 Welcome everyone to the fourth meeting in 2017 of the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, can I remind everyone presently to ensure that their mobile phones are on silent for the duration of the meeting? No apologies have been received and so we are going to move straight on to agenda item 1, decision on taking business in private. At agenda item 1 the committee has asked to decide whether to take item 5 in private. This is to consider the committee's approach to looking at the impact of the UK's departure from the EU on policy areas within its remit. Are all members agreed? Item 2, the second item on the agenda is the evidence session for the Minister of Transport and the Islands on rail services in Scotland. This session was originally scheduled for the 18th of January but has to be postponed. It forms part of a series of regular updates to the committee, allowing it to monitor rail network and rail service and performance issues. Can I ask any members before we go any further whether there are any interests to declare, Gail? Yes, thank you convener. I have an interest which is on my register. I am an honorary vice-president of Friends of the Four North Line. I am honorary president of the Scottish Association for Public Transport and honorary vice-president, rail future UK. I welcome the minister for the transport and island, Humza Yousaf. I would also like to welcome Bill Revy, the director of rail at Transport Scotland, and Gary Bogan, head of the franchise management unit at the Scottish Government. We have a huge amount to cover this morning, and I would appreciate if members could keep their questions as short as possible, and witnesses in reply to the questions could keep their answers as succinct as possible. I invite Mr Yousaf if he would like to make an opening statement. Thank you on that note, convener, and I will keep my opening remarks brief. Can I first of all offer the committee my sincere apologies for my absence at the previous committee unavoidable due to illness? When I last appeared before the committee in October, we shared a mutual desire to see a focus by the ScotRail Alliance on improving performance to the levels that we expect, but of course, more importantly, the passenger expects. I had demanded a performance improvement plan, intended firstly to stabilise performance, and then, of course, to improve performance thereafter. At that last hearing, I reported that the moving annual average to the public performance measure was at 89.6 per cent against the contractual trigger of 90.3 per cent. At that moving annual average has improved to 90 per cent by period 10.3 per cent from the target that will lift ScotRail out of improvement plan territory. We are seeing encouraging signs that the current four-week period that we are in could potentially see a further increase in the moving annual average. On the performance improvement plan, our latest information is that over 86 actions have been complete. The remainder of actions, the vast majority of them, are under way. Before Christmas, members will have noted that we look to thank passengers for their patience during a difficult period with the offer of a free week's travel to season ticket holders. I believe that this offering is a demonstration alongside our tireless work on the performance improvement plan of our commitment to ScotRail's passengers and services. There will also be further discounts offered to weekly and less frequent travellers, whether for work or for leisure, particularly using the ScotRail smart card for journeys. All of this is backed by £3 million of funding—£1 million, of course, more than many were calling for. At the time of the announcement, I made it very clear that we would bring forward further details of the scheme in early 2017. I was also clear at that stage that there will be a contribution from ScotRail, as well as from the Scottish Government. Members will see shortly more details on that, confirming £3 million of funding and, of course, a little bit more in terms of detail around the offering for season ticket holders both monthly and annual, and for weekly holders. Finally, I would like to conclude by saying a few remarks on another topic, which has had a fair bit of coverage since I last appeared. That is the further devolution of Network Rail. I am strongly of the view that greater devolution of Network Rail's functions to Scotland will deliver better outcomes for passengers and the taxpayers. I have therefore charged Transport Scotland with establishing an expert panel to provide practical advice on how we can achieve that outcome in a manner that fully accords with Network Rail's reform agenda, as set out by the UK Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, last summer. With that, I am, of course, happy to answer any further questions that you or other members may have. Thank you, minister. The first question is going to be from Stuart. Thank you very much, convener. I have just looked up the PPM figures, and at the moment for today, ScotRail was running at 93 per cent, which is 4 per cent ahead of the GB figure. I do look at them every day. There has been only one day this month where I found ScotRail behind the GB. Does this tell us that the performance recovery plan is working? If we end the day with 93 per cent for the sake of argument, presumably that will replace the day in the moving average a year ago that was rather worse than that, hence we will be contributing to improvement. Or are there still issues that we should be concerning ourselves with? I thank the member for that question. I would expect no lesson to go into the technical detail of PPM. I would say that his broad question about the performance improvement plan, since that improvement plan, as I said in my opening remarks, we first saw stability. Of course, we have now seen improvement over the last few periods, which is encouraging. Not at the place I want it to be, 90.3 per cent is the target to lift ScotRail out of the performance improvement plan territory, therefore, of course, but logically no longer requiring an improvement plan. There are still 0.3 per cent away from that. I think that Phil Wester explained this when he was in front of committee last. The moving annual average, of course, the reason for that is that it takes in seasonal variations, and that is the point of the moving annual average, calculated between periods and then of course moving there. It is a rolling average. The point of that, of course, means that if you had a very good period 11 last year, therefore you have to have a better period 11 this year in order to see some element of improvement, period 11 last year was fairly good. Therefore, making huge leaps in performance improvements might be challenging, but as we currently stand, the performance, if it stays at a relatively high level as it is today, then we should see some upward movement in performance at the end of this period as well. Thank you for that. I also note that the sleeper performance of the other franchise is running at 100 per cent for the fifth consecutive day. Of course, they have only five trains, so it is not perhaps—to have a long route—but let us move on. Very briefly, Abelio and Transport Scotland are both engaged in improving performance. Are there particular issues that Abelio and Transport Scotland have at the top of the list of things that they are looking at to continue to improve performance? The improvement plan was split into the three broad sections around infrastructure, which is largely under Network Rail, such as the rolling stock, which is the train operating company and the operation, which is also the responsibility of the train operating company. As members know, there are 249 actions and even more initiatives that feed on from those points. There is emphasis and priority going into those 249. Some of those inevitably, as the performance improvement plan details, will take a long time. Kilometres of cables that need to be replaced for signals, for example, cannot be done necessarily overnight. Members will understand that. There is a real focus on that in those three broad areas—infrastructure, rolling stock and operations. We are seeing, as we said, some improvement. There has also been a focus on those initiatives that improve the passenger experience. Perhaps skipping stops is an example of that. We saw a third reduction between the period before that period 9 and period 10. That is positive as well. Acknowledging the information that came out with Mr Stevenson's question, minister, the public was interested to know what, if any, sanctions had been applied to Bellio for failing to meet contractual punctuality and cancellation targets. You will timeline that, please. Yes, I mean that I can. First of all, it is probably worth saying that it is obviously within the train operator's best interest that performance is as good as it can be. Reputational damage means, of course, that less people take the railways, if less people take the railways, that obviously impacts on their profits. There is an inherent self-interest for the train operator. I must also say, from speaking to Phil Wester, the management team, right the way through to those on the stations, conductors and drivers. I have spoken to numerous members of staff in ScotRail, and they are hugely committed. Nobody is lax a days ago, but I understand the reputational damage that has been done to the railway, but they also want the best passenger experience. There is a self-interest, I should say that, right from the offset. On what other sanctions can be applied, it has been well rehearsed in the public that, ultimately, a performance dipped to certain levels could be termination of the contract. Even if it did not get quite to that level, performance will be one of the things that will be discussed when we get to discussions around the breakpoint. When we have those discussions, we know that the breakpoint is 2020, and discussions will take place before that. Of course, performance will be one of the measures that is looked at, so if performance consistently is not matching up to where we expect it to be or is not improving, that will be part of the consideration of the breakpoint. On top of that, the last thing that I will say, because I know that the convener wants us to be succinct, is that the ORR, the regulator, also has the ability to, if they feel that their improvement plan—that a train operating company is not making all the efforts practically possible—is not exerting all the effort that they can to achieve that performance, and they can investigate themselves. The regulator can also investigate. That is the final thing that I will say in terms of standards in the railways. People know about our squire regime, the robust auditing regime that has been loaded across the UK. Of course, if ScotRail, when they fall behind on certain criteria, they have to make a financial contribution, and they have done to the tune of the whole squire that is sitting at 2.0 at £6 million, once the deductions are taken out of that. Thank you very much, Stephen. I think that Jamie wants to drill down on contractual obligations. Sorry, Jamie. Thank you, convener. I think that the minister answered quite a lot of my question in that previous answer, so I won't dwell on it too long. I think that it is important to understand specifically what actions you can take if there is consistency in failing to meet the target. Is it true that if they rise above the 91.3% that the improvement plan stops or continues? I think that that is something that is quite unclear. The second part of that question is just that if they continue to fail to meet that target but are somewhere above the trigger for the default limits in terms of the contractual limits, there is no man's land in the middle, which we wonder what action you can still take if they are in that zone, if you like. I will go back to my original point. I think that it is a really good question as well when I will come back to the performance plan. The second part of his question is that it is in the train company's inherent interest to make profit to improve that. I will read from the ORR's latest letter. They talk about the fact that they will be meeting with the ScotRail Alliance again next month so that they will meet with them regularly. They say that it remains a case if at any point you fail to provide evidence that you are doing everything necessary and brackets to the greatest extent reasonably practicable to deliver the performance improvement plan or achieve your regulated performance outputs, then we may initiate a formal performance investigation. They are not at that stage at all. In fact, I should reiterate and re-emphasise that ScotRail is demonstrating improvement. The moving annual average and the reduction of skip-stopping across a number of measures are improving, so it is going in the correct trajectory. That ORR letter recognises that and says that it recognises the efforts in the recent upturn in performance. To answer your question about that kind of no-man's land, as you described it, from our perspective, there are a number of things that we can do. Continuing the performance improvement plan, there could be a formal investigation from the ORR, but I go back to the point that, inherently, it would be outwith the train operating company's interest to allow performance to fall to that. We have no evidence of that happening. Performance is going in the right trajectory as opposed to the wrong trajectory. On the first question, which I thought was a very good one, what happens with the performance improvement plan? If, for example, at the end of the railway year, they are out of improvement plan territory, they are 90.4 or 90.5, whatever they are, my view would be, currently speaking, that I would have a discussion with ScotRail and, of course, there may be a change in perhaps personnel at the top of ScotRail. I would have a discussion with ScotRail. Because some of the actions in the performance improvement plan are due to continue into the next railway year, i.e. beyond the end of March, I think that it would be sensible for us to keep monitoring that performance improvement plan as a live document, so that would be my opinion on that. Of course, once we get to that stage, first we just have to focus on getting to that 90.3 and then take it from there. John, I would like to take John on. Is your question specifically on the improvement plan? Minister, you are giving full answers for which we appreciate. I would ask you to appreciate that we are less than a quarter of the way through the questions, and time is quite about the essence. Do you believe that you will reach the target at 91.3 by the end of March? The first target is 90.3. That is what we have said. The target is to get out of performance improvement plan territory. As Phil said a couple of weeks ago, they feel confident that, by the end of the railway year, they should get to that 90.3. That would be the first target. When they get to 91 or 91.3, that will be certainly later than the line. I would say that the target of 90.3 is what they are aiming for for the end of March, not 91.3. That has been made clear on a number of occasions. Okay, but you will reach 90.3 by the end of March? It is not me, ScotRail, whether they will reach 90.3. Certainly when Phil was here in front of the committee a couple of weeks ago, he was reasonably confident that I am not saying that that would be an easy target for them to reach, but we are certainly pushing them to reach that 90.3 by the end of the railway year, if they possibly can. However, as long as they are showing improvement trajectory, that is what I want to keep seeing. So that was not a yes or no, but... Phil Vester leaving. Alex Hynes arriving. Any comments? I mean, I wish Phil well in his new endeavours. I enjoyed a good relationship with Phil. There was a period of around four to six weeks where he was phoning me every day at seven in the morning at my insistence on just hearing about the morning peak, so I probably spoke to Phil more than I spoke to just about any other member of my family or friend. So I built up a good relationship with Phil. I think he's very committed to the railways and continues to be, so I wish him well, but also I've heard some very, very good things about Alex Hynes, not knowing him personally, but speaking to those in the railway industry, he comes with a very formidable reputation. I mean, I think one of the things I appreciated about Phil Vester was, he was pretty open straightforward, he had a very good handle on the practical aspects, how things were actually going, and gave us, I thought, good answers at committee. So I'm hopeful and I hope you can reassure us that Mr Hynes will be equally open and frank with the committee. I will certainly be the direction or what I expect him to do, not just with committee, but I think communication with passengers is vitally important in this role as well. So again, he comes with a good reputation on those fronts and we'll look forward to that continuing. Thank you. Moving on to a slightly different subject, Peter. I'm going to ask you about the project delivery. There was an Ernst and Young report that stated that increases the original funding was £1,131 million, and that increased to £1,510 million, an increase of £379 million, but when we asked Phil Vester about the figures, he reckoned that that wasn't an accurate figure, and the correct number he reckoned was £293 million that the project deliveries had risen by. Which figure do you recognise? The member for the question, actually both figures are technically correct, they're just looking at different periods. So the Ernst and Young report looks at the major projects, the five projects that it details, that began in period 4 towards the end of control period 4 and will end in the early part of control period 6. That total that was mentioned in the £379 million takes into account in that entire period, the figure that Phil used, 297 or there or there abouts, was just control period 5, so that was that figure. Technically speaking, both figures are correct, they're just looking at slightly different periods. Okay, right, I can understand that. Sorry, I kind of understand that, it seems like statistics and I can't remember what the other thing they're called, but I'm a bit confused by that. I wasn't sure that I was going to accuse anyone of saying that. Well thank you, convener, that seems to be unnecessary. Perhaps it would help the committee if we could see that laid out exactly how that figure is broken down, minister, and that could be supplied to the committee after the meeting, if I may. Sorry, Peter, not to interrupt. That's fine, I mean I can understand if it is letting the different periods in, obviously that could be a correct analysis of the thing. But the Ernst and Young report also makes a number of recommendations for action by Transport Scotland. Can you provide an update on the implementation of these recommendations to date? Where are we with them at the moment? Yes, I can. Of course I will if the committee wants me to write to them on further details, but Mr Chapman understands it, so I'm pleased that at least there is some understanding, but I'll try to lay it out in a little bit. Are you not suggesting that I need to lift my intellectual level to Mr Chapman? Well, I'm trying to take it that you didn't mean that. I certainly didn't want to suggest that. I will leave you to answer Mr Chapman's question. I didn't want to suggest that, of course, at all. What I would say to Mr Chapman's question is that there are a number of recommendations made at the Ernst and Young report, and a significant number were for Transport Scotland. I'm pleased to say that, yes, all of those are being undertaken at the moment. Where you can break them down into three very broad headings is ensuring that there's better quality of reporting from Network Rail. The second one would be around the governance, which is probably the most important. Governance around current projects, so the establishment of the major projects portfolio board that is chaired by the chief executive of Transport Scotland, Roy Brannan. He sits on that, chairs that. It has an overview, and therefore there's a little bit more in terms of accountability between Network Rail and Transport Scotland. The