as I think minority groups and other definitions of place such as some allotment societies or possibly community councils and how that relates to the postcode definitions that have stood in the past because I think it's important for us all to understand how we can empower communities for the future so I'll just throw that in at this stage. Can I say first of all we have a company I am the chairman of the board we also have a registrations of charity our main fundraising at the moment is to pay the accountants to do the accounts for the company and the charity we did look at a sgios and we concluded that wasn't worth us changing at the time as in in our current position so we have managed with the system it did cause us a few problems we had to change the memorandum and some articles at one stage to meet something and there are bureaucratic processes which if you're not involved in them routinely can be quite hard work the definition of the community we we took Dumblane as a community because this is right in our quest for the land that the land we're seeking is right in the heart of the town translating that into postcode was not easy and and then moving on to achieving a 10% of the people on I have to remember which it is the open register we couldn't get we weren't allowed to have the people um on who who had taken themselves off of the register and that that was in itself quite quite a major task and several people spent quite a long time in the library going through the electoral role knocking out people who had signed who who who were not eligible under the definitions so I think trying to define the community in a more free form fashion and post codes may be an entirely acceptable way but perhaps we could have defined it by the community council wards for example as just one of them and something that I think I think all of this comes back to to something that I think is important and I I will declare a slight interest I'm an ordinary member of the association of community rail partnerships so it'll tell you a little bit about where I come from I think you have to leave it to the community to define the community interest you then have to say whether you think it's the right definition and whether you think it's vested interests or or things which are are not necessarily appropriate and I'm not trying to define that in any way but it's sort of to try and set a much more diverse framework so you rather than say you have to tick these boxes something that enables you to come up that enables people to understand that they've got to be inclusive and they've got to meet equality legislation and and open membership but that they can define their their community by the need that they perceive and the way in which they would go forward and I'm not going to be clever and try and say this is how it should be done I leave that to others I'm happy to participate if there's a dialogue and I think we would say we will be happy to participate in developing any of these ideas if they if anybody would wish to do that but it's to it is about coming up from the bottom not coming down from the top and this should be entirely enabling at legislation I genuinely think this is quite groundbreaking which is why I spent a lot of time trying to contribute to everything that has just been said about communities helping to define in their own place and I think what the bill is seeking to do properly is recognise the criticism that the postcode definition was just too restrictive and it's opening up more possibilities and giving ministers power and flexibility to consider other things that a community might argue for so I think that's exactly right I think that would that's very helpful I think on the the question about sceos and bencoms and so on again I think you know skeos didn't exist when Mr Ferguson was dealing with this in his committee they now exist and it's right that the act when approved recognizes that but equally I think it's right that other forms will will evolve the survey dynamic sector who knows what's going to emerge in the next week while and again ministers are giving themselves powers rightly to constantly update that I think that's right on the question of community interests communities of interest that's a good deal more complex I think and this bill really comes from a concept of place and how you develop place it's not about interest however within a place in an urban context in particular but not only there if you have you know the local dramatic society or whatever that want to purchase a piece of land to develop something or a building to convert it well they would be able to try and move that through the processes that are being developed there wouldn't be an inhibition to that but ministers would ultimately have to define whether that you know registration of interest in the land was in the public interest etc etc so I don't think it's excluded but this bill comes from a different place it's about place not interest or you've got a further question John did you maybe just echoing Sandra the changing structure of the kind of bodies that can apply for funding and use this right you know have evolved over time and for a long time there was almost exclusively companies limited by guarantee I think that that was in a period where public funding was perhaps more available and some of the changes to Bencom's for example is to allow these companies to raise private capital as well as to apply for public funding which I think we all welcome given the difficulties in public funding and I think there are ways of ensuring that you can achieve both that flexibility of capital raising ability with community and public interest and I think that's the challenge and the Bencom model is evolving interestingly again where in my lottery hat we've just recently funded the community shares Scotland service which is advising communities on how to raise community shares for a variety of activities and you'll probably see various prospectuses from community organisations raising money through this mechanism for projects with some with remarkable degree of success in many cases I came across one recently whereby the company that was raising the shares had built into their memorandum and articles and it was a Bencom keep me right with Sandra I'm wondering here it's an industrial provident society but one of its one of its objectives was to transfer its surplus profits to a community-based charitable organisation and that link between a trading activity which could be based on owning a land asset and a community benefit charity I think is a very important one but these are more complex models than we've been seeing we've been seeing in the past but I think we have to to look at them very carefully and I think the legislation should enable that to happen sorry Sandra you can correct me now nothing to correct at all as time has moved on and as communities have become more innovative I think we need to be more sophisticated in some of the approaches and it is quite difficult in primary legislation to be prescriptive about entity types and one thing that we were advocating earlier is that rather than having a company with a big guarantee a skeo and a bencom which then limits you to those to put in the characteristics and if we get the characteristics right it would then be up for each applicant to address those characteristics and demonstrate that their structure is fitting with the characteristics detailed within the bill and we see that as being something that would be more enabling to accommodate future developments that we can't anticipate at this stage and it will also allow communities to see very clearly and it might help to take into account where communities of interest I think communities of interest have got a legitimate role to play but as it's currently structured the way the definition of community is it is centered in a geographic community and you have to kind of describe the geographic community currently within post codes