third would be improving how we do major projects both to development and delivery for the future. We know that we have control period 6 coming in 2019-24. The way that we do major projects is simply not fit for purpose, so we're consulting through the HLOS process, the high-level output specifications, and we're consulting on that to determine a better way of delivering major rail projects. They're well under way. They come under those broad three categories, and as we say, we'll continue to make the improvements and follow on from the recommendations at the Ernst and Young report to the highlights. So you're content that as we go forward, we will come forward with more accurate figures than what we've received in the past. That must be the aim, surely? Absolutely. You're right, that must be the aim, because the way it is currently done is simply not fit for purpose. It must be the aim now. Can I promise you absolutely that there won't be a single out overrun on a single project in the future at all? Of course I wouldn't make that promise, but we certainly should be aiming absolutely without doubt to have better cost estimates in the beginning before projects when they're at that developmental stage and then following on into the future. So yes, he's right, that should be absolutely the aim. Okay, thank you. Okay, Richard, I think that you've got the next question. Yeah, good morning, minister. You wrote to the UK Secretary of State for Transport in November 2016 asking for control of Network Rail to devolve it to Scotland and basically he wrote back to you and said no because they didn't believe that it should be going beyond the Smith commission. Can you explain what benefits you think that full devolution of Network Rail would bring to Scottish rail passengers and freight users and how do you envisage or how would you envisage have been structured, regulated and funded if it was devolved? Yeah, it's quite a lot in that question and what I would say is the general aim of devolution of Network Rail and the benefits that would accrue due to that devolution is not just something that's shared by the Scottish Government, I'm pleased that it is shared by the Scottish Government, it's shared by some of other political parties around this table. But on top of that, you know, maybe I can just read out the quote from the reform Scotland think tank and Tom Harris, who was co-author of that former Labour Transport Minister, said, we need fundamental change to the governance of Network Rail. The Scottish Government is responsible for the strategic direction and funding of the Scottish rail network, but this responsibility cannot be properly exercised while Network Rail remains answerable to the UK Government. Reform Scotland believes that Network Rail in Scotland should be fully accountable to the Scottish Government and that means that it must be devolved. That's coming from an independent think tank. Various reports into Network Rail, the Shaw report, McInultie report and others have also made similar overtures around devolution of Network Rail. The point is that the principle is a well-established one across, not just the Scottish Government, but across many experts in the rail industry. On the actual benefits, it could probably split them into three broad categories. Firstly, around timetabling. Timetabling is essentially important for rail delivery. Timetabling is currently done in Milton Keynes. We think that it would be much better if it was done up here in Scotland, closer to transport to Scotland and the Scottish Government. What we have just talked about with Mr Chapman in terms of major projects delivery, of course infrastructure projects are still reserved to down south. If that responsibility over major projects was up here, we could closely align and much closely align with the aims and objectives of the Scottish Government in transport to Scotland, there would be a clear line of accountability. I think that there could be considerable efficiencies made there. The last benefit would be the devolution of headquarter functions, largely around the legal, the property and the capacity issues. Those would be the three broad benefits around timetabling, major projects and each other functions. Richard, are you happy that there is no follow-up on that? No, not at all. Can I just say that I am a little bit confused because when we had Phil Verstyr in and he was asked specifically on this subject, he said that there would be absolutely no benefit from the control of network rail moving back to Scotland. My gut feeling is always to go with the man on the ground that is making the system work. Could you just explain to me why you are not taking his advice on that? No, he is employed by Network Rail and, of course, Network Rail has a standard view on that. I have spoken to Mark Carney on that. I do not want to misrepresent Mark Carney at all. He can speak for himself, but it is fair to say that he does not quite share the same level of devolution, the ambition that we have up here in the Scottish Government. There is an understanding that, if someone is employed by Network Rail, they would, rightly and understandably, speak on behalf of Network Rail. I would not expect Phil Verstyr to be speaking on behalf of the Scottish Government and saying what our Scottish Government ambitions are. My point remains, convener, if I may, that this is not just the position of the Scottish Government, but the position of other political parties, of respected think tanks, of various reports that have gone into Network Rail. I can only explain to you what our rationale is for our aims and ambitions. Of course, others who represent other organisations can do it on behalf of their organisations. I accept the comments that you made. The comments that I think that, if you look back at the official record that he was here representing everyone whilst he may have been employed by Network Rail, he was saying that there was such a good working relationship between all the organisations that they were pulling together as a team and making it happen. He stressed that it was a team involvement, and he could see no benefit. Maybe it is a political suggestion. Just on that issue, one of the questions that I was going to Phil Verstyr last week was that Network Rail had been the cause of some of the problems, delays and performance issues. Given that Network Rail's performance in 18 other areas of worse than in the ScotRail area, would it make a huge difference to performance, because it suggests that the other 18 railways are performing a lot better than ScotRail to bring them up above? I accept the point that, first, the convener's point. I do not want to say that the alliance has not been successful. Of course, the alliance is creating relationships that were not there previously. That is a good and that is a positive. I noticed that the Secretary of State for Transport in the UK Government wants to replicate the alliance model across different franchises in England and Wales, so that is a positive. On Rhoda Grant's question, it is still the indisputable fact that the 54 per cent of the delays as the reform Scotland report highlighted are still coming from Network Rail. My simple presumption on that is that, with 54 per cent of delays being attributable to Network Rail, the fact that we are paying £100 million towards the headquarters, the fact that they are responsible for those major projects that, as we know, have the cost overrun in the hundreds of millions, yet we do not have direct accountability over Network Rail for me. That is just not an acceptable situation. I am not arguing with that, but I am arguing with that. That would make a step change in performance, because its performance is worse in 18 other areas. Therefore, if its performance is better, it suggests that ScotRail is failing behind those other companies. There is no doubt that, in some measures and for some part, 37 per cent of the delays were caused by the train operating company, but still it remains the case that 54 per cent of the delays were down to Network Rail. I am not saying that if you had devolution that, magically, you would click your fingers and everything would be okay. I am simply saying that having that direct relationship with Network Rail would help us to be able to overcome some of the issues that would help to tweak up performance. I get frustrated when I hear from passengers, of course, understandably frustrated about signal faults, about track failures and I hear it day in and day out, so I understand why passengers get frustrated. It causes me to get frustrated. I wish I just had some direct accountability and some direct control over Network Rail so that we can have a closer relationship to tweak up. Not making a difference. No, I think that, as I said just a moment ago to the convener's remarks, I think that the alliance is making, you know, creating positive relationships. I just think that further devolution, more devolution could make even more of a difference. If I may, I am going to leave that there, because I think that that is something that some people have aspirations for, and I accept your aspirations. It may not be reflected ever. I am afraid that I am just going to leave it there, Stuart, if I may. I move on to John for the next question. Thanks. I mean, if I am allowed a supplementary on the previous discussion, you said that— No, no, no. I would ask you to move on to the question that we have identified purely because of time, John. Yeah, I actually think that we are all doing okay for a time, I have to say, but I accept your ruling. Concerning Edinburgh Glasgow Improvement project and Queen Street station, which are obviously interlinked, there has been some suggestion, especially from the ORR, that—well, both have slipped. Can you comment on either or both of those? Yes, I mean, the TOS process that we are currently going through is a complicated process. We know that from previous TOS orders that they are really straightforward. There was a slight delay in receiving the submission for the TOS from Network Rail, about a three-month delay. That, of course, then has an accumulative effect in terms of delays. You have to go through the statutory steps, as you know, the public local inquiry and so on, and so forth. To answer your question as succinctly as possible, the passenger and the commuter will want to see the key outputs of quicker journey times, i.e. that 42-minute journey times, and longer trains, those eight-car trains on the network. They are scheduled for December 18. I am determined, and I know that ScotRail Network Rail are focused on reaching that December 2018 deadline for the longer trains and the shorter journey times. Queen Street Station, when are we expecting that to happen? Yes, and this is where Phil Wester was correct a few weeks ago and, as identified by various reports, we have put out that there could be a risk of slippage when it comes to the end stages of development, so some of the aesthetic redevelopment of Queen Street and nothing that would affect, for example, or should not affect, the longer trains, i.e. the platform extensions, the longer trains, the shorter journey time, but there may well be some level of slippage. Now, we are working very closely with Network Rail. Obviously, the other stakeholders involved to try to identify what that level of slippage may be, but Phil was correct a few weeks ago in front of the committee to say that there could be a risk of that. He said that we expected the Taws unit to report back to the minister in July of last year, but the revised date for the report back is January or February this year. When is that report happening? The Taws report has been submitted to me as a Scottish minister. The approach going forward—I should say that there was a delay in us receiving the submission, and I just have to re-emphasise that. The Taws report is with me and has been with me. I have then tasked officials before making that order to go back to speak to the stakeholders to ensure that there are some nuances and modifications that have been made to that order to ensure that I give them a further opportunity to comment on that. What I did say when I met some of the stakeholders last week, I said that we are looking at making that order within weeks, as opposed to months and months and months down the line, so we should shortly be able to make that order. What I do not want to do is make it, and then, because of the modifications and perhaps some of the nuances that have been changed in that, then have more objections coming in at delays and, accumulatively, delays the project even further. If the report was delayed by six months, does that mean that the start of the work is delayed by six months? It was delayed three months when we received the submission and, therefore, some accumulative delay after that. No, it does not mean that because of that, then automatically there is a six-month delay. As we said, I am working with Network Rail, working with the partners to determine a better timetable, but the key thing for passengers and commuters, who want to see longer trains and who want to see a shorter journey time, we are still very focused on reaching that December 18 deadline. Thank you, minister. We are going to move from Glasgow, I think, further north. We are indeed. Good morning. Aberdeen Inverness and Highland Mainline, just to go back to the Network Rail Monitor and look at progress on both of those lines. Are you satisfied that we are ensuring the best value in the development and the delivery of both of those projects, given that there has, again, been some slippage and some escalating costs? Yes, we are still at—I am disappointed by the slippage that takes place on any of our projects, and I highlighted that very much at the time. What has been detailed in the Ernest and Young report stands? John, did you have a follow-up on that, you indicated that you may? We are not on this occasion, thank you. We will leave that one there. Rich has got the next question. Can we turn to the rolling programme of electrification? Maybe you can tell me, is it Network Rail that does this, or you, or who is responsible for electrifying the railing? Fund it that Network Rail carries out the work. With three projects, rather than to cope bridge, which was completed in 2014, still into Dumblane and Allawa, the one that I am very interested in, the Shorts line electrification under both the Allawa and the Shorts one under development. We are getting told that the Shorts budget remains at risk due to a number of emerging risk factors, including, well, in Shorts mining redemption, land risk assessment arrangements, further compliance issues. There are recently highlighted concerns about the risk to the budget of the Shorts line and the still in Dumblane and Allawa electrification projects. Can you outline what Transport Scotland is doing to minimise the risks to the budget? I understand the member's interest in the specific route. What I would say is that, on the back of the Ernest and Young report, where there seem to be found cost increases, the main recommendation that we took forward was to establish that major projects portfolio board. That gives the chief executive of Transport Scotland, who, of course, reports directly to me. It gives him an overview of all those projects and gives a level of involvement and scrutiny that previously did not exist. When it comes to the Shorts line delivery, the current delivery date is still March 19, but it is absolutely correct to have said that the cost increased from £80 million to £160 million, which, again, for me is just an unacceptable cost increase. That is a Network Rail increase. We know that electrification projects across the United Kingdom have suffered cost increases. In fact, some electrification projects across the UK have had to be scrapped because the cost has spiralled. The Network Rail will give its own answers on why that is the case and the ORR will give its reasons for why that is the case around compliance issues and other such matters. Fair to say, we are keeping a very close eye on that through the major projects portfolio board. We would expect that current deadline to be met. Did I mis-tear you there? Did you basically say that the cost has doubled? Yes. For the Shorts electrification from £80 million to £160 million. I know that we have done a lot of mining in Shorts, but not as much as that. I mean that this has been an inherent problem in electrification projects, but that does not take away from the fact that it should not happen. It goes back to the answer that I gave to Mr Chapman earlier in the session, that there must be a better way to do major rail project development and delivery. The current process for me, the current model for me, is broken, and therefore we need to have another way of doing things. Hence why we have put a consultation out, which is due to end in February, due to close in February, on how we deliver major rail infrastructure. I agree with his shock at the increase in prices. I find that unacceptable. We are still saying that, to finish off, that portable could be done by March 19. That is the current position, yes. Right. Stuart, I think that it is going to come in. I am just slightly surprised that the increase in prices that we heard, that is to it, sorry. Phil Vester told us that the electrification to Dumblayam is being delayed by issues related to the Victorian pedestrian bridge at Stirling that crosses platforms two and three. If you are not brief to give the answer now a written answer, probably we would do, but we would be interested to know just what the current timetable is on that. My own suggestion is whether the Dumblayam and Bridge of Allen and Dumblayam trains could alternatively be brought in at the Allawa platform, which would avoid that pedestrian bridge, and then a little crossover to take it back to the main line is being considered. However, that may be more than you wished to say now a written answer, probably we would do, convener. I think that I would accept Stuart Stewart's suggestion that a written answer on the detailed specifics of that question may be appropriate, and I will get our clerks to write to you about that. Okay, yes. I am happy to do that. I should say, convener, that you expressed before that question some surprise at the figure. Can I just say that that figure was made public in the Answer and Young report and has been public since the publication of that report? On Stuart Stevenson's point, yes, December 18 is still the target again in the Answer and Young report for the completion of Stirling, Dumblayam and Allawa, and on his wider point about bridges and other proposals, of course, I will happily accept writing to the member on that. Okay, we are going to move on to the next question, and Brodie is going to lead on that. Can I ask about the three weeks' travel, please? When will this happen, and how will it happen, and how will people claim it? On the back of this session, because I wanted to make sure that we gave some detail to the committee first, there will be a little bit more information that will go out from both myself and ScotRail, and the £3 million initiative of the free week will go ahead this summer. We always said when we announced this in December that further details would come in early 2017. Some of those details, for example, the deal will include particularly extra incentives for those on a season ticket if they move from the paper-based system on to the smart system, which is, of course, something that we want season ticket holders and others to do. The annual season ticket holder on a smart card will get a free week for them, or indeed for a friend or a member of their family. Plus, it will also get two off-peak return trips anywhere in Scotland. If you are a monthly season ticket holder, you will get a free week added to your next season ticket purchase, plus one off-peak return trip anywhere in Scotland. If you are a weekly season ticket holder on a smart card, you will also set to benefit with a complementary one-day return ticket anywhere in Scotland. A further offer for leisure passengers is in the pipeline for later this year, but what will happen is that they will be able to claim that in the summer period. However, in advance of that, in at least six to eight weeks, ScotRail will heavily advertise when that free week will be able to be claimed. There is plenty of time for passengers and commuters to take advantage of that offer. For a smart card holder, it is not for all season ticket holders? No, it will be for season ticket holders, but there is an additional advantage and additional incentive for a smart card. Obviously, we want to try to transfer and incentivise people to transfer from the paper-based system to the smart card system, so no, it will be for season ticket holders. Initially, the monthly and annual, I have also mentioned their weekly passes, but also for a less frequent traveller, so even if you do not have a season ticket, there will be additional incentives there if you are on the smart system, as opposed to just the paper system. There is a way of trying to incentivise people to go on to that system, which, of course, is a shared aim across political parties and, indeed, across state holders. We heard from Phil Verster that he did not know how they were going to deliver that, he did not know what systems they would use. Why was this announced before there was a plan drawn up on how you would deliver it? I do not accept that premise in the slightest. The broad principles of this free week were well established in advance of announcing it. That was £3 million, which would be a contribution from the Scottish Government, and that there would be a free week. Did you not know how they would deliver it? They would try and make it work? No, again, I do not accept that in the slightest. The principles were there, which would be £3 million, which would be a contribution from the Scottish Government in the Scottish Government in the Scottish Government. There would be a free week as well, and that would benefit monthly annual season ticket holders, as well as weekly and less frequent travellers. That was the announcement that was made. Of course, every time I made that announcement in public and, indeed, in any written communication in advance of the announcement, I said that more details would come out in early 2017. Opposition members wanted us to make full details of this available on 2 January when those fare rises took place. We did not do that because, of course, the fare system is a very complex one. All you have to do is pick up the newspapers this morning, and you will see that the rail delivery group is saying that there are 16 million different fare algorithms, and they are working to simplify that. Therefore, it is a complex system that we are working through with ScotRail, and we will be able to announce details as we go on. So, you do not know how it is going to be delivered, so what you are saying is that you do not know how it is going to be delivered. No, it is a complete misrepresentation of what I said. The details of it are well established. We have the funding absolutely in place. We have already said that they will be able to claim in the summertime. I have given details of some of those incentives and discounts at the moment. Further details for those who are less frequent travellers and for weekly travellers will be given in due course. Absolutely, we are living by the commitments that we made earlier this year. I will drill down on part of the information that you gave to Rita. Can you explain to me how much she is coming from ScotRail and where it is coming from in her budget? I will read from the press release that will probably be released shortly from Kathy Craig, who is a commercial director of the ScotRail Alliance. Her quote is, "...we are pleased to be contributing £1.8 million of square funds for the significant benefit for passengers. This is a sincere token of our appreciation for the patience and understanding. As we progress one of the biggest infrastructure improvements for Scotland's railway since Victorian times, there is more to the quote." That coming from ScotRail obviously shows that £1.8 million of the square funding will come from the existing transport Scotland budget. I know that Mike Rumbles wants to drill down on the actual use of the square fund, but before we go there, can I just understand? Filverster, when he came to us, said that the square fund had about £800,000 in it. That is what he said was available. You are looking for another £1 million from the square fund. Hold on, if I can just follow the logic. The square fund is actually made up of contributions for when ScotRail failed. What I do not understand is that we are in a position where you are saying that it is going to come from the square fund but that you want ScotRail to improve but that you need them to fail to be able to fund it. Can you just explain that to me, minister? Yes. It is an incorrect understanding, but not based on your understanding but based on what was said in committee a few weeks ago. In fairness to Filverster, he predicated what he said with the caveat that he was doing it from memory and that he was not entirely sure. In fairness to him, that is why the figures used were slightly incorrect. The square funding sits at £2.06 million once you deduct the £834,000 that has been spent on particular station improvements that have been agreed between ScotRail and the Scottish Government. Once you deduct that, the unallocated funding is £2.06 million, as I said in the parliamentary chamber last week. From that, there has been an agreement between ourselves and ScotRail to use £1.8 million of that. That would leave in the order of £200,000 to be spent, but, as you rightly say, convener, every four weeks that fund is topped up. Now, would I want it to be the case that absolutely ScotRail meet each of those robust criteria so that they do not have to pay square funding? Absolutely. If they do that, there will still be £200,000 left in that square pot or there are thereabouts. Realistically speaking, we know that those funds will continue to come because some of those improvements will take time inevitably, so that is the position that we are in. I will move on to Mike. I think that the critical point here is what concerns me and I think may concern Mike is that the square fund was set up for specific purposes. It seems to me that there are no trustees or no management structure for it that it is difficult to see how that fund is properly used. Mike, could you— Thank you, convener. Can I just follow on from that point before I ask another question? Philip Verster, when he came here, was quite clear and surprised the members of the committee, certainly surprised me when he said that the contractual position is that the decision about where to invest the square fund sits with Abelio ScotRail, not with the Scottish Government. This £1.8 million, he said, he had, quote, not agreed to and then 48 hours later, he resigns and now you come to the committee to say, and I quote you again, we have the funding already in place." I do not know why members are laughing, this is a serious point. The insinuation is an absolutely incorrect one. It is absolutely unfair to make a suggestion because after Philip Verster's coming to committee that somehow he resigned as a result of that, that was the insinuation that you were making, an absolutely incorrect one, an absolutely false one to have made. Frankly, I have a crass one to make as well. Phil was moving— Minister, in fairness, I think that you have a right to disagree and I would like to keep and would always seek in the committee to keep comments on disagreements rather than making it too personal. I would ask you to withdraw that and maybe answer the question that Mike has asked. I certainly do not agree with the insinuation that was made around Phil choosing to take on another opportunity in Network Rail. On the question that was asked when it comes to the contractual position, when it comes to spending square money, so taking the £834,000 that has been allocated, generally ScotRail will come with propositions, but it will be a discussion between Transport Scotland and, of course, then coming up to Scottish ministers, but Transport Scotland and ScotRail will come to an agreement on where to spend that money, contractually speaking. It is up to the Scottish ministers how that money should be spent, but generally speaking, as we have always done, we will do that in consultation and discussion with ScotRail. I ask, therefore, if I have got something wrong here. Phil Worcester, who comes to the committee, says, and I am quoting from the official report, that the contractual position is the decision about where to invest this money sits with Abelio ScotRail. You have just said that it is up to Scottish ministers. Obviously, and I am not insinuating anything, I am actually making a point to you and I would like you to address that. It is not insinuating anything. I am trying to get to the facts here. Phil Worcester comes to the committee, makes that point. You have come to the committee, makes the opposite point. There is obviously a disagreement between the two of you. Would you not agree? There is not a disagreement. If you read Phil's remarks, he said that he was working from memory. I would ask the member to bear that in mind that he was working from memory. He does not have, I do not imagine that Phil has a photographic memory of the contract in his head, so he was working from memory. I am more than happy to provide the member with the wording of the contract. That would be very helpful. He was obviously wrong when he said that his understanding was the contract, it was his decision and not yours. I am happy to write to the member with the contractual position. That would be very helpful to find out exactly what the contract actually says. The main point that I am trying to get at here is— Just before you go on to your next point, minister, I would rather that you did not write to the member. It is a matter raised by the committee. I would rather that you write to the committee and we will make sure that he has got it. Sorry. The contract is in the public domain, but I will extract that point and highlight it. That would be very helpful. This is such an important point because, as you have just again said today, the square fund is used for station improvements. When I asked Phil Worcester in my region in the north-east, he said that there is a real issue over in-station, which I have written to him. I am sure that he will reply fairly soon. The point was that I said to him that the money that is used for disabled access at, for instance, in-station in my region will be used for disabled access in other stations across the country as well. I am sure that it is not just for in-station, but the point that I am trying to make is that he gave us a clear impression that this fund was for those sort of developments. That is why he was not agreeing with your access to that fund, let us put it that way, for a different purpose. That is the disagreement that I am trying to get at. Is he wrong? The £1.8 million is unallocated. The £834,000 from the square funds are allocated, so it would be absolutely correct to say that the £1.8 million is not impacting on projects that are being delivered. Of course, that fund continues to get topped up every four weeks, every railway period. In terms of DDA compliance, in terms of working to make stations more accessible, the main funds for that, of course, are the access for all fund, which is a DFT fund, but there is a ring fence pot for Scotland, and that fund, which goes into the tens of millions, is helping to refurbish and, indeed, make more accessible around about in the order of 25 stations, has gotten up to 2019. Indeed, on top of that, in the franchise, there is a minor works fund, which is around £350,000, which is specifically there to ensure that accessibility is improved among stations. There is access for all, which is in the tens of millions of pounds. There is a minor works fund in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. There is square funding that is already allocated. The £1.8 million, of course, is unallocated, and it continues to be topped up of square funding as well. In terms of inch stations, which the member mentions, and he has written to me, of course, I will give him a response in due course. I am more than happy to meet with him to see if we can come and put forward a proposal for future access for all funds. There are some difficulties with that. I know that the member has spoken to me about what he thinks is a more cost-effective solution, and I will happily hear him out on that. I just want to final try on this. It will be if I understand that. I understand what you just said about all the other funds and everything that is available for disabled access to stations and so on, but Phil Verster was quite clear when I asked him. I asked him, and the official report is in there. I said that this fund could be used for things like disabled access at stations, so it is like an inch. I am not disagreeing with what you said at all, but the point that I am making is that £1.8 million could be used for that, and what you are doing is using it for something else. The £1.8 million is unallocated. The £834,000 is allocated, but we are not touching the £834,000. The £1.8 million is unallocated. For works on disabilities and improvement to access, access for all would be the correct fund, as well as the minor works fund. That square fund will continue to be topped up, and even once we deduct what we are deducting for the fares, there will continue to be £200,000 in that, plus whatever is topped up every four weeks on top of that. I think that, if I may, Jeremy wants to come in on it. I think that there is some concern on the management of the square fund and how it is used. Sometimes it is used to do various things in allocated funds, and sometimes it is used to do things that are to help situations as they arrive. It may be to help the Government. I think that it would be really helpful for the committee, and I have certainly done some research to find out the management of the square fund and how it is managed and who is responsible for it and who decides how it is spent. It would be helpful if you could make that information available to the committee. I have been more than happy to convene it. I will also make the point that, before the franchise, when square money, for example, the previous executive labour level democrat coalition, when they had the franchise, square money was put back into the centre of the central pot. It was not ring-fence to reinvest back into the railways, so what we have managed to do is get an agreement to reinvest back into the railways, a significant step forward. What I will do is write to you about how decisions are made and any other details around the management of the square. If you want to come back to me if you think that there is some detail missing, I will do that. I would like to emphasise that the main thing for the passenger is what I announced in December and to continue to announce that we have £3 million of funding, which is going towards a three-week and further discounts. That will be welcomed. There is a very small supplementary from Jamie Halcro. Jamie Halcro is not a political point by any means, but does the minister think that that £1.8 million is the best way of spending that money, if you like? I appreciate that there are 800,000 allocated to existing projects. I dare say that some of those projects are good and will improve the passenger experience. Is it his view that the best way to spend the balance of the square fund is on free travel? It is a very simple, straightforward question. First of all, it is not the entire balance. As I said, there will still be some money in the square pot and it will continue to be re-topped up. However, it is a good qualitative benefit for passengers who have had to suffer disruption. Some of that has been planned like closure of Queen Street tunnel and some of that, of course, has not been planned. The incident in November and Haymarket station, for example, caused huge disruption. It is a good way to thank passengers and commuters for that. It is being welcomed from the passengers that I have spoken to. There are a couple of questions that we have not got to. I am afraid that our time is particularly short. We have other witnesses coming in this morning. It may well be that we will write to you and ask for answers to those questions. I would like to ask you if you would like to make any brief statement as a result of giving evidence morning to the committee. No, nothing really to add, convener. I thank the members for the questions. Obviously, we will follow up on what needs to be followed up. As I said, I was keen to give committee a little bit more in terms of details on the free week before it goes out more publicly. However, if there is any follow-up on that, of course, I am always willing to come in front of committee or indeed to give any written submissions that are necessary. Thank you, minister, for attending today's meeting. I would now briefly like to suspend the meeting to allow witnesses to change in the room. The third item on our agenda this morning is to take evidence on the Scottish Government's draft climate change plan. The plan was laid on 20 January 2017 and the Scottish Parliament has a period of 60 days to consider this document. The committee will be carrying out scrutiny in collaboration with three other committees and will be focusing on agriculture, forestry and transport. Last week, the committee launched a joint call for written evidence and I would encourage as many people as possible to send us their views. We will begin today's session by looking at the climate changes that relate to agriculture and then we will be looking at forestry. Now, I would welcome and I am going to start, I think, sorry. Oh, yes, of course. Thank you very much for reminding me. Before we start with introducing the witnesses, I would like to just check on declarations and I am going to have to make a declaration that I refer members to my register of interest in that I am a partner in a farming partnership. Does anyone else? Yes, I am a partner in a farming partnership as well. I have a tiny regular agricultural hoarding from which I derive no income. I would like to welcome Professor Pete Smith, chair in plant and soil science at the university in Aberdeen. Peter Ritchie, there we are, executive director of Nourish Scotland. Stephen Thompson, who is the agricultural economist at the SRUC and Alastair Nann, who is a farmer and environmental spokesman for the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association. Andrew Bow will be joining us. Unfortunately, he has been held up by a transport delay, but as soon as he arrives I will ask him to join the group. I have mentioned to the committee already that we have a huge amount to cover this morning and I would really appreciate it if members and witnesses could keep their questions and answers as succinct as possible. I also ask witnesses to indicate to me if they would like to speak or respond to a particular question. Andrew, I have already introduced you and I am glad that you can join us before the session started. The first question comes from the Deputy convener, Gail Ross. Thank you, convener. Good morning and thank you for coming along. In a letter to the rural affairs climate change and environment committee in November of 2015, the Scottish Government stated its intention to secure widespread participation in the development of the plan, including engagement on potential scenarios. It used the words to build collective ownership and responsibility. How do you feel that yourselves and your organisations have been engaged in the process of the development of the plan? I think that that is because all of you will have an input. If I could ask you very briefly, I do not know who wants to start. Andrew, you lead on. Certainly my experience has been one of the most involved processes of engagement. I think that the Scottish Government deserves some credit for the amount of efforts that are put into gathering the views of stakeholders. Certainly NFU Scotland would have no complaints about the extent to which it has been consulted on this. Can I just remind witnesses that you do not need to press any buttons? You will be picked up as soon as you start to speak, so do not worry about the buttons. We will control the buttons. Pete, do you want to go? I agree with Andrew that the Government has made