but that might change because you have to establish what your membership is to then be able to demonstrate a bit of majority of the those who voted from that membership are in favour and it's quite difficult to get that constituency of voting if you can't determine if it's a community of interest how do you know where that community of interest is and who would then get a vote in the ballot currently it's based on the geographic community so I think there's something to do with looking at the characteristics which might be more enabling and accommodating for future needs. It's the same point and David wants to come in again and Roddy wants to ask a point on this too. Yes, you're in the lead. Just to follow up on the issue of the Bencoms. I'm so sorry, did you say not me now? No, okay. To follow up on the issue of the Bencoms. Would you see that there would have to be any amendment within the act, within the bill in order to enable the transfer of assets if something came through to a different organisation for instance a charitable organisation as you described in order to enable that to happen and just to follow up your point Sandra in terms of communities of interest and I'll just give you an example from my own region where there's a coral society in one town and people travel a considerable distance because of its reputation and if they were to consider purchasing a building which was a venue for an arts hub or whatever one wouldn't want to restrict it so I do think your description of how of a way forward is useful. Some of my colleagues have probably read the draft bill more carefully than I have but I thought that there's a clause within it which which goes to the Minister of Flexibility on other legal structures which I think we should welcome. What I was going to say is if you can put the emphasis on the people rather than the geographic place then that's the real community of the people in it and the place that they live in is I hate to say secondary because I don't mean it like that but look after the people if that's the guiding principle then the rest will follow. To make a point myself just now it follows on from something that David Prescott just said a little earlier. We've got the kinds of constitutions that are demanded of different sorts of organisations. We've got the kinds of constitutions that are acceptable to the big lottery and I can think of examples in Eventon where I live where the constitution of a body had to be changed three times in the process in order to access the funds that it finally got. That's something that hasn't been touched here but I'm wondering if it's going to be made any simpler by this bill and if there are ways in which we should recommend that it should be made simpler. That's a very challenging question. I mean I've got two thoughts about that. One is that it could be dealt with by administrative means in the sense of getting the lottery together and the people who work on this in government and land funding and make sure they're asking for the same thing or broadly the same thing but secondly I think the flexibility that the bill is proposing as I understand it for ministers to add to the list ought to not be used sparingly when there's a need so it avoids people doing these very cumbersome things that are very difficult. In fact one part of the bill we might come to implies that they may have to do more of this in order to comply with this bill and that takes up a lot of energy and effort so but I think the flexibilities are emerging from this to allow this to be helped. John what? On slightly dangerous ground defending the big lottery here but I think that we've always attempted to ensure that our programmes are aligned with the legislation and if the legislation were to change and there were to more flexible constitutional models were to be used I'm sure that the big lottery would be enthusiastic in entering into dialogue about alignment. That would be very helpful indeed. A template articles for communities and it's something that High set up and we manage it and we keep it current with any changes in company law and we went to some lens to consult with Scottish Government to make sure that our template articles fitted with the community right to buy provisions and we also checked with Oscar because there's certain things within charity law so we've got currently and it's on our website and anybody can access it the template which if you don't deviate significantly from what's there it will meet the community right to buy provisions it should get you a long way towards getting charitable status of that as your view that's appropriate for you and if there's any changes coming through this process and this bill into an updated act we would then amend it accordingly so there's quite a lot we can do out with the legislation to try and enable it and clearly what we're all looking to do is to try and smooth the path as much as we possibly can. That's a helpful point because we'll bear it in mind as we go along. Had you finished your questions Claudia? Thank you fine. Detailed procedures and requirements Dave Thompson? In your submissions a number of you mentioned issues to do with registration and at home hull I think you're saying here that the requirement to pre-register for a right to buy is unrealistic. HIE states that late registrations are very much the rule rather than the exception and Community Lands Scotland again it would be best to accept late registrations as the likely norm and if itself need not be justified by any prior action or lack of action I'm interested in all of this because I just wonder what your views would be on the need for early registration at all should we not just have a registration system that kicks in when a community is made aware or whatever that land is maybe going to be becoming available rather than for communities to be doing an awful lot of work beforehand trying to identify what land might come up in the future which would be a pretty difficult thing. I'd like to get your views on just not needing to have early registration and not needing to be able I mean having quite tough rules I think for registration maybe even slightly tougher I think Community Lands Scotland you mentioned that in your submission so that's I'd like to get panels views on that. Well I think it's a hugely important issue because the practice that's emerging and Sandra can comment much more on this than I can actually because she's seen enough what more cases is that communities don't approach the world by thinking abstractly about the land around them as a sort of thinking now is there anything to think about here and do we have to register interest in land what land would have to register interest in that's quite cumbersome for reasons we've heard and I just don't think that's the real world of communities and that's what experience is showing so the norm it seems to me will increasingly be that communities only really pay attention to this the minute the land comes on the market and I think we should accept that as being the norm and therefore for me the challenge is how can you find the right tests and hurdles while not ruling out that situation I was very interested in the dialogue that was going on last week between this Dave Thompson and the bill team is Dave Thompson which becomes very confusing obviously but the dialogue that was going on seemed to me to be saying that well first of all you were asking questions but why is this necessary since then I went back and read the the 2003 memorandum policy memorandum for the act for the land reformat and it became clear to me I think in reading that there were two things at work in requiring early registries one is there was real concern at that time in the writing of that policy memorandum that having a free and open right to buy so you didn't have to register would have a universal impact on property rights and the property market and I think the logic of the registration was to say registration and