efforts to engage people. My sense on particularly the agriculture part of the climate change plan is that there has not been enough background papers setting out the context, giving us international comparisons and the direction of travel and giving a context to the discussion out of which we can then generate concrete plans and concrete suggestions for reductions in emissions. The times model does not work particularly well for agriculture, but I draw the committee's attention to some publications such as the DEFRA statistics on agriculture and climate change, which give a much more detailed sector-by-sector picture of emissions intensity and also farmer attitudes towards climate change. A people like that would have provided useful background, I think, to the discussions about agriculture and climate change. I would say that the future stockings cop stakeholders group where there is a wide industry representation that has been discussed. The stakeholders have good knowledge of that. On Pete's point, the Centre for Expertise on Climate Change has produced a number of background reports for policy. It is whether or not the wider stakeholder members are aware of those background reports, but they are available on the CSE website. There is a lot of background information available that research has been feeding into Government on that topic. Can I just say also that you are all aware that we have had written representations from, I think, most of the people, most of you here today, for which we are extremely grateful. Sorry, Alasdair. Well, the STFA is only too happy to participate in the Government's CCP plan and we will do our best to move along and see that we can do our best for the Scottish farming industry and the Government's climate change plan. Because there are two Pete's, do you mind if I call you Professor and ask you to answer that? Pete's, but that's fine. I would echo Stephen's point. I think that there's been excellent engagement with the scientific community in order to make sure that these targets are evidence-based. There's been consultation on the times model, so the times model was introduced and feedback was solicited on the times model and climate exchange, for which I am the science director, has been involved in providing some of the underpinning evidence, calling on a bunch of the institutes that contribute to climate exchange. Those reports are available on the climate exchange website. Okay, thank you for that. I'm going to move on because I think that that's quite a useful summary of the position and I ask Stuart to move on with the next question. Thank you very much, convener. I want to turn to the farming for a better climate that was run by the SRUC. I want to ask concisely if that's had a beneficial effect, but more to the point has what's happened in that scheme, which was limited in the farms that it was working with. Has lessons from that moved on to other farms? Have they been picked up by others in the industry? The farming for a better climate programme was initially for climate exchange, climate farms. The lessons that I've learned from them are quite an eye-opener, where its common sense approach is what I would probably classify as best practice or good practice. Farmers adopting them have managed to make significant financial benefit or financial gains and also significant carbon footprint reductions. The lessons learned, so I asked for some statistics on that. Last year, about 880 people attended the events. 88 per cent of them said that they would adopt some measures from the things that they learned, including soil management, soil sampling, biomass, hydro, herd health planning, selecting breeding efforts differently. A whole range of things and lessons that can be learned from that have been reported by the agricultural community themselves. One of the criticisms will always be that it is the early adopters that will attend those meetings and how they then disseminate that knowledge further. I know that there is a meeting between Sandy Ramsey, who is the head of the farm advisory service for SRUC and the Scottish Government, along with Rebecca Odsley, who leads on farming for a better climate, to see how we can engage with the wider farming community and get the messages further out. However, there are key messages here. There are a number of case study examples on farming for a better climate website that goes through the process, what the benefits have been on the farms. As I said, for some of those farms, it is quite a significant financial saving, as well as climate change. Last minute, I visited one of those farms and I saw that, for £10 on a whiteboard on the side of the diesel tank, it got a huge multiplier of the money back, just simply recording when people took diesel. On the financial point, is there evidence as to how much money people can save? That is likely to be an early and obvious motivator for farmers to move on an agenda that helps the climate change agenda. Later, when we tackle some of the more difficult things, it might not be so obviously financially beneficial, but are the farmers who are not yet taking action really aware of the financial savings that they could be making? I suspect that, in the early stages, they are compatible with modest efforts. It is significant. For TORFARM, there were £37,000 savings with 11 per cent carbon footprint reduction. Glen Cullery saved £11,000 overall, 10 per cent reduction in carbon footprint. Others have had significant. Upper Nisbet saved £10,000 just from knowing their nutrient value of their manure and applying that using GPS soil sampling. There are a lot of easy wins if farmers adopt. I would always refer back to things like getting fertility levels up in cattle, i.e., some farms are down at less than 80 calves per 100 cows you have, but the top range is up at £98.99. How do you then stimulate those people to change? That is the hardest thing, or the biggest challenge that we have. Some people want to change and some people will adopt to those changes, but I would not say to drag the others. Stimulating others to make changes is more of a challenge, and others might have more thoughts on that. Could we perhaps just hear from Alasdair then briefly? Does he think that farmers will pick it up? Gentleman, I was going to come in straight afterwards. If you want to speak, and I am very keen that you all get an opportunity to speak, please try and catch my eye. I will either indicate that I am going to bring you in, or I will regretfully, if time is running short, shake my head. Alasdair, if you would like to talk about the answers on that and how to specifically move farmers forward to achieve some of the goals. At the moment, I am changing my own farming policy. I am shifting away from having high productive cows that need a lot of maintenance to a cow that can stay outside much longer, where I do not need to bring in loads of straw and bring it in for miles away. I winter them outside. I am probably going from a high-output system to a low-output system. That is the way that I see it, how it is to go in the hills. Yes, Pete. I think that everybody will agree that there is a cultural change issue here that we are needing to address. Really trying to get climate change higher up most farmers' agendas is important. I think that the DEFRA survey, which we quote in our report, is interesting that about half of the farmers that they surveyed across the UK did not think that climate change was anything to do with them. It was not something that they were going to take into account in their business decisions or that they had already done enough or if nothing they could do. That cultural change stuff is something that the Farming for the Climate and other initiatives are at the foothills of, but we need to invest much more resource in the cultural change programme over the next 10 or 12 years. It is not just about technical knowledge, it is also about attitude change. I think that we need to boost the advisory and extension services significantly if we want to make a difference. As we say, we need very strong leadership, both from Parliament and Government, but also from the colleges and from the farming leadership saying, this actually matters to everybody. Yes, it will save you money. We are spending a lot more money than we need to on bag nitrogen. We could reduce that and save farmers tens of millions of pounds across Scotland, but we need all to get more efficient and more thoughtful in the way that we use resources. Pete, just before you move, because I think that we have all read your submission. The question is, and the point that you have made there is that it comes down to leadership. Do you think that it is still at the stage where it says leadership rather than legislation, or do you think that we are at the legislative stage? Then I am going to come to Andrea, and a very brief answer on that would be very helpful. Leadership is crucial. Legislation on its own won't make change happen without leadership. You can penalise people for not doing things, and we need to make things like soil testing, compulsory, because it will help. It will help more farmers to do it. There is no point in every farmer who has got a bit of rough grazing doing it. We need to farmers who are on productive land, where they are using fertilisers to put on the ground to do it. First of all, they are the key people to do it. We have talked about using the individual social material framework to really understand what are the factors that help farmers shift and what are the factors that inhibit them shifting. Is it lack of knowledge? Is it what their colleagues are doing? Is it just that the economics do not seem to work out for them? I think that the key thing to bear in mind here is that, on average, there is 1.2 full-time equivalents on Scottish agricultural units. That is a tiny workforce that has to deal with a very wide and deep body of regulation guidance. Never mind keeping the farm business going. A key barrier in my head is that people have the headspace, the time to reflect on the changes that they are going to make in their business. It is great that people like Alastair and Pete are making those changes, but for a lot of people, they are caught on the wheel and they are simply trying to keep their existing business going. We need to create those opportunities and the people with the right knowledge in the right place, presenting it in the right way that allows people to stop and think that, rather than trying to sustain my system as it is, I am going to make a positive change that is going to benefit my business and the environment. You would not expect me to come here and say that we would welcome lots more regulation. At the same time, we are conscious that there are certain things out there that, at some point in time, you may exhaust every other opportunity, but I do not feel that we have yet got to that point. We have an awful lot of people who have adopted early on, as Stephen said, good practice, but we need to help other people to have the time and the space to do the same. Stephen, if it is very brief, because we have a huge amount of questions. Just a final point is that, in addition to the nine climate change farms, there are also the soil nutrient network farms. There are currently three of them where soil sampling occurs and shows best practice around soil sampling. That is going to be extended to 12 farms across Scotland under the Farm Advisory Service. People who attend that get a 30 per cent reduction in their soil sampling, so there are a number of different things on-going. I know that people focus on farming for a better climate, but there are other initiatives out there that are on-going. We are going to come back to soil sampling because it is a point that is run across all the submissions and something that the committee will have an interest in. John, can I ask you just to move to the next question, please? Yes, I have four questions, but I think that I will try to combine them to speed things up. I happen to be in the economy committee, so yesterday we were looking at that as well. There is definitely a feeling in some quarters that agriculture is getting off very lightly in this whole plan. The other sectors are largely compulsory, and other sectors are expected to make much greater savings. What we are told is that 12 per cent reduction in carbon emissions from agriculture is the smallest proposed reduction of any sector in the plan. I think that it was pointed up at the clear committee as well. A lot of the language in here is very much conciliatory and working with rather than compulsory. For example, page 136 of the plan, 14.2.3, we will work with farmers, we will have encouraged farmers by 2020, by 2030. Most farmers will know the nutrient value of their soil. Would you agree that agriculture is being given a very gentle approach compared to other sectors? Two nights of touch and agriculture getting away lightly is what you are saying, John. Professor, can I bring you in because you have not had a chance yet? It is a more difficult sector to decarbonise because there are greenhouse gas emissions other than carbon dioxide that are involved. In most sectors, we can decarbonise them simply by using less energy and less fossil fuels in the processes that we do to support those parts of the economy. Nitrous oxide and particularly methane are large components of the greenhouse gas balance of agriculture. That makes it more challenging to reduce those particular emissions. It is not just a matter of decarbonising the energy that we put in. There are some biological processes, particularly in teric fermentation that occurs in ruminants, which produces methane, nitrous oxide emissions that occur from nitrogen in the soil, whether that is through mineral or organic applications. Whilst I take the point that the sector may have got off lightly compared to others, it is actually a more difficult sector to decarbonise. This may reflect the smaller targets in the sector compared to some of the others. I am told in the plan that emissions have dropped in agriculture by 25 per cent since 1990, and that is entirely due to a drop in agricultural output. That means that the industry has shrunk by 25 per cent since 1990. That drop has got to be replaced somewhere, and it can only be found by importing the food that we do not produce ourselves. Are you saying that it is not possible to increase production without increasing the emissions and so on and the effect on the climate? Can you say that again, please? Are you saying that it is not possible? If you increase the output again, is that automatically having a negative effect on the emissions and the climate plan? Well, it means that if you have to increase your output on less acres, then you have to put on more slurries, more fertilisers, more tractors working there, so it may well one way cancel the other one out. Sorry, can I just work all the way along? John, if everyone has a chance to come in on that, I notice that the professor wants to come in and Richard wants to come in, so maybe Andrew, if you go next. I would say that, in addition to the points that the professor has made, there is the way that the emissions are allocated between different sectors, and that is being flagged up in our submission. I am sure that, by everyone else here, the work that farmers do to manage forestry, to plant new forestry, to manage peatlands and to put up renewables on their farm is not featuring in the emissions envelopes that are in the plan, so we would not see that reduction as a full account of what agriculture will do. I take the point that it is on the face of it that it looks less ambitious than for other sectors, but given the challenges, the biological challenges, the way that things are accounted for and the pressures, both economic and workforce, on the sector and a desire with other agendas such as the food and drink agenda to grow this part of the economy and grow our food and drink sector and make our rural economy stronger, it would be foolhardy of us to just plough ahead solely on the basis of maximum reductions. I would just reiterate some of those points. I knew that this was going to come up in terms of the reduction since 1990, so I quickly went and looked at the number of animals that have changed. We have had a 23 per cent reduction in dairy cattle, 7 per cent reduction in beef cattle and a 34 per cent reduction in sheep numbers. In sheep alone, we have seen roughly a 5 per cent increase in lambing percentages and the system is changing, so the system is moving away from a very extensive hill-based system with lots of smaller sheep to much larger, heavier sheep producing more animals each, which means that it is more efficient. It is more efficient from a carbon perspective so that, although it might be putting more inputs into a heavier cross-bred yew, it is actually getting greater output as well. There is a lot of complexity in this and I would reiterate Andrew's point about the envelope for agriculture, how renewables, peatland, et cetera, do not get captured for agriculture yet. They are some of the key drivers in those targets. None of you have mentioned the time it takes either to move from heavier, badly producing cows to better producing cows, but Pete, I am going to bring you in and then, if I may, I am going to bring Rhoda and Richard in at the same time. No, Pete, sorry, it is you, Pete. I am going to refer to the professor as a professor. Okay, absolutely. I think that we have got off slightly lightly in agriculture, I think that we could do more, but we do not underestimate the challenges of achieving those gains. We think that we could really have a push on nitrogen. Nitrogen is 5 per cent of our total greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland and, at the moment, our nitrogen use efficiency in Scotland is not as high as it could be. We could do something on nitrogen that should save farmers money but also make a dent on those emissions. However, that is about increasing farmer knowledge, and, as Andrew Saynes says, these are all nearly all very small businesses and it is not like the construction industry or other industries where you have big players who, once they decide to change, change. We are talking about lots of actors changing, so what we keep saying is yes, we need to be more ambitious, we need to raise the barf agriculture, but to do that we need to invest a lot in advisory and extension services to help farmers to make those changes, which will make their businesses more profitable. Professor, do you want to come in, but briefly? Just very quickly on John's question about if we increase production, do we necessarily therefore increase emissions? There has been historical decoupling between production and emissions through efficiency improvements, and you can see that globally from 1960 onwards, so it is possible to do farming more efficiently to decrease emissions per unit of product, but we must also remember that the quickest way to reduce emissions in the agricultural sector is to close it down and import all of our food, but then we are exporting our emissions and that is no benefit to the climate and disastrous for our economy. There has to be a balance, and I think that Scotland perhaps has a role in leading the low emissions intensity agriculture and to promote our clean green food and drink, which would be beneficial both for our internal market and for our export markets. If I go to Richard first, and then I'm going to come to you. That's actually covered the point that I was going to say. At the end of the day, it's saying here that the reduction in the number of cattle and sheep, the reduction in the amount of grassland being plowed, has resulted in the reduction in their emissions, so we took the daff suggestion, and I'm not suggesting your daff, Professor Beatsmith, but that we shut down the whole industry, then we'll save all this, we'll reduce our emissions vastly. My view is that the population is going up. I agree with Alasdair Nairn that we have to increase our production of food to save imports. So, where does the two balance? I'd be interested to know that. Before you answer that, can I just bring right around? I think that there may be a time with the two. Yes. Given that emissions falling is down to us having less production, greenhouse gases is a global issue, and it's not a country-wide issue, so if we're just simply importing and that looks good on our figures, it's looking bad on somebody else's figure and causing the same amount of damage, how do we then, I suppose, encourage our farmers and crofters to get involved in looking at ways of farming better, that encourages production, but also cuts greenhouse gases? I think that it was Andrew that said, you know, you're talking about very small holdings where it's one person, they don't have time to go on the course that teaches them all this, how on earth do you get that knowledge out there, because people will make a step change if they know, but if they don't know, they'll continue doing what they're doing. I suggest that, because that suggests that a huge list could come out from all of you. I could ask you each to come up with one particular thing that you'd like to see concentrated on to try and deliver this change. I'm going to go to Pete to start with, because I think that he's already indicated where one of the areas that he thinks very strongly about. I think that nitrogen is something that we haven't focused enough on in Scotland. If you look at the nitrogen balance in Scotland, we take off about 200,000 tons of nitrogen in our crops and our pasture, and we've put on about 200,000 tons between the manure that we put on the ground and the clovers and beans, and what just comes out of the air anyway. On top of that, we put on 160,000 tons of bagged nitrogen, so we've got a surplus of 160,000 tons of nitrogen if you take Scotland across the board. That's out of line with our European competitors who are doing much better in their relative surplus of nitrogen, so we could bring that down over a period of 10 years or so. We could probably halve that without any loss of productivity at all, but just by using nitrogen that animal manure is more smartly and also using getting food waste digested back on the land, too. We could just be much smarter with nitrogen, and that's it. Can I just come back to John's point about where farming has got off lightly? If you reflect back to what I said about farming for a better climate, 10% to 11% per annum reductions are working with specialists and probably on pretty good farms to start with. There might be higher gains elsewhere on farms that have got more to gain, but it shows that it is a difficult challenge. On your point, the question that Rhoda raised was—I would agree that nutrient budgeting is probably a key to a lot of that—understanding what your soil is capable of, understanding what goes off your soil in regards to silage, grazing, etc, and understanding what you then need to put on after your slurry. Understanding those kind of things from a farming perspective, the regulatory approach for NVZs didn't particularly work, because farmers saw it as a regulatory tool and put it in a piece of paper into the drawer and never really revisited them. They are now starting to understand the benefits of that, but it has taken a long time from that regulatory tool to have an impact. I think that partly we need to have a bit more faith in farmers and their capacity to change and their willingness to change under the right circumstances. That might be a bit demonstrating or explaining to them. That is what we want to get to. It is down to you to decide in your individual business how you are going to get there. Here are some suggestions. There is also a place for a lot more peer-to-peer knowledge transfer—farmers learning from one another, not just through the farming for better climate model. If I can abuse the microphone from me just to return to John's point, we have a fundamental decision about what it is that we want from our food and farming sector in this country. We could chase efficiency at all costs and reduce our emissions—I am quite sure of it—high input and high output systems. Does that sit well with how our brand is perceived in different markets, both domestic and foreign? We could chase a low-output model, and I am not decrying either of those models. They have their place. That might sit very well with the brand, but it might do both positive and negative things for individual farm businesses and the rural economy in its output. I do not think that we are not in the business of five-year plans in this country, but we need to be mindful that we have some pretty big agendas—different ideas—of what the rural economy and our food and farming sector is about that are not yet reconciled and settled in people's minds. Andrew, you have not quite come back with the golden bullet from your perspective on what is going to help us get on climate change. Would you like to have it? There is no such thing. I do not believe that there is. I think that it is a lot of little things. Alasdair? I would like to bring the committee's attention to a paper that was written by a philicode Graham Sate on the health of the soil in its known as humus. It is a glue that determines whether the river is running brown and it is rain, and it is a thin veil of topsoil that sustains a soil. We are losing the fertility of our land, and it is very important that we get the right to stop greenhouse gases going away from the soil and into the atmosphere. I think that we should be looking at the fertility of the soils, because the decrease in topsoil has had a huge negative impact beyond global heating. Recent research has revealed that if we maintain our current loss of three to five tonnes an acre annually, we will have just 60 years until it is zero. That is not a very long time. I would say that there are so many people writing those papers out there who do you actually believe, but I think that we are faced with quite a serious situation now where we have got to look at the fertility of the soils in the very near future. Professor, would you like to come in on that? I think that quantifying the greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product in Scotland, we have a fantastic climate and great soils for efficient production of food. If we quantify our emissions and compare those to some other areas, we can show that Scottish food has the potential to be a low emissions food per unit of product, and we could use that to gain a share in the market. The other issue that I would like to bring up, and it is an extremely controversial one, is that nowhere in the report are demand side measures considered. Demand side measures are things like reducing waste, but more importantly dietary change. The last IPCC assessment report considered dietary change as a method to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and dietary change would largely be a move away from livestock products to consume more plant-based products. It is known to have a large technical potential, and since the IPCC assessment report, a number of papers have been written about this. It is controversial, but there is a large climate mitigation potential here, and it also has the potential to deliver healthy diets for the future. I think that this is a big omission in the current assessment of what is possible with the climate. We, of course, have to consider all of the social justice and policy issues associated with that, but given that our diets in Scotland are not the most healthy in the world, it could help co-deliver to both the public health agendas and the climate change agendas. I am going to come back on the soil issue and fertility issue, because it is a theme that is running through. Peter, I think that you have got the next question. Sorry, John. My one is mainly targeted at you, Alastair, and it is great to see a fellow north-east farmer in the Parliament here. The tenant farmers association has been particularly targeted in that plan. Why do you think that is, and what are the particular issues that affect the tenant sector in addressing these issues of climate change? I would say that I could address this in one or two ways. The first thing that I would say is that in the tenant sector, we are moving away from long-term tenancies to short-term tenancies, something like maybe five, 10-year contract farming, grazing leases, that is the main ones. Nobody is looking after. If you have a 10-year lease, you will put on the nutrients on to your soil that you need to get to probably to year 8. After that, you are not going to put lime and scot-force and those things on to your land for somebody else to get the benefit off. The production capability of that land falls away. It is the same with probably a short-term tenancy, a five-year tenancy. You will put them on year one to get the benefit of them, but who says that the next—if the landowner takes it back—who says that he is going to put anything on to that soil to bring up the fertility? That would be quite a big issue as far as I am. I recognise exactly what you are saying, Alasdair. The short-termism is a hugely bad thing for the health of the soil to go back to your previous point. We need to recognise that healthy soil is one of the best ways forward. How do we overcome that issue then? Is there a way forward to get away from that short-term view of short-term lets? How do we address that? I think that some has been created by the subsidy system because the landowner has kept the single farm payment on the land and he has let out the land. He does not feel any obligation to put anything on to the soil to keep up the fertility of his soil. He leaves it up to either the grazier or the lease holder. If it is a grazing lease, the tenant is just going to put on the type of fertilizer that he is going to get the most benefit out of. He is not going to think of the fertility of the land beyond the time when he is using it. There is a theme building here that will come to it. Stephen, do you want to come in briefly on that? I will reiterate that point. I think that there is a lack of confidence in wego compensation. If there is adequate support or belief in that system, when a tenant gives up and gets compensated for the improvements, the improvements are meant to include soil. The tenant is meant to put the soil back in the same condition as he received it, but there is a lack of belief in that system on how it is operational. As an observational point, it is sometimes quite difficult to quantify that. Specific soil sampling makes it difficult to see what nutrient levels you have increased. I think that that is an interesting point. Stuart, can I ask you to move on? You had some questions on meat and dairy, I think. Yes. I do not think that we need to take too long on this, but I particularly want to perhaps ask Professor Pete. In earlier remarks, there was reference made to the methane, in particular outputs from ruminants. I have been told that I am so far from being an expert that you will never plumb the depths of my ignorance, let me say that straight away. However, I understand that there is quite significant variability that is genetic but also the bacterial mix in the rumin between different beasts as to the methane output. Is there an opportunity for us in Scotland who have taken the lead in certain kinds of research to develop beasts that intrinsically emit less for the same input or perhaps fine-tuned diet? Is there really an opportunity that matters there or is it just back to the point that you made that we should be eating less meat and hence producing less methane? You stick to generic animals rather than the natural breeds for fear of upsetting some breeders across Scotland, Professor. Of course. There is some variability in the amount of methane that is produced, but the methane is produced by the microflora, the gut bacteria, and the gut bacteria are the things that allow ruminants, generically, to break down the cellulose, so to break down the cellulose in the grass and to convert it into protein. Methane is a by-product of that. There is no way of getting away from ruminants producing methane. You can get breeds that work better and some that have less and some that have more per unit of input. You can also manipulate those things to a certain extent by varying the diet. The best way to reduce the methane emissions per unit of product is to get the animal to slaughter weight as quickly as possible, which tends to push us so that the methane emissions per lifetime of that animal is less. That pushes us in the direction of ever more intensive production where we bring the animals in, the opposite of what Alistair was saying. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, that may make some sense in terms of emissions intensity, but in terms of what we want from our food, potentially that is a step in the wrong direction. There is limited potential to improve breeds to do that. There is lots of work going on in New Zealand and also in Ireland to look and see how much that is. We are going to have to put up with the emissions if we want to consume ruminant products and if we want to do that in a way that is consistent with a clean-green way of doing it. We probably have to avoid just looking at the problem through greenhouse gas blinkers because it would push us potentially in the wrong direction in the way that we want to go in Scotland potentially to produce clean-green livestock products that we would want to consume ourselves and to export. Ask if there are options to absorb the methane further down the digestive tract and bind it into some of the waste output. Go further down the digestive tract. It is burped out, so rather than farted out. Thank you for the mechanics of that. The technical terms. I think that you wanted to come in. I could just, for a moment, on this point about eating less meat. I think that it is important here to be clear about the language that we are using here. The information that we have from people at the supermarkets is that purchases of unprocessed meat tend to go hand-in-hand with increased purchases of vegetables, so people are buying cuts of meat and they are buying vegetables to go with it. I think that if we were reducing the amount of processed meat that we were eating, there is certainly value in looking at the detail of that, but the devil will be in the detail. If we simply talk about reducing meat consumption, the producers that are producing high-quality, unprocessed meat on our hills, not only are we reducing the amount of their product that we are selling potentially, we are also running the risk that we substitute that with processed meat and that the veg consumption goes down alongside it. We definitely have to consider the demand and supply side issues and understand that consumer behaviour will be a major driver in all of this. Pete wants to come in. I think that it is all right. I do not want to argue about the veg consumption. We are doing quite a lot of work on how to increase veg consumption independent of whether people eat more meat or not, but I do think that we just need to put a marker down that reducing meat consumption globally is essential within Europe. It is really important. There are signs that it is already starting to happen, which I think is quite helpful, but we do need to separate off this idea. Yes, we absolutely need to support Scottish farmers to produce very green beef and lamb and to eat some of it ourselves and export the stuff that we do not need to eat, but we need to separate off this idea of production and supporting farmers to produce a very good product from the fact that we individually should probably eat a little bit less. I do not think that there is any conflict between the desires of farmers to sell their product. We do not have to drink all our own whisky or eat all our own salmon. We signed out how to eat all our own beef. I am very glad to hear that. Stephen, do you want to come in very briefly? I would just say that within the strategic research programme of the Scottish Government there is quite a lot of research probably on going into finishing animals, the methane production, so there is the green cow facility at SRUC. On this issue of emissions intensity per kilo of product, what we have to remember is that quite a lot of our livestock are in rough grazing scenarios. Rough grazing generally leads to higher greenhouse gas emissions than an intensively finished or intensively reared animal that is on a grazing system with cereals. We know that we can finish animals at 11 months in the beef sector, but you cannot sell it as beef. It is rosy beef or whatever it is called. There are real issues in that the systems that we can make efficiency games are not being demanded, so we are told that bull beef is no longer really a demanded product, yet you can finish an animal very quickly. That comes back to Andrew's point earlier on about the reputation of Scotland. Do we want the clean, green and environmental aspects that go with the brand, or do we want to reduce greenhouse gas intensity and have a quickly finished animal that is intensively reared? Those are fundamental questions. Sorry, I am going to bring Peter in, if I may. I just want to redirect the thinking a wee bit. I am all for healthy diets, but I am also all for the healthy agricultural industry. We have got to recognise that the vast bulk of Scottish agriculture is online that can only grow grass, and if you grow grass, you keep sheep and you keep cattle on it, and that is the only way forward for that. However, another bit of this equation that we have not really talked about is the health of the animals. We need healthy animals, we need to tackle disease issues, so that the number of calves and sheep that are born or more of them gets to the final slaughter stage at a healthy age, at a young age, and efficiently produced. Health of the livestock is vitally important. Whether the enemy wants to comment on that, I just wanted to bring that in myself. Can I allow two comments on that? It is just that we are very short of time. Alice, to put his hand up first, so in fairness, I am going to let him go first. That sheep's worst enemy is a sheep. If you have them in an intensive farm situation, then you are going to have to vaccinate them for everything under the sun. However, if you have them out in an extensive situation where there is no coming in such close contact with each other, then there is less disease. You do not need to inject them for every possible scenario. I would say that we definitely still need livestock on the hills in extensive farm situations where we can get good, healthy breeding stock to probably bring in to the more intensive systems. One system complements the other if you want to put it that way, but I do not think that we should be trying to intensively farm everything that we do. I am actually going to leave that there, because it is a fair note to say that a healthy cattle, a good cattle and sometimes pushing them too hard or a healthy stock of good stock, pushing them too hard can be detrimental to what we are trying to achieve in Scotland. Jamie, I am going to ask you to come in, but I am going to ask panel members again to be very brief on their answers to that, because we have four more very important questions. Thank you, convener. I will keep it quite brief. My question will link quite nicely into the next question anyway. The overall climate change plan makes a number of assertions. It uses words like there are substantial potential economic benefits to the rural economy from the policy. What is good for the planet is good for your pocket and so on. It talks very directly to farmers in terms of positive impact. It also says that improved profitability could encourage greater intensification in farming. Knowing that agriculture accounts for 19 per cent of emissions in Scotland, it is the way that the Government is selling this climate change plant industry a bit like selling Christmas to Turkey's. I am looking for somebody who wants to come in and then Andrew. I am absolutely right that a lot of the things that farmers can do to reduce the impact on climate change will also help their businesses. As Peter said, having healthier cattle, losing less lambs and all those things have an impact on climate change when they help the farmers. I do not think that it is a miscell. I think that that is the direction that we need to shovel. There are some things that you could ask farmers to do that would be so expensive and have so little impact on climate change that they are not worth doing, but I do not think that we are there yet. I would just echo that. Those in Government who are responsible for trying to deliver this in the research institutes out there in the industry are all quite convinced of the importance of sustaining agriculture in rural Scotland. Therefore, I do not see any desire to use this as a trojan horse to reduce emissions. We have to be careful that we do not do it badly and that it has that effect. However, I do not get any sense here that this is some way to drive emissions down by driving agriculture out of rural Scotland. I am going to leave that there because John Finnie has got an important question, which I would like to bring in now. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. This has been touched on very briefly by the Professor. It is about what is not in the plan. In fairness, I will do a literal quote here. That is from written evidence to the ECCLR committee by the Friends of Earth Scotland, who said, "...the multi-stakeholder event held in December was of limited value since it was at a very late stage in the process after many policy options had already been eliminated for technical or political reasons." The question is, do you feel that the full range of options were examined in developing the plan? If there is anything that you feel should be in the plan, that is not in the plan, please. Andrew, you signified first. That event was pretty late in the day. I cannot speak for other sectors. I would say that, within agriculture, there had been a lot of events before that. There had been substantial discussion about a wide range of measures and advice was taken from a lot of people around the table and a lot of others at those earlier events as to what was really workable, what had some mileage and what did not. I would not share that criticism, certainly not in this part of the plan. Pete, you want to come in? As we said in the evidence, we would like to see organics in there. It is in the organic ambition plan. It did not feature at all. By December or something, it was too late to get it in. If it is not too late now, we think that organic should be in there as a major driver because it benefits farmers' pockets as well as the environment. Does anyone else want to come in, Professor? Yes. I do not know why demand-side measures are not there, but it is the only sector where demand-side measures are not considered. When we look at transport or energy, we are constantly looking for reduced consumption of those products. I imagine that consumption measures are not here because they are so controversial, because food is such an emotive issue and because it would be extremely difficult to effect change. Having said that, the science is unequivocal that it has a large technical potential, so I think that it deserves more attention, particularly as our targets move through towards 2050, when we are going to need even more ambitious targets. I think that it will need to be considered at some stage in the future. Thank you very much. The deputy convener Gail has a question. I think that just to finish and wrap everything up, in your opinion, how appropriate do you think the timescales and the policies and the plan are? I am going to ask each of you to answer that, if I may. Who would like to start? No one. Andrew. I think that there is an overarching approach in the agriculture section, which is about working with people over the next few years to build up that knowledge and capacity to change, and only thereafter looking at more strict mandatory measures. I think that that is right. If we went straight to those mandatory measures, I think that we would get kicked back and unintended consequences. I would support the approach of trying to bind people to that process through demonstrating its value and only thereafter regulating some of the issues there. Pete, if I can encourage you all to be as succinct as possible, I do not want to take away from the valuable information that you are giving us, Pete. I think that we have not made much progress in the past 10 years on a lot of these issues if you look at the numbers. We need a clear narrative about where we are going next with Scottish Agriculture. We need to paint that picture that we want to have a climate-smart, low-emissions agricultural sector in Scotland that produces really good food and that meets a lot of the different social goals that we want, and we need leadership on that. In a sense, we can get climate change targets in as part of that. At the moment, it reads a bit like a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and a bunch of measures that are not quantified in terms of how much they will contribute to reducing climate change emissions. It needs a narrative that really holds the thing together and says that this is where we are going with farming and this is what it is going to do for climate change and this is what it is going to do for other things as well. I do not think that we have that at the moment, particularly with the EU decision, but I think that that is— Stephen Cackett I would say that on quantifying some of that, the uptake of carbon audits has been relatively weak to date. There is scope for 250 in the farm advisory service. I think that there have been 50 applications to date since the launch in September. Taking efforts that way might be positive, but it is going to take a long time to encourage people—again, it comes back to this time element—how much time it is going to take to encourage people to change their practices. With regard to some of the other measures, if we change the greening components of ecological focus areas, we would suddenly get more legumes in rotations. The fact that we have an August 1—you have to have two nitrogen-fixing crops growing—all of those measures are counterproductive in terms of what this is trying to achieve. We need to look more holistically at what we do with agricultural policy. Agricultural policy is the thing that has driven all the changes that I talked about earlier. It is changing ag policy rather than anything else that is really driving an awful lot of the changes. We are moving forward into a period of uncertainty with regard to agricultural sport, and there may be opportunities to redesign how we are doing things and do it better. Many farmers are aware of carbon emissions. Many of them now have GPS systems on their tractors and their fertiliser spreaders are much more efficient. They are aware of climate change. Many farmers now do carbon audits on their farms already before they can get their produce into some supermarkets. I do a carbon audit every year, but I feel that people who supply our industry have to be aware of the situation as well, and they have to do their bit as well. We are losing a lot of our protein now from the distillery industry because it has gone into anaerobic digester. That protein will have to be replaced from somewhere else, and the only place that I know where it comes from in any vast quantities is South America, so it has to be shipped over there. We are destroying our source of GM-free protein and replacing it with genetically modified protein. I do not think that that is a good idea. I think that that is a very good point. I thank you for bringing that up, because I know that it is particularly relevant to people in space. Professor, could I ask you to do a very brief question? Yes, very briefly. I think that the timelines are broadly reasonable, as is the roll-out of the policies and proposals. Maybe there has been one or two missed opportunities in joining up the dots with some of those. For example, the soil testing to improve nitrogen applications could be rolled into assessing the soil organic matter status and proposal 5 to increase carbon sequestration in soils. If we had soil testing that was routinely measuring all those things, we would have monitoring and verification, as well as being able to determine the nutrient status at the beginning of every cropping season or every livestock production season for exactly how much nitrogen we need to add or how much nitrogen phosphorus and potassium we need to add. There are some missed opportunities across them. The other one, I think, is on carbon audits. If that were more participatory so that the farmers were doing this in groups using tools to understand how the carbon audit is put together and what their largest sources of emissions are, we have shown using the coal farm tool in the USA just by getting farmers together, showing them how the tool works, that the group learning has allowed them to reduce emissions by 16 per cent over three years from organic egg production with no targets. We didn't set any targets, we just allowed them to learn from each other, to copy what each other were doing to reduce those emissions. If the carbon auditing was used as part of the engagement opportunities, we could help farmers to educate themselves about those issues, as well as providing the baseline data that we need going forward. Thank you very much. I am afraid that our time is up, but can I make an observation that the one thing that has come through today and in a lot of your submissions is the whole issue of soil and fertility of the land? I think that it is something that this committee will want to look at a great deal more. I think that what is important is ensuring that—and I understand that the difference is—it is making it appropriate for the area of farming that we are in. For example, I very much take the point that was made in one about legumus crops being grown in areas where they don't actually grow and doesn't actually achieve very much. I think that the whole issue of soil sampling is very important. I think that it goes across the whole farming sector, and I believe that, without consulting the rest of the committee, I notice agreement from most people that it is something that we would want to take a great deal more interest in. I would like to thank you all for coming here. If you feel that we have done you short of anything that you want to say, I would remind you that the deadline is 10 February. If you would like to add further submissions, we would be welcome to have you. Thank you very much for coming, and I am sure in the course of this Parliament that we will be seeing you all again at some stage, but thank you very much. I am going to suspend the meeting briefly, briefly, committee members, to allow the change of witnesses. We will now continue with agenda item 3, by taking further evidence on the Scottish Committee's draft climate change plan. We are now going to focus on forestry. We are joined by Professor Robin Matthews, leader of the nurturing, vibrant and low-carbon communities research theme at the James Hutton Institute. Charles Dundas, public affairs manager at the Woodlands Trust, Alan Carter, chair of Reforesting Scotland, Stuart Goodall, chief executive of CONFOR and George Robbie, managing director of Till Hill Forestry. I welcome you all to the meeting. We have a series of questions, and if you want to answer the questions, I would urge you to try and catch my eye. I will try and make sure that you have equal chance to answer. I apologise in advance if I do not get the opportunity to get you all in on a subject, but I would remind you that the deadline for giving evidence, if you want to give additional evidence, is 10 February. If, at some stage, you do not feel you get in, please submit further evidence. The first question is going to come from Mari. Much in a similar way is what was asked to the panel for agriculture. It is really just how you feel you are engaged in the process of developing the plan. Given that the Scottish Government was looking at the process of developing the plan, it would build collective ownership and responsibility. Do you think that it has achieved that? Who would like to go first? The James Hutton Institute has certainly been involved. We do a lot of work with the climate exchange programme, CXC. A lot of work on the peatland emission factors and woodland stuff has been done by us in collaboration with other institutes. The university of Aberdeen has been evolving with quite a bit to work on that. We are also members of the agriculture and climate change stakeholder group as well. There have been a number of things that we have had inputs into the plan through. My title has changed from 1 January. It is now just natural assets, a thing leader. Professor, thank you. I wish you told me that before, because it was quite a sentence to read. I apologise for using the wrong title. Who would like to go next? I can say very briefly that we have quite a lot of contact with the Scottish Government around the whole issue of planting, which is the focal point over where the forestry sector can make a contribution. We also deal with the Forestry Commission on a quite regular basis on some of the other issues that are maybe less highlighted within the sector as opportunities to contribute. There is the construction element as well. The use of wood, especially Scottish wood in construction, is a difference between using imported wood and domestic wood. Harvested wood products from domestic wood can be counted, as I understand it, in Government's reporting or mitigating or efforts to reduce emissions, whereas imported wood does not have the same status. I would also flag up the whole issue of how we manage our woodlands and whether we stock them is an important element of that as well, and it is something that has not been considered enough so far in this report. George? The issue of engagement has been good and it is worth pointing out that there is quite a long backward track in terms of engagement with the forestry sector and the issues over woodland expansion. The woodland expansion advisory group, for example, did a lot of work on that, and I think that the RPP2 builds on that. I was here in the case that you wanted to come in. I think that it is fair to say that this is not a new element within climate change tackling. You can see a thread between RPP1, 2 and 3, so we have been engaged in the process of talking to both the Scottish Government and the Forestry Commission at every section. I think that we see within this report the culmination of a lot of discussions that we have been having. Alan, do you want to say anything on the process? Yes, I think that for us this is quite new to us, the RPP process specifically. We received an email a few weeks ago, basically, asking if we would like to put something together and give evidence. What I did notice and was very encouraged by was the integration between the process and the land use strategy. It is very important that those things are tied together and that there is a consensus built around the sort of thing. One of the commonest reasons that I hear from farmers for not wanting to go into forestry or regretting going into forestry is that it is a very long-term business. If you plan to field a barley, you can change next year if the subsidies change. In forestry, there is always a bit of a reserve about that because you are making a commitment for a very long time. There needs to be an equally long-term commitment and vision from the political side. This is an important part of that, so we are very glad to be along. John Finch-Everett, I think that you are going to ask the next question. I think that there are two parts to my question. First of all, RPP 2 has already been mentioned. The reality is that we have not been planting as much as we had hoped. The committee has actually looked at this, but we want to put some more stuff on the record today. If we have not reached the 10,000 per year so far, is it realistic to think that we can increase that in the future, or is that just over-optimistic? Secondly, on the use of wood products, is it realistic that we could use more wood in construction and so on, or is that again over-optimistic? Stuart, because he has given evidence before, he knows the theme. If you wave your hand first at the beginning of the question, I will try to bring the first person in and say, do not be intimidated by Stuart, but Stuart, if you would like to start. I think that it is just my natural enthusiasm, convener. I think that it is achievable. The targets are achievable. We have not achieved them in the past, and we have provided some information on why that is the case, but to recap from our perspective, what we have seen is that it has been supported through grants and through a agricultural system designed for farming, not designed to support forestry. That means that it is not necessarily fit for purpose, it creates problems. We have it then tied into cap cycles and you do not have to be a rocket scientist to look at history and see that as you come up to a new cap period and they come out of that, there is a falling away of planting. As you move from one scheme to another and as farmers to some extent, because a lot of this happens on farming land set in their hands, and the other part of it is the scheme process, where if you have a large planting scheme, then it can take many years to get it approved and cost an awful lot of money. Can we then change those? I mean absolutely. Assuming we leave the common agricultural policy, then we have got an opportunity to design these systems to suit ourselves. Equally, whichever route we go down, we have to get a balance between having an integrated rural policy and providing planting grants for trees that are not tied into an integrated system designed for agriculture in the way that we have. If we look across the IRC to the Republic, that is the route that they have gone down. It is something that we had suggested four or five years ago and was not possible, but clearly it is. There are actions that we can take, alongside improving the scheme with the output from James McKinnon's report for Farragus Ewing, which was published recently. We can achieve that. I think that those things were in place. We would have been hitting that 10,000 hectare a year target, because there is land out there and there is interest out there. George, I think that it is important that we recognise that forestry is a long-term business, and the first version of SRDP was disastrous for woodland creation, particularly in the early years. There have been a lot of changes since then, and the scheme is now much more fit for purpose. However, we have lost a huge amount of momentum at that stage, which we now can see returning because of the changes that have been made. As George mentioned, the implementation of the recommendations that McKinnon has made is going to be really important. It is a bit disappointing that it has taken a bit of an outsider to come in and knock heads together and effectively state the bleeding obvious in terms of some of the issues that we have had in terms of the whole process for approval, which has become burdensome, inefficient and adding little value to the process despite its cost. Charles, would you like to come in on that? I would echo the points made about the process by which funding is arrived at, but I would also point to land supply and the way in which the land use strategy is implemented in terms of identifying land that can be used for a forest station. I know that we have had two very successful pilots of the land use strategy in Scotland. Unfortunately, we seem to have run aground after those pilots because they involve investment, and that is why I am very pleased to note within those proposals that there is a commitment for the Scottish Government to invest in local planning authorities to assist them with what it does not use the word invest, it uses the word support. I am choosing to interpret that as invest, and I will continue to do so until I am told otherwise. To support local planning authorities in the development of local forestry and woodland strategies, I would like to see integrated with proper regional land use management at a strategic level. At the moment that is not invested in by the Scottish Government, it is left entirely to local planning authorities, who are hard pressed enough already with the work that they have to do without taking on an extra element. Land use strategies came out of the very first climate change act. It is really important that we integrate land use with the climate change outcomes that we want. We have to take land use seriously and implement regional strategies for land use. That is why I am looking at it. Is there