therefore the right to buy only applies to those who have registered so it wasn't a universal it wasn't a universal application I think that's one thing I think the second thing is it's bureaucratically tidy to know in advance you know what land is likely to have to go through a process and therefore to know about it so I think there's probably two reasons for that the other thing that was really interesting in the dialogue though from the two Dave Thompson's if I can put it that way was that the bill team Dave Thompson made clear at one point in that dialogue that the situation you were referring to which I think you called a light bulb moment when people suddenly thought we're gonna have to do something about this Dave Thompson the building I think confirmed that was not provided for here and that's the key question for me is how do we provide for that I also think that in looking at what's being said and again from the dialogue last week it struck me that what is now being proposed which we see is potentially very difficult damaging and that is that a community would have to show that taken prior steps or done prior work and then it's sufficiently advanced of the land coming on the market it's just impossible to meet however I think what the bill team were constructing in that is simply to deal with those situations where a community had taken prior steps and had done prior work it would be easier for them to then get registered but the key question is what about those who haven't and that'll be the norm and to me you've got to allow that to happen and but you've got to have suitable tests in there to make sure it doesn't just happen automatically and it's finding the right tests two of them are there already you've got to show greater community support than you would for a normal registration and secondly um well I've forgotten the second one off hand um yet there's public support for that uh and and um it's in the public interest and it would further sustain all development so that there are the kind of tests and you could add another one that we suggested um so I think this is a very important issue convener if we don't get this right then automatically communities will be excluded from using the provisions of the act okay um yeah all right well the alex ferguson before we bring in any other witnesses sorry I was I was actually going to raise this later on but but um mr peacocks just raised it just now which is this uh a further suggestion that the community land scotland have made um which is that ellable land or or sorry the the legislation could be amended to state that eligible land would be land the sale of which to a community body would contribute to the achievement of a greater diversity of ownership and I assume that's the other suggestion he was referring to just now can you get further down the process I think for registration in that case I'll leave it to later convener I'm sorry I thought that was what you were mentioning because I've got advanced warning of that question yes David I think the the light bulb moment for us was was when the fore sale sign went up on a piece of land that we had in the planning process and had free rein to wander over and everybody took as being this is this is ours if you like as a community when it goes up with development value on it then or development potential or whatever the words were you uh you suddenly think hang on a minute that's not what we've got um but there's no way that the community would have found a way particularly with needing to get a petition and membership and voting numbers and redo it every five years and and everything else that went with it um so I think you know ours was was a typical experience I'm quite sure that many communities will start to have if you expand this to urban environments will start to have these light bulb moments as community facilities get that they've enjoyed for many years will suddenly turn down or turned off or or shut or something like that and um I can think of a few examples I'm sure you all can where where the community feel that there's something that has been provided by the private sector and suddenly the private sector stops providing it but it's of a community value and the community wishes to retain it um but you can't register somebody else's property you don't go out registering somebody else's property on the off chance that this might happen so I think you're going to see an awful lot more of this kind of response and if the community is going to be empowered to to look after itself and to develop itself and become therefore much more financially and emotionally and sort of generally sustainable then you you genuinely want for these facilities to be taken into a form of ownership which may be able to survive when the private sector has not been able to survive because they have different forms of ownership and different forms of provision of labour through volunteers and and all the sorts things that go with it Sandra Holmes for a slightly different take on things we certainly would support communities being proactive and putting steps in place in advance of something coming on on to the market and that's certainly how the land reform act was put in place the reality is has been borne out that communities are responding to opportunities and partly that is because the process to actually put in a timious registration is quite wondrous it means forming a company getting your 10% support and then that application that you're putting in is pertaining to one asset it could be one building one bit of land and you might have to do multiple assets if you just want to get a couple of acres of land you would have to do multiple applications so it hasn't been something where communities have felt that they were going to perhaps it's a lot of work to go through when they're not guaranteed of getting any success through the process the difficulty with the late registration is that if when the community applies late at the moment they have to satisfy the good reasons test and my understanding is that the good reasons test was put in to enable the act to work in the earlier stages of the act and there has been good reasons being taken forward later on which perhaps weren't envisaged so we welcome the removal of the good reasons test but we're a bit concerned about the the amendments have been put in to replace it in terms of taking these steps so it's relevant work and relevant steps to show that the community has been proactive we can see perhaps a way where there's a bit of a hybrid where if a community has been proactive and it can demonstrate in a community council minutes or having a development plan that they have got aspirations to own a building or aspirations to own a development plot and they can articulate that when it then comes to it later on if an asset comes up for sale they've then got that marker down so it would then enable them to get in satisfying hopefully that they have taken relevant steps and they've taken relevant work because the process of actually responding to a late application is really quite challenging within a very short period they would potentially have to form a company they would have to get members of that company they'd have to get the 10 percent and it would have to be more than 10 percent because it would be a late registration and they have to make an application and assuming that late registration applications accepted they're then straight into having to raise the funds for the purchase and that's where I think the current part two of the land reform act gets quite a lot of bad press because that's a very very onerous process I think something can be done where we're still asking communities to be proactive but on a more general strategic point of view and then having these relevant works and relevant steps fitting in with that so the marker can be down and that would then open up greater opportunities so there's something in here where I think would be more workable for