anyone else who wants to come in and who has not said anything? I think that we would be slightly less angry about whether the targets will be met. I think that we are moving in the right direction. We would also welcome the McKinnon report, which I think nails it in terms of some of the problems of process that there has been. We think that that will help, but looking at the timescale for achieving the targets, it seems to be assumed that almost immediately we will leap back up to 10,000 on the basis of the McKinnon report. I do not think that that is really the case. It will take a while to implement some of those things, some of them are quite deep-seated. I do not think that in themselves they will achieve the targets. I think that we need to look more broadly. The big thing that is really left out of the report, as far as we are concerned, is that will-in creation does not happen in a vacuum, as Stuart mentioned, the common agricultural policy. There are competing subsidies at work. That needs to be addressed before the targets can be met. We are living in interesting times at the moment. The only certain thing about our relationship with Europe and the CAP is uncertainty. We think that now is the time to be planning for both possible outcomes with that and for taking advantage of the real opportunity that would come if we were out of the CAP to have a much more integrated policy between agriculture and forestry. I noted something in the NFU's contribution. It is rather roofily noted that, if farmers do anything in forestry, if they plant up an area, it is immediately taken out of the agricultural account and put into forestry. They could not get any credit for that. It is rather the same if a hill sheep farmer wants to plant trees. The rational thing with a hill sheep farm is to look at how much in byland you have and see how much hill land that can support. I really put the rest of the trees as an income stream and shelter at the moment. If they do that, they are told that that is not agriculture in the context of the CAP. It will not be funded like agriculture is. The difference in subsidies is enormous. That is a real skew, which we have an opportunity to end. Can I bring in Mike in? There is a bit on products that you have mentioned. I wonder if anyone wants to mention that. Maybe Mike's question will tie in. In the Parliament, in the chamber in the last forestry debate, there was a cross party unanimity, and the minister agreed that he would set up a panel of experts to advise him on looking at a new system post-2020 about how we've got it. I just wondered if we're at a stage when any of your organisations have yet been approached to think about advising the Government on a new system of subsidies because what you're saying is that it's come out of agriculture, and we really need a forestry, a design for a forestry. Is there any response to that yet? Can I just say that a brief answer yes or no if you've been approached at this stage would be very helpful? Stuart? No, we've not been approached but we're developing our own thinking that we want to share. Professor? No, we haven't been approached. Charles? No, we haven't been approached. Okay, and Alan, I'm assuming not. John had mentioned the increase of wood products in construction, and is that what you want to come back on, George? I realise that we've not actually answered that question or that part of your question. Certainly speaking for the somaline capacity, the substantial green mill capacity in Scotland that could increase, timber is an internationally traded commodity, and at the moment Scottish mills are running rather slower than we would like to see, really, as a consequence of the world economy, and it's a demand issue, really, rather than a supply issue. So there is capacity, certainly, in the sawn capacity. So have you said demand issue if people are not wanting to use wood or not wanting to use Scottish wood? It is not a Scottish wood issue, it's a worldwide wood issue based on the world economy being rather sluggish, and therefore there is surplus supplies on the world market, which affects our import competition. Stuart, do you want to come back on that? There are always issues and short-term issues of supply and demand, but I think that the main thing is that it could be using more wood, because if we're going to increase and meet these targets, then we have to be using more wooden construction. In our perspective, there's a lot of opportunity to use more timber in not just in housing but in construction generally. At the moment, I think that we're about 70 per cent wood for new build through timber frames, which means there's still 30 per cent of housing that is not built with wood. We are developing products with wood like cross-laminated timber, glue-lamp, which allows us to put wood into bigger sections, to go into high-rise buildings, into office blocks and the like. So there's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of development and there's still a lot of opportunity out there. I think that what we're facing is there's still a lack of perhaps understanding of how wood is a suitable product and, in some cases, over-specification. So Scottish Wood may be graded, not to get into too much technical detail, at a lower grade than imported wood because, in summary, it's faster and faster growing, but we can often use that Scottish Wood in places where people are specifying a higher grade unnecessarily, and that's educating architects. So I think that there is a number of elements being to look at here in order to hit the target. It hasn't really been explored within the RPP3 paper, but it is definitely achievable. That would be good and worthwhile. I think that you're on to the next question. Yes, and it's just on that issue. Obviously, the faster-growing woods are the ones that people are seeing at our lower grades, but there are uses for that. However, how do we get our own hardwoods involved in construction and the like? Historically, you wouldn't call them plantation, but they've never been managed properly. Can we manage native hardwoods better to provide the grades that are required, as well as educate architects to use lower grades? Would products that can be used very well in construction? I understand the opportunity to use both more hardwoods and softwoods. We focus on softwoods because, to be blunt, the vast majority of wood that is consumed, including housing, is made of softwood, and that's globally what's traded and what's used in the UK. However, there are opportunities to use more hardwoods if we can. The slower-growing tend to be more expensive per unit of production, which obviously has an impact on how you can utilise them. Part of the issue that we have is that we've lost the culture of managing woodlands generally to produce products. A lot of the establishment of woodland that we've had in recent decades has been about it's good for wildlife, but it's not necessary to work with the person who's planting those who would say, well, why don't you manage them so that you can have a high-quality tree at the end of the day that can provide income and support local activity? Unfortunately, the resource that we have tends to be not very good for high-value uses such as construction, and therefore it's still a bit of a niche market. However, if we look at this going forward and say how do we make sure that when we are working with grants with supporting woodland management that we're encouraging people who own hardwood or broadleaf trees to manage them, then it's something that we can change for the future. Unfortunately, the cycles are probably 50 to 60 years to 70 years from now, rather than the 20 to 30 years that we're looking at for softwoods that have been planted in the past. A lot of planting occurs. People follow the money and be at a tax break, which you're not really fussy what you're planting as long as you're ticking that box to qualify for the tax break. Also, if you are getting the same amount of grant for a fast-growing softwood as a slower-growing hardwood, is the way that we look at financing and encouraging forestry needing a total overhaul to make sure that we get it right to get the right product? Before you answer that, I know that you want to answer all the questions with your enthusiasm, which I notice. Charles is quite keen to come in, and I'd quite like to see if I can bring him on partly on what was answered before and see if you'd like to answer on that as well. Stewart is right that ultimately it will be the subsidy regime and the grants that are available that will drive that, but we have lost a lot of the culture of hardwood management within Scotland. That's where it's a great advert for the Forestry Commission in Scotland, who, particularly in the south-west, are able to do a lot of experimenting with trying to bring back productive hardwood skills and productive hardwood management and trying to regrow that culture within Scotland. The profit is further down the line, but there could be value in that. We heard before in agriculture that sometimes we should focus on a better end product rather than chasing efficiencies in the system. The same is true of forestry. Those skills are not spread across Scotland, but they are there being tested in part, thanks to the Forestry Commission. First, I'll just comment or add to that. I think that there's a bit of an impression that Charles has given there that I don't believe is correct. The majority of the existing hardwood resources in the private sector are not on the public forest estate by a long way. There always has been a differential in terms of grant rates because it is more expensive to plant broadleaves than it is to plant conifers and to get them successfully established. Past grant incentives for broadleaves has essentially been targeted at just planting those trees, just planting those species, without much thought as to what the end point would be, and therefore the way the schemes have worked has encouraged planting trees, broadleave trees at wide spacing, which vastly reduces the potential for utilisable material coming out of those. There are a number of lessons that we know and recognise. The new grant scheme is today much better balanced than the old SRDP, and there is more focus on productive broadleaves, which was almost absent in the past. It was simply a case of planting hectares with trees widely spaced, which didn't give much opportunity at all for wood production. I think that we can address that very rapidly. We have a very expert professional bunch of forest managers in Scotland that will respond to the opportunities. Although the culture has largely been lost, it can be reinstilled quite quickly. Stuart McMillan, now is your chance to come in. I will just add one specific point to respond to Rhoda's question about whether the grant system or the mechanisms that we have to support are appropriate or should change them. Essentially, to achieve planting, we are providing a grant to pay for the capital costs of planting the trees and you are effectively providing financial support to help to compensate the farmer for losing the CAP payments that they are giving up by planting trees. Moving forward, I think that we are never going to get away from the need for a capital payment, especially if you are looking at broadly trees because of the costs. However, there is an opportunity to look at a post-CAP system of supporting farmers and wider people working in the rural economy to ensure that we don't have those break-off points between somebody who is switching from agriculture to forestry activity. I suppose that that then takes us to the age old question that you are skewering money for agriculture into forestry and there is a fear that you do that. You get everyone running in that direction because it is obviously not so labour intensive once you have got your trees planted and there would then be a concern from food producers that food production would fall. It is not maybe quite as straightforward as you are suggesting. Sure, Alan. A good time to come on this one as well. One is that if a farmer is planting some of the land of trees, they are still receiving the income. It is not in the same way that we are looking at the CO2 issue that farmers are saying that if we plant trees that seem to be benefiting the forestry sector and recorded there rather than the agriculture sector, if the finance is being paid to achieve an outcome, it is the landowner that the farmer receives the benefit. I also think that that also flags up the issue of how we deliver a lot of the tree planting that we are seeking. There are big opportunities for sheep farmers in particular to be planting trees on part of the land and in doing so having minimal impact on their production. Planting trees in broader shelter belts is a decent-sized woodland but it also provides shelter for sheep which means that they then require less feed. There are ways in which we can integrate those. I think that we encourage farmers to see that as an opportunity and not as a zero sum loss from farming to forestry. Alan, do you want to come in on that? I do not think that I need to. I would have said that. Where did you want to ask? If I could move on slightly but sort of on the same topic, really we have seen new targets announced by the Government. My question is that are the timescales appropriate? Are we being ambitious enough and do you think that the sufficient funds are being put into it? Those of you who saw the debate would have seen that I passed a comment on that but I would be welcome to have your comment on it. Perhaps we could just start at that end and just work down if that would be all right. George? The issue of funding is a chicken and an egg or a horse and cart issue in terms of we fail to meet targets and therefore we have not actually bumped up against the funding ceilings. My impression is that there is a commitment from the Scottish Government to to really back these targets and the money will be found and certainly we have not had an issue so far that as planting or demand for planting is increasing and there is actually quite a good pipeline at the moment for the 10,000 hectare target that those funds will in fact be made available. I hope that, in the sense that I have and others have in the industries, there is great support from the Scottish Government to financially back achievement of those targets even though in any one year it may appear that we are planning to fail. I think that the targets are about right. I think that they are stretched targets but they are not overly ambitious and provided there is adequate commitment across the board to achieving those, I think that they can be delivered. George, can I just push you just a wee bit on that? Some people who might be considering planting trees might be put off by the fact that they do not see the grant in the pipeline, although there may be nice words from the Government. The whole issue of the costs of developing the woodlands and the fact that they are not seeing the grant available, do you think that that is affecting them? I do not think that it is because there is a barrier ahead of that, which is hopefully going to be addressed in the McKinnon report, and it is the process. Unless you are planting a very small scheme, the burden of the application process is a major disincentive. We know what we need to do to change that, and it would be that planters are looking to see how people will behave. We have heard the words and we are looking for the behaviour. Early signals from how McKinnon's recommendations are going to be implemented are really important to make sure that we get the momentum that we need. I will stick my neck out and say that I think that we will reach the 10,000 hectare target this year. That is not necessarily as a result of the McKinnon recommendations starting to feed through, but rather as a result of the fact that we only planted 4,700 hectares last year as a result of the SRDP changeover. There was some pent-up demand sitting there in the pipeline that will be manifest this year. In terms of the wider issue of timescales for planting, they say that the best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago, and the next best time is today. The timescales within the report are achievable. Some would argue that they need to be more ambitious. Certainly continuing with the 10,000 hectare target for the next 10 years, or sorry, until 2024, is not going to do anything to address the backlog of failures to meet the 10,000 hectare target over the past few years. There would definitely be scope for delivering a bit more faster. However, that then takes us to the second question, which is funding. You will see in Confor's submission that they have calculated that to deliver what is in here, you would require £45 million for forestry funding, whereas the current draft budget only raises the forestry grants to £40 million. I would add to that that, even if that pot was devoted entirely to new woodland creation, that pot has also depended on maintenance and management, tree health issues, deer management and so many other issues that, again, are like the funding for local authorities to work on land use strategies unless the whole process is supported. The political will is all very well, but it has got to be backed up with cold hard cash. The cabinet secretary is running around for another £5 million, as you speak, Professor. Yes, I do not think that I have much to add to what has been said on this one, but I think that the targets probably are achievable with the providers regarding funding and so on. However, the only other thing that I would perhaps add on top of that is that we really need to think about the targets of CO2 reduction, or greenhouse gas reduction, and not only the areas involved. The targets, given that the climate change plan is purely area-based, seems to be a move away from the amount of CO2 that is saving. After all, it is the target that we are hoping to get. Work that we have done at the James Hutton Institute shows that it depends on where the trees go, and that is a real important question as to what sort of savings are actually made. You can be very successful in achieving a certain planting area target, but not necessarily a CO2 reduction target. I think that that is an important thing to consider. Certainly, with the current climate change plan, there is no evidence or at least no target at all presented, as far as I can see, in terms of the actual emission reduction targets. I agree that the timescales are appropriate. I am always happier to see them brought forward but it is achievable. I highlight the point that I made earlier that, if you plant trees on farmland, you are not stealing from farmers to give to foresters. You are recycling the pot within the farming community, so we should look at how we fund forestry planting as not being a silo activity. In terms of the average cost of the planting that we have had over the past five years, it has been higher than we would expect going forward for the reason that it has been a higher proportion of broadleaf trees compared to softwood trees. That has not been in the proportions that the Government had sought or the private sector had sought, but, going forward, we are seeing a higher proportion of softwood trees being in the applications that are there and, therefore, they are cheaper to plants, so that should bring the average cost down. At the end of the day, we will still need to have some additional funds to achieve the targets that we are setting ourselves. I would also make a plea in that context that we are seeing a lot of interest coming forward. I think that, ahead of us leaving the common agriculture policy, if that is what eventually transpires, it might encourage a lot of landowners to come forward and say, I would like to plant now on the basis of what I understand is available to me, and, therefore, there is a danger that we could be turning people away over the next year or two, so I would caution that we would keep that envelope, if I can put it that way, open. Interesting point, Alan. Well, without repeating what has already been said, just a couple of points. One is with the grant rates that we should avoid trying to have a bidding war between different land uses. We can end up sort of ratcheting up, because we are not achieving one