communities and also for the supporting agencies because it's quite difficult for us to be able to respond very very quickly when something is being going through a late procedure and at the moment the late procedure is a good chance that they won't be successful. I just want to come back on that and actually answer the bit of the question that I didn't answer for Mr Ferguson that I think this is sortable, I don't think this is too difficult to sort, it really requires to accept that not the sign that Sandra has said which would be the preferable position when a community has not done that nonetheless there should be allowed to make their case to the minister and there are criteria against which the minister then has to judge whether to do that. I mean for example we had phone calls and I know that Sandra attended a meeting about this from people in Blair Gowrie because suddenly overnight the co-op farms came on the market who would ever have expected those farms to come on the market so why would they have registered an interest as soon as it came on the market think shouldn't we be doing something about this? I had a phone call one day for an email from somebody in Donside saying suddenly a piece of land that was central to their community had come on the market they had never in their wildest imagination expected this to ever happen and they were now thinking what can they do about it. All your arguments let's have an opportunity for that to be properly considered and not to have some simple test because if you're a land owner looking from the air point of view who's done a lot of work to prepare the ground for that and it comes on the market they want that mark to be expedited so there has to be some pressure to do that the extra test we were going to try and put in or suggested to the bill team that they might want to put in those circumstances they would have to satisfy there was a higher support in the community it was it was strongly indicative that it was in the public interest which is the current basic test but also to put something in about there was a reasonable likelihood the community could actually conclude a deal because the last thing you want is a community going through a process but there was no reasonable likelihood they could actually raise the money or whatever and that would be another little hurdle which we think would be fair but and therefore would you know I think we could get a workable answer here the important thing is to try and find a workable answer I doubt we've got it at the minute. John Mott. It's just a table one idea as you know the the land reform review group of which I was a member tabled a menu of rights for communities and the first the first right that we suggested was a right light right which would be where by which a community would just simply register an interest because at the moment the current act is is actually a right of preemption but if you if you simply had a right to register an interest simply to be notified if a piece of land was going to be coming on the market or changing ownership and that then would trigger the process of of the heavier right of registering a right of preemption it's just just an idea we thought that of getting around this everything being a late registration. We'll be taking quite a bit of evidence on this but it's important to get it just now because it's clear we're getting you know suggestions for amendments here and it's a good idea to get these in an early stage if that's what's finally agreed by the committee. Did you want to ask something out right? Thank you could I just ask um I understand that the land reform review group had some written evidence um that recommended re-registration of an interest in land could only be needed possibly every 10 years rather than every five in view of how onerous it is and the complexities for communities. I'm listening to the discussion we've had already but in are there any comments on on that particular issue from the panel? Reiterate this that we felt that the process of re-registration was fairly onerous and heavy and every five years seemed to be quite onerous and we thought 10 years would be more appropriate. We thought and looked at this and re-registration effectively is doing the same again. There's a real risk of registration fatigue in the community. One of the things and maybe we haven't understood it properly one of the things for example is in terms of refreshing and I think that's the way I would rather describe it refreshing the registration rather than you know redoing it is to ensure that we have obvious community support but not necessarily to go through you know trying to find another 10 percent of the community who are prepared to sign things and completely redoing the documentation um so in our case for example I would would expect that to include support from say the community council as elected representatives um if they didn't support them we have more difficulty um and and there is just a general issue of what reflects community support um and possibly equally what reflects community opposition that that touches an equally valid point so I can see the need to refresh it and to make sure we're still there um because of its impacts on somebody's private property but I think it's one of the things that needs to be sort of proportional to to where you're getting to. Peter yeah with that we've we are given our evidence submissions for a 10 year two I noticed last week that the bill team did signal they plan to simplify the form and the process and that'd be very welcome but I don't think it defeats the point that it should be a longer period of time there's maybe an honourable compromise possibly. Yes, Dave. Another couple of things that come into the same kind of area is the need for a community in the bill to identify ownership I just you know wonder that in some cases that's going to be an extremely difficult thing for the community to be able to do and do the panel have any comments on that? I agree it can be very challenging and we would seek that that was caveated with taking all reasonable steps and the community demonstrating the steps that they have gone through to try and achieve identification of the right for loaner but if that can't be done I think as long as they can demonstrate the processes that they've gone through and that was deemed to be reasonable. I think it's wider in the sense of the whole land reform agenda so it'll be interesting to see if that's a point that's made either later today or in detail. Can I just add to that I mean I agree with that entirely and my understanding but I you know just have to be correct in this is that in compulsory purchase orders a local authority there would be or any development use there would be a procedure if you'd taken all reasonable steps to nonetheless proceed with a compulsory purchase not the standing you couldn't finally identify somebody clearly it's best to identify them. I noticed too last week that the bill team talked about absolutely requiring to identify the owner but I would continue with that argument I've just made but they also suggested there was an alternative procedure now I think they were referring to the the Queen's of course a QLT or the Queen's Lord Treasurer's Remembrance to which Bonavacantia land falls and I think the suggestion was therefore that if if you couldn't find the owner and it was declared Bonavacantia if that's the right expression then you could approach the QLTR to purchase the land I just don't know if that would work and I think I would prefer that we sort it out in the face of the bill but maybe it would but that would have to be checked out. I subsequent to trying to do the registration and such like but I did go to the registers because I happened to be in Edinburgh and the system worked extremely well and was extremely user friendly and I got all of the information on the registers it doesn't necessarily correspond with the owner's claimed ownership but my view is that whatever is in the public record has to be the reasonable test of reasonableness for for a community body and if people wish to hide their land ownership that shouldn't be a way of avoiding being part of the community and so I just felt and I know that you can get you can get professionals to access the register if you can't get to Edinburgh and therefore it'll cost you a little bit more but it just seems that that that was an extremely good way of moving forward and I genuinely was quite impressed with it and I felt that that was one of the things that's where the options should be registered so that the options should be held so that they're on a public record even if they are redacted for confidential information except that might happen. I think that I wanted to be on that except on the other part. Just a reason on the subject of QLTR which might be a bit unfair to ask for a lot of detail on that but just through a constituency issue I have at the moment which I very much hope will become the subject of a community right to buy my understanding is that since 1999 in the establishment Scottish Parliament land that basically falls to the ownership of QLTR is actually effectively falls to Scottish Government as Scottish ministers as I understand it now have have control if that's the right word of QLTR. Is anybody comment on that or am I wrong? I think that if it's being suggested that you must know the owner or go through the QLTR route which seems to be the current suggestion I think we need to check out all the detail about the QLTR route to know that that would be robust. I mean you know if I mean on the face of it if the QLTR did own the land they could perhaps give a first right of refusal to the community and that might satisfy the matter but I don't know if that's possible. You convener I just want final point here and I think it was Peter that mentioned it earlier and in your submission too you know when we get through this there'll be an act and that's fine but what you said earlier was that there's a lot of negotiation going on with the act there in the background and it's the point about facilitating mediation rather than having people go through strict legal processes and procedures which would make a lot of money for lawyers and take longer but there are a lot of good mediation organisations available in Scotland now it was at an event in the parliament last week which was excellent an American mediator Ken Cloak run by John Styrrick and mediation I think is something that we should build into the act the ability of a guy or whoever to facilitate discussion between a landowner and a community rather than having them at loggerheads with each other in a legal sense. No I absolutely agree with that I think that the really striking thing is that where a landowner and a community can sit down and work at things it's by far the best way of doing things but there are examples where that's really difficult and you know I won't labour this but there have been a case running for a long time which ultimately has been sorted out hopefully sorted out by a process of bringing the parties together with a trusted third party but that's been done purely on an ad hoc basis the third party happened to live locally to these two other parties and and it seems to have worked or certainly added to the process I just think we're too much more deliberate about that and my understanding is that while it's high and the Scottish Government team who deal with these things will recommend to organisations if you to communities if you can negotiate that that's better they are not they don't actually have powers to do anything about that it's a simple power to a minister to be able to facilitate that would seem to help enormously I would have thought and that could be by you know making sure a mediator was appointed or whatever the Charbitration Act and the organisation which has been set up to do that in business it might be something which we could take on board you know in our report see how that organisation fits in with the concept of mediation in a more formal sense you talked about issues which are related to showing good reasonable behaviour there are things to do with periods of activity of interest time limits you know the appointment of ballaters and all these sort of things are there any other we've got the detailed evidence from you on that do you have any other points finally on that just now that you feel you need to make on the procedures and requirements I've got one point it's in our evidence but I would just like to raise it briefly and it's to do with search section 31 for double a triple I and this is just to put that into plain speak this is a bit about very often when communities are looking at taking forward a project it might be a community council that might be the starting point or it might be just a group of individuals will come together and it be sometime perhaps later on before the entity the community body is actually set up and this part of the act is sort of saying any work that was done prior would have to be done in the name or under the guise of this community body that hasn't been set up and we would really welcome a decoupling of that because it's very very common place that it's a subgroup of a community council or just interested people coming together to do the foundation work and to do some of the initial feasibility and this often happens for projects outwith the legislation but it's tried and tested practice and we support organisations in those formative stages and there are senses that the work of that organisation of that group of individuals coming together on behalf of the community is no less valid than had it been done under the community body which might be formed later on so there's a time and a place to form the community body but often the preparatory work always will always happen before so it's a very minor thing but I think it could be have quite significant consequences if it stays in as drafted. Okay, thank you for that. We want to move on to abandoned and neglected land. Nigel Dawn, very much convener and yes we've had a lot of talk here about processes and aspirations but of course I'd actually like to look at the text and for the sake of the record can I say that I'm actually on page 29 of the bill as introduced it's section 48 of the draft to bill but every other number is actually going to be something like 97C which refers to the section which it's going to put into the 2003 act so hopefully anybody reading this later will have a clue what we're doing. In that context 97C1 says that eligible land is wholly or mainly abandoned or neglected. Can I say in the light of the discussion that we've already had and the written discussion of last week it's still not even obvious to me why those criteria should be in there so I guess my first point is going to anybody any really explain the rationale behind those and justification and then the secondary question is going to be what nurse do they mean anyway please. First of all can I say that we very much welcome the principle of this whole section part 4 and section 48 being in the bill because it fills a gap in the current provisions which is that the public interest in ownership of land cannot be tested other than in crofting land so it's a very important principle and we welcome that we see it very much as a last resort power or matter rather than a first use power but as you say the devil is in the detail of all of this and we've got serious reservations about it I have to say I am not clear why abandoned or neglected has been introduced and there was a dialogue with Mr Thompson and Mr Thompson last week and the solicitor who was present about some of that now in thinking further about it I think there are probably two reasons two potential reasons one is that it's there for an ECHR reason it's there to try and protect in in what is an interference in a property right effectively is to try and make sure that that is less challengeable