target and then another. If you do that, what you end up is simply subsidising land ownership, because that gets factored into land prices, that gets factored into land rents and so forth, and so the money is going pretty much directly to the landowners without achieving any change in land use. Again, we cannot ask about forestry grants in isolation from the other grants on the land. One point on targets to add to what has already been said, we are restructuring a lot of forests now that were planted around about the 70s or so, and this is a very good thing, because it allows us to achieve a much greater range of benefits, many more public benefits exploiting a lot of synergies, but it does mean that we are getting less timber production from those forests going forwards. If we do not want to end up simply displacing timber demand overseas, then we have to be quite ambitious about the targets here. Looking at the target of 21 per cent by the end of this process, I would just note that that is still very low by European standards. If we may, I am going to move on to the next question, which in this case will be Jamie. Thank you all for those excellent contributions. There are lots coming out and unfortunately time is short. I would like to talk about bringing it back to the climate change plan itself. It states in the plan that the woodland creation ambition will directly benefit all those that work in forestry, farmers, crofters and land managers to create woodland, but at the same time it also says that woodland creation can have significant positive or negative impacts on the landscape. I wonder if you had any views or comments on the plan itself, or if you agree to an extent or disagree with that statement. I would agree with that statement. It is entirely true. What it maybe does not do is flesh out what makes that difference. I think that it is basically good forest design. It is what makes the difference. It is good that support for UK forestry standards and so on is in the plan as well. That is really where those synergies I was talking about come in. If you have good forest design, it is not a zero sum game between carbon storage, livestock shelter, water retention, economic production and so on, but if you have bad forest design, it can be. In your submission, you should make the comment that land suitable for forestation in Scotland for timber production and native woodland is currently subsidised for other uses. You make a point about good forestry creation, but there is a fundamental issue here in that the land is already being used mostly for sheep farming or other uses. So there is a sort of trees not sheep sort of message in your input to the plan. I just wonder if you could develop that a little bit further. I think that the good design message really applies not just—you should not see farming and forestry as silos, each having their own good design. There really needs to be good design in the integration of them as well. With the sheep, I mentioned that sheep are still productive and profitable in some areas. If you have improved in by land, then that can support a population of sheep, which then can make use of an area of hill. What we have at the moment is that the areas of hill on those farms are vastly larger than the in by can really support, so sheep are being ranged very extensively. What happens when you do that is that they are preferential brazzers, so they will braze out the bits that they like best. You will get a mat of purple moor grass and such building up. That stops nutrient return to the soil. It is a situation that is really quite poor for farming. The farms themselves would be a lot better off if they were more able to put more of their land to forestry integrated in a whole system. George, you indicated that— To try and answer the two parts of your question, the direct benefit to those in the industry and the downstream side clearly will benefit. It is important to recognise how big an industry that has become in the forest industry in its entirety is now a bigger industry contributing more to the Scottish economy than fishing, for example, and it has considerable scope to grow. I think that the impact on the landscape—I think that good design is a given now. The process we have to go through means that the forests created today are radically different from the ones that I cut my teeth on when I started in the industry, which were much more utilitarian. We have come down to a bit of an issue of taste in terms of the impact on the landscape and a general human resistance to the process of change. There are lots of documented cases of objections to forests and woodlands being created and then objections when somebody and generations later have come to try and remove those. I think that it is all about a sensitive process but one that can move along at a sensible pace, which is where I come back to McKinnon. We need to make sure that the design and the whole approval process is something that is actually fit for purpose and uses the resources wisely. The cost involves for a large scheme now. To the applicant it can be £100,000. That is a lot of money. For a scheme of 100 hectares, there is not much difference in terms of scale when you get up to that stage. That is £1,000 a hectare of cost that is going in there that, in my view, is very poor value. It does not help the decision making. That is because the scoping exercise is far too wide. As McKinnon said, let us focus on what is important. Do not waste time proving what we already know. Let us make sure that the environmental assessment or something similar to that, if it is not requiring an EIA, focuses on the issues that really are material to make in the decision. If we can nail that, that will make a huge difference in terms of the attitude of people wanting to create woodland and the actual delivery. Another person is at this stage. Charles Professor, do you want to come in? I know Stuart will always come in. Brief point to make. It returns to the previous one that I made in terms of the effect on the landscape. I think that we cannot forget about the soil underneath. Certainly, when we are planting trees, there is a lot of disturbance, which results in CO2 emissions because of that disturbance. It takes something in order about 10 or 15 years before the balance is restored again in terms of the carbon that is stored by the trees. That depends very much on the type of soil that the trees are actually being planted on. The study that my colleagues have done at JHI has quantified that and has done it spatially across the whole of Scotland, showing the areas where there is a positive benefit from planting trees. In quite large areas, not just on the deep peats, which are excluded at the moment, there is a negative balance for quite a period of time. They have pluses and minuses. It is very important that we place the trees on the landscape in terms of the carbon balance. The final question is going to come from the deputy convener. Before I ask her to ask her, you are all going to get a chance to answer this. Just to give you a chance to think about your answers while the question is being asked. As I asked the agricultural sector, we have heard a lot of them. Thank you, your contributions have been extremely valuable. We have talked about subsidies, attitudes, land use and funding. I think that we have gone over quite a broad range of issues. Are there any policies or proposals that have not been included that you would have liked to have seen in the plan? George, you can stop. There is almost no reference to our existing woodlands and making sure that they contribute as best they can to climate change. There are two issues for me. One is the process of restocking, the longer the rotation and the interval between felling the trees and replanting is a critical part in terms of just carbon capture, contribution to the economy, the wood production and so on. There are two broad schools of thought that are largely practised in the private sector and certainly by my company, what we now call hot planting, so we like to restock as quickly as we possibly can, but in weeks almost of the season's ride behind a harvester. For reasons that I still do not fully understand, and I should declare that I am a forestry commissioner, I choose to delay restocking largely as a response to weevil. It seems to me very odd that there are two main schools of thought there. I harbour a suspicion that funding and matching budgets has been a major driver towards that delay. I would like to see more focus about how we continue to manage the existing woodlands to maximise their contribution to carbon capture and climate change and a particular focus on restocking. Let me not forget the loss of forestry from our existing planting. I grieve over the areas of forest that have been lost to wind farms, it seems to me, striking that the hill that had the trees on it is the one with the wind farms on it, the one next to it without trees on it, somehow or other, has been left without development. We have a net issue here in terms of the area. We must not forget the loss as well as the gain from woodland creation. I am going to be very similar, I am afraid. When the Committee on Climate Change investigated how Scotland was doing with its climate change plan, when they looked at forestry, they looked a lot at the existing forestry and the risk from tree disease and tree pests. As part of that, they said that there was a risk of Scotland's existing woodland sequestering less carbon because of the lower proportion of young trees within it, which again brings us back into the issue of deer management, which I am sure all MSPs are very familiar with. Our existing woodlands need to be better looked after. The Native Woodland Survey of Scotland from 2014 revealed that more than 50 per cent of Scotland's native woods were in an unfavourable condition. On a large part, that was down to failed regeneration and invasive non-native species within it. It is great that we have the ambition to create more woodland, more and more woodland, but it is like turning on the tap while you have still got the plug out. We need to put the plug in and start looking after the water that is in the bath—the trees that we already have. We need to be good stewards of the trees that we already have so that we will be better stewards of the trees that we are going to grow over the next 20 years. The only thing in addition that I would like to have seen more of is something on agroforestry. I think that when I search through there was only one mention of it, and that was right at the end anyway. I mean, we've talked about it a little bit already. I think that there's a lot of scope for trying to explore the interface between agriculture and forestry. We tend to see them as two different silos, I think, often. If there was more on trying to encourage agroforestry, during the distinction between farm woodlots and my concept of agroforestry, which is more growing trees and crops together and looking for the synergies between them, I guess that I'd like to see more on that. I very strongly support the point about looking at existing forests and understanding what's happening there and dealing with losses. I think that what we need to do is make sure that we're monitoring every year changes in forest cover to be able to understand if we're not replanting why that is not happening and tackling it. We are worried that there seems to be an increasing bank of land that once had trees, which was expected to again have trees and doesn't have trees, and we haven't really got to the bottom of that, so I'd flag that up as a key point. The other thing that I do think that is missing is that the linkages between forestry and agro-set is often that forestry has been looked at as a silo, but as we've already discussed, you plant trees in agricultural land and you're benefiting the agricultural side of the activity there. There are only three big areas that sit above the line in terms of emissions when we're looking at the graphs of emissions. Agriculture, transport and industry. Agriculture, forestry can contribute. Industry, we have a large manufacturing industry based around using wood. Quite simply, it has a positive carbon balance, so we're locking up wood in those wood products. The process of producing those wood products releases a lot less energy than steel concrete plastic brick. By having more forestry manufacturing activity, we can have a successful industry, but we'll actually be reducing our carbon emissions. I think that those linkages across forestry to those other elements are perhaps missing in an RPP3 and hopefully can be addressed in the future. Alan? I wrote down a list of points when you asked your question. I've crossed my left. Essentially, I would support that. The problem with the report as it stands is that it has a very narrow focus on planned woodland creation, tree planting and so on. It misses out the variable nature of existing woods and the need to look after them. The fact that a lot of woodlands come to be by natural regeneration across most of Europe is natural regeneration when you stop doing almost anything else with land that goes to forest. That often doesn't happen in Scotland to a large extent because of deer numbers, so we need to look at those factors as well beyond the forest fence. Thank you very much. I think that the last points that you brought up were particularly interesting. Hot planting is something that I've not heard of before. I think that the whole issue of managing existing woodlands that we have is critical. I think that the committee will want to look at that more carefully, as they will want to look at agricultural forestry connections between the two and the whole issue of forestry cover in making sure that we're not losing the existing trees that we've got. However, it's been very helpful for us. Thank you very much for coming and giving of your time. I would remind you if there's something that you feel that we haven't explored enough and you want to get back to us on, you've got till the 10th of February to do so, so thank you very much and I'd like to now very briefly suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to move. Thank you. Agender item 4 now. The committee is invited to consider a legislative consent memorandum lodged by the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy and Connectivity, outlined in paper 5. The legislative consent motion relates to the UK digital economy bill. The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee have considered the LCM on Tuesday 31 January and have made a number of recommendations that it wished to make to the committee. As you will be aware, it raised serious concerns regarding the breadth of data sharing provided to the Scottish ministers by the LCM. Those echo the concerns that were raised in the Equivalent House of Lords Committee. Members will note that the timetable that we've been given for the LCM is extremely tight, and I think that we can probably all agree that that situation is not ideal. The members will note that the DPLR committee is content with the aspects of the LCM that refers to MAS and the communication code, which specifically relates to our mid. The DPLR's committee's concerns relate to data sharing aspects of the LCM. Those provisions are so broadly ranging that a significant number of committees would also be engaged under their remit. None of them have had the opportunity to scrutinise the LCM due to the tight timetable. As a lead committee, we are required to reflect on the memorandum and then consider whether we are content with the terms. We will then report our findings to the Parliament. Do any committee members have any comments on it? Thank you very much, convener. I've been a member of the DPLR on a couple of occasions. I spent quite a lot of time in the trenches on this subject. I'm not sure that I would give the same weight that the DPLR has chosen to to the issue of the powers that have been given to ministers, which is essentially a power to change the list of bodies that are affected. That's a pretty standard thing that ministers do. In the Scottish arrangements in this Parliament, the secondary legislation that is under discussion by the DPLR is a matter for Parliament. Yes, ministers are the ones who lay it, but that does not deprive the Parliament of the opportunity in a negative instrument to intervene, to stop it and requires, in the case of a Fernum instrument, that Parliament takes a decision on the matter. I'm not 100 per cent clear of the processes that take place at Westminster, but I understand that there's a less clear way for similar things that happen there to be dealt with at Parliament. What I say doesn't invalidate what I believe the House of Lords is saying in similar terms about the legislation. For my part, I'm quite neutral as to what the committee does, but I don't find myself overly concerned by some of the observations that the DPLR has chosen to put to us. Mike, I'm very concerned by the observations of the DPLR committee. I mean, just read one to put it on the record. It says that it quotes the House of Lords saying that we are deeply concerned about the part to prescribe a specified person providing services to public authority. We recommend that the clause should be removed from the bill and the committee agrees, and the DPLR says that the committee agrees with those recommendations, the delegated powers and regulatory reform committee in their application, and it goes on. I won't quote those, but I'm certainly not going to support this. I don't want to—I actually think that this is so important. I'm going to raise this issue at the bureau on Tuesday because I'd like to see a debate on the floor of the chamber about this. I think that a way forward for the committee is not to have a debate now and here in the committee on this, but I think to note this and let members in the chamber have a wider debate about this so that we can make some sort of decision. Okay, just before I bring in John on this, because he's indicated that he wants, and I'd just like to remind the committee that we do actually have three options open to us. We can either approve it, we can disapprove it, or we can note it, and by noting it we would send it back to the Government, and it would then be up to them to decide whether they wanted to debate it further. Those are the three areas that I see we have. John, you wanted to come in, sorry. I think that it would just be to say that, in many cases, the buck stops with us as a committee on a whole range of issues, and if we don't do something about it, nobody else will. In this case, the buck stops with the House of Lords committee, which has raised those concerns. I broadly agree with those concerns, but I think that the reassuring thing for our committee is that it is being dealt with where the bill is, i.e. at Westminster. I think that I'm quite relaxed about our reaction to this, whether we note it or support it or whatever, because the House of Lords are actually dealing with those very points that we are concerned about. I very much agree with Mike's summation of the thing. I think that he's absolutely right. The data protection thing is such a wide-ranging issue, and I think that we've all said that the timescale is very short, and I just feel that we should note this bit of legislation and refer it to the debate in the chamber. I suggest that we could take other opinions, but there seems to be a sort of opinion that noting that the LCM would be the way forward. Can I therefore make a recommendation to the committee that we note the LCM and pass it back as that? Would that meet everyone's approval? Of course, we will produce a small report that reflects the decision of the committee. A point of clarification. If we noted, does that mean that it will be debated as Mike has suggested, or can we, part of the report, suggest? I think that it's up to the Government to bring forward a motion, and I think that that will be down to the bureau and the Government to decide, and I think that we've had an indication from Mike that that matter will be raised at the bureau. Can I therefore have your approval to say that we are noting the LCM? Thank you. That's agreed. I now like to suspend the meeting to allow the committee to move forward into private session for the last item.