under ECHR than would otherwise be the case however having said that I could if that is the case but I'm not clear that is the case I'm not clear that I would actually be required because it seems to me a very substantially greater hurdle than for examples required in the crofting part 3 right to buy where you simply are finding on whether the matter further sustainable development as in and is in the public interest so I'm not clear about that I think the other reason however could be a quite innocent reason if I could put it that way not that the other one's sinister but and that is simply it is only there to provide for what is abandoned or neglected land and if that is the case then that would not be unreasonable the problem with that is it then leaves you because that's the only definition on the face of the bill it then leaves an unintended consequence which is that land that is not abandoned or wholly or mainly abandoned or neglected but nonetheless is in need of development sustained development it would be ruled out of consideration and that's so that's the that's the big trap in here I think and I think it would be important to clarify you know precisely why is this here again I don't think it's impossible to work through this but at the minute it's not entirely clear why that's there and I hope that but I think there are two possible reasons I think those might be them from the point of view of our piece of land up until June last year I think we could have well defined it as neglected by the land owner had done absolutely nothing for several years after he came up and chopped down all the trees and such like that's not neglected it was pretty awful what he did it was illegal and various other things but it wouldn't fall in the definition of neglected and and it certainly wasn't abandoned because he did know his property rights so I would go with Peter I think this this is very small but my concern is that the land isn't being used in our case and I know it's a specific the land is not able to be used in the way in which the planning designation and the community at large have defined it to be used and therefore they are damaging the value of the land in the way in which the community has had set it's stall out and I would have and this is an entirely personal view an issue with the ECHR there are property rights but property owners also have responsibilities to their communities rights and responsibilities do need to be somewhat balanced I'm not saying I'm sorry and that sounds terribly bold but I'm not saying you know you can take over everybody's land but if you're part of a community you do have a responsibility to try and live with that community and work with that community all of us do and and so I think there is a sort that there has to be some kind of balance there rather than the property rights exclusively swamp everything else thank you John what well I too was surprised to see that being such a restrictive area of potential rights and in a kind of negative way I would have preferred to have seen it this is me just speaking is me now as something about fulfilling the fullest potential for sustainable development rather than being proven to be abandoned or neglected but as Peter said I think there probably was a hint of the EHCR in the back of the minds of the of the drafters and also I suspect looking at the urban situation where perhaps abandon and neglect can be more easily identified than it can be in a rural situation especially if we're looking at larger tracks of land so that's my good job site and the building that we're talking about so this was probably written at the time when they were thinking about that extension to urban I think yeah I'm wondering whether you and I've jumped on to 97g62 whether something that's been said so far suggests that sustainable development ought to include leaving land wild because I think there may be areas where part of what you would want to see would actually be the meadow being left alone and other things may be around it do we believe that that could be part of the current definition of sustainable development place well I suppose that I don't suppose that we know that the sustainable development is defined in three ways and in a sense this is what's the problem at the heart of the definition of abandon and neglect it it may deal with one of the three things but it doesn't necessarily deal with the other two and as you know better than I certainly do in this committee who must deal with sustainable development all the time I mean it's about an environmental component which could be exactly what Mr Dorn has just described but sustainable development is also about economic and social development and if you stick to abandon and neglected and this is the definitional point I think the difficulty with that is that it looks like abandon and neglected it is a physical construct of the land rather than about the the the sustainable development of the land and the whole policy purpose of this bill in the land reform act originally was about furthering sustainable development so I think there's a there's a bit of a trap here because of the way the thing is currently defined I do think it's sortable I think it'd be possible to have a third criteria because if abandon and neglected is to do what you described convener which I can readily see then you could also have abandoned or neglected or in need of sustainable development or sustained development and that would allow the social economic considerations to be considered the other way to do it I mean the currently the the bill is drafted looks to define some of what ministers have to have regard to in relation to abandon and neglected in regulation but we think there's a problem because abandon and neglected just looks like the physical thing and not not the wider parameters I've just described so you could you could either add those that third criterion or you could define neglect and you could define abandonment on the face of the bill and that might allow through that definition to look at economic and social development as well as the physical attributes of the land so I think there are problems with from our point of view with the definition as it is I don't think it's I think it is sortable and in fact the bill team in discussion with yourself last week Mr Don seemed to me to be saying that they were looking at how you define some of these things on the face of the bill and it'll depend where that takes us I guess I'm hoping that this might have comments though because I think if and I I read that discussion the same way but I think they probably need a bit of help because to be honest my interpretation is exactly what we've just said that I think this came up you can see the gap site in in your town you know what it looks like and it may in fact be a sort of old coal yard or something we will know and there's a bit of a wood behind and and that's not been a band and that's just the way it's I've been so you can see how this kind of definition would work in many environments but it might have absolutely nothing to do with other environments so I guess we need to expand that but I guess they would like some help in knowing how to expand that and I wonder if anybody else has any any comments as to where you might go we had a particular issue when we started because our view was or the view presented to us was development was all about steel and concrete and tarmac and bricks and all the rest of it our view was very clearly this this was about environmental and social benefit for the community it was a facility for the community we didn't intend just to leave it to go wild in fact quite the opposite we recognise that most of the trees will in time need to be cut down because they're reaching the end of their 200 250 year life and therefore you need to develop in in as much as you need to change and move on and try and maintain on improve on the environment so we had this very real problem but sustainable development was was certainly what we would wish to do and and that's what we believe we we should get and what unfortunate I will say this we can't get out of the planning process at the moment so although we have land as public open space the only protection we've managed to get on it is a tree protection order but that doesn't do anything for all of the other issues about it just stops and being chopped down without advising the council so there's no development capability and we have a long history to this of trying to improve the land and we could go through with it through we explain it if somebody wished to but probably not now it's a long and involved process as it is Dave perhaps had a little documentary on one part of that and then you can move on no I just wanted to raise a related point about the ownership of the land or is that something Nigel was planning to come on to again it's 97 inch and close sea that if the owner of the land were to remain is its owner that ownership would be inconsistent with furthering the achievement of sustainable development in relation to the land I mean that that is going to be almost impossible to prove and I just wonder why we need it given that we've now got the part judgment in relation to crofting and criteria laid out there that the minister approved you know which defined to a great extent what sustainable development was I mean I just wonder if the panelist you know have a comment on whether we need this clause at all well I think this is a killer clause frankly I think that you could go through all the process you could in the face of it this is a matter of interpretation but you could in the face of it demonstrate that the land and on the current terms was wholly or mainly abandoned or wholly or mainly neglected and yet it could also be found that in itself the ownership of the land by the current owner was not inconsistent with furthering sustainable development and therefore that the minister would be bound to reject the application so I think it's potentially a killer clause in that sense and I really don't understand how this is probably my lack of understanding and it probably can be explained but if you've got a series of criteria the minister must judge they must first of all you know agree that it is abandoned or neglected land they've got to search in the public interest for their sustainable development why this test is necessary I don't know but also why would it be wise to leave open a situation that you approved something was abandoned or neglected but it could still be rejected because of itself it did not the ownership the current ownership did not of itself mean that the land could not within rather their ownership was not inconsistent with furthering sustainable development I don't these two tests seem to be in opposition so I think there's some quite tricky stuff in there convener I just wanted to ask the law society you make reference to kind of parallels with the procedure for compulsory purchase just to expand on that point and say is there any guidance from that which we might be able to draw in terms of dealing with the question of abandoned or neglected land identifying ownership obviously compulsory purchase would involve an advertising type mechanism and as long as you have something as open and transparent as that that should assist if you are unable to identify the the true owner of the land but it doesn't specifically assist in kind of the the abandoned or neglected point per se just don't we're just talking about ownership there it's effectively identifying that who is the owner yeah so if you have your Edinburgh Gazette and your local newspaper advertisements but it doesn't help us with the definitional aspect of what's abandoned or neglected no I don't think the society want to comment more fully on those definitions at this time because it's a minefield unless you are willing to grasp the net land and provide the definition and we'll comment on it at that stage yeah that's fascinating but we didn't know we give you minefield not intentionally of course sorry where are we 97g 5b1 requires us to specify the owner of the land isn't that in the light of what's just been said its own problem we're making earlier about identifying the owner it runs through different parts of the provisions part 2 and part 3a and I mean if I understood what Mr Wood was saying that as long as the community had taken every possible effort and followed all the procedures to identify the owner but couldn't then there shouldn't be an impediment on them getting permission to nonetheless pursue the purchase of the land is that yes okay could I go back to 97c3e we've already discussed it I'm not going to try the law latin but land that falls to the crown either because the owner simply cannot be identified or because it falls in succession and there is no succeder why should that be exempt can anybody explain to me the answer last week was it was about process which I don't really buy it may may change the process but surely it should be open for a community to have access to that land yeah well that would be my view but I think it's I think it's in the bill because because you because by definition you can't define the owner therefore it has fallen to the to the crown it it that's why bone of a canty is mentioned because it's excluded land because nobody can identify the owner and if you can't identify the owner it would be excluded land but but I guess the problem comes back to the point about if it was in the if it was in the ownership of the qltr then can you know can a community exercise and he writes over that that would be the point at that point sorry this is this if you forgive me is is is the policy point which I'd like to address we tend to leave out the crown because we've I left out the crown yeah just first almost the first lesson you learn in law is that the crown will be excluded why why on earth should it matter that the land is actually known to be in the possession or occupation of the crown can can anybody rationalise where that should be the case thank you okay that's that's fine may I push on then because 97g6d requires us to say that we know all about all the rights and interests in the land I'm glad there's a lawyer here and we can say anything about the service pipes lines water courses etc stuff under the ground could anybody please explain to me why they think that's a good idea why it might be there in the first place and convince me that it isn't a daft idea because it's almost impossible to know what's under the land until you've dug it up which is a stupid thing to do but I don't understand it but we also in our written submissions made the point that we thought this this required clarification that actually should be eligible rather than not eligible does anybody else have any comment to make on that sorry I'm rather feeding you the words but I'm I'm hoping this I'm hoping people will disagree with me I think the others have been dealt with if you oh no sorry could I just pick up I'd like to come back rather picture it up briefly but the law society at page 39 I think of the oh sorry in our in your submission talked about clean titles which you would get under a compulsory purchase order and the probability that you wouldn't get clean title under this do you have any further thoughts as to whether in this kind of situation a community should be getting a clean title if they've gone through this kind of process that they would be guaranteed that the title was immune from subsequent challenge opportunity for business for yourselves is there any real downside to that no thank you if you remove all of these criteria that we've been talking about how do you ensure that this is the policy of last resort that Mr Peacock referred to in his opening remarks on this one we're not arguing that we should remove all the criteria it's a particular point Mr Thompson made of that one part about demonstrating having to demonstrate that the ownership if kept in the current ownership would be inconsistent with sustainable development I just don't think that's possible to prove that and therefore it becomes a problem but I mean ultimately the community our hope would be and the bill specifies that the community would also have to show that they'd sought all other means to get the land before they made the application which presumably would be seeking to negotiate or discuss matters with a land owner making an offer for the land and so on so I don't think and these are entirely appropriate tests that seem to us so that kind of puts this at the very end of the queue you were expected in fact if you couldn't show you'd tried to get the land by other means you wouldn't be able to progress your application under 3a so that makes it very much a fallbacker power nonetheless it's that power that focuses the minds of people and as we've seen in the crofting right to buy that's given rise to the climate within which debate and discussion about negotiated land purchases can proceed so I think I hope that answers the point thank you very much try and move on to the interpretation of sustainable development which might be the escape clause the escape tunnel from this particular previous debate and kicking off there again Nigel dawn I think possibly well I think convener we've probably already covered everything that I thought we were going to have to cover because I was particularly concerned about wild land being sustainable development so I think in places it might be I don't know whether anybody has any other comment to make about that physiology reiterate the point convener that I think the crofting legislation and the park judgment gives us a very clear steer in relation to this you know hey well yes please donald I have to declare because obviously I've been involved in park and I've dragged it out for 11 years it is still in court so it is sub-subdurus so that the 2012 was simply a sideshow to a share of court action that is still on going not get involved in park therefore I think that's proof in itself that the 2003 act is full of pitfalls yes it struck me that the whole question of having to deal with you know this in terms of sustainable development and so on that we've teased that out quite well but what I'd be looking for I think ultimately is to decide whether the panel thinks that you know it's inconsistent with furthering the achievement of sustainable development in relation to land if the ministers you know find it difficult to satisfy that do you think we should put something in the face of the bill try and decide what sort of land in fact what sort of way in which they would define land because previously we've had the sense that the sort of development in Dunblane is not the kind of development that you're talking about and we have to be somewhat clear about that because there's a much wider way in which we can define land that should be in community ownership this is this is really difficult territory legally I guess but the I mean the whole purpose of the the bill that land reform act as I've said earlier is about promoting sustainable development and removing obstacles for sustainable development and I'm not understanding what Mr Bird said if you actually look at the park case one of the parts of that is where the the judges make comment on what is sustainable development and they basically say it's a well understood term that's to do with use and development of land and I guess that's what it this comes down to it's about it's about how you describe the use and development of land and the the ministers thought of that is very openly revealed in the in the early decision letters about park both when they refused an application and said why it didn't meet the sustainable development test and then when they approved it and showed why it did meet the sustainable development test so I think that the there's quite a lot of kind of I don't mean this in a technical term but case law in the sort of more general usage of of what sustainable development is about I don't think this is in that sense too difficult the key thing is to allow a community to make the case that what they are proposing would advance or further the achievement of sustainable development and the problem with the current definitions around Ivan and neglected looks like he couldn't make that case currently but I think again I think that can be I think that can be dealt with David Prescott yes I just feel that in some ways having been through it all that the the planning process does really set out a framework of of the development concepts of a of a physical community whether that's truly sustainable I'm not going to try and argue but that certainly I would see in in the urban environment being something where is the use of the land in line with the planning designations that that are on the land and they're democratically derived and fully consulted and developed and and and picked over and or are the proposed changes from the community recognition that that usage isn't the right usage anymore but what they're looking for is a is a second stage that's probably a bit complicated to to work through but I think the planning process has a lot to offer in the urban area in terms of is is the community task and I'll be quite honest if there had been designation of the land that we wanted to buy had already been designated as land for building then I wouldn't have expected to have for us to have got a right to buy I freely admit that and we wouldn't have started but it was designated as open space and that's what we wanted to to use it for for the community. There are some interesting places where planning applications go in which effectively blight the land and we'll keep getting rerun forever which which do need to be thought through but I think the planning process is an extremely strong place to start in an urban or more urban environment. That's a good point I think to to take on board for us because you know we do rely on that planning process and getting it right and having the community's views well rehearsed and taken on board and you know we all know that sometimes there are wider criteria that planners use that override what communities actually want I can think of examples where people have appealed these before but generally speaking we're kind of in agreement that the planning that the the local plans that have been agreed in that process are materially helpful in general to back up what the ministers then have to to decide upon. Right well I don't know what they will be saying you all again but that's entirely possible in various stages in this I think the point that I was just going to make is that we we're going to be amending part 3 of the 2003 act with regard to the crofting at the second stage here. I'm just hoping that we aren't going to see such major changes to that that affect our approach to the use of part 3 in this stage of community right to buy. We've seen obviously what the Scottish Government are proposing in terms of consultation and I know from the meetings that have taken place in the course of the last week or two there's a pretty clear consensus across all the interests that's emerging on this and I would be hoping to be very reassuring to the committee you shouldn't worry too much about this it looks like it's heading in the right direction and the Scottish Government are dealing with it entirely appropriately by the looks of things. Thank you very much for all of that it's been a long session I'm going to close it here because we have other business that we've got to deal with but I'll just before I do I want to say that at the next meeting on the 3rd of November the committee will take evidence from minister on the affirmative SSI the public water supplies Scotland regulations 2014. I take evidence from two panels of stakeholders on the community empowerment Scotland bill and now ask the public gallery to be cleared and I'll move this session into private thank you.