Chamber and committees

Does Abdool Kara want to come in on that?

Thank you very much for that challenge—we will look into that. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. It has been a useful and insightful discussion, including that pointer and some other things that have come up that the committee can take further. We will look forward to hearing from you after the January report comes out.

Thank you very much for that. I will now bring in Emma Roddick, who has a couple of questions.

Thank you. That is noted—we will take on board the need for those frank conversations.

I bring in Willie Coffey.

Blyth Deans mentioned that Clackmannanshire Council gave 2 per cent of its budget to participatory budgeting. We have participatory budgeting in Moray, but people are now starting to refer to it more as participatory grant making, because it is not really getting to the heart of the council’s budget. It is more about communities choosing to fund good community projects, rather than going back to the original idea of communities engaging in setting the council budget. That idea came from Brazil, I think, where communities were really getting in there and deciding about buses and engaging at that level of decision making. Is that happening in Clacks, or are we still at the grant-making stage because that process acts as the training wheels in getting a sense of agency into communities?

Our next item is to take evidence from two panels of witnesses as part of our pre-budget scrutiny for 2025-26. We have been joined by our first panel. Jo Armstrong is the chair of the Accounts Commission, Blyth Deans is audit director at Audit Scotland, Lucy Jones is audit manager at Audit Scotland and Derek Yule is a member of the Accounts Commission. I welcome the witnesses to the meeting and I invite Jo Armstrong to make a brief opening statement.

I am going to shift the subject a little, but I will pick up on what you have just said about the long term. As you know, the financial sustainability of local government is one of the main themes of our pre-budget scrutiny. We are interested to hear how sustainable you think the finances of our councils are. Should we be worried that what has happened to some local authorities in England could also happen in Scotland?

Do you think that something is missing there? If NatureScot is looking at national things and the responsibility for making the other decisions falls—to use your term—on the local authority, is something else needed, or are you satisfied with the local authority making that decision in that nuanced way?

I will pick up on a number of the recommendations that were made by the REC Committee. Recommendation 9 says:

“The Committee considers the current level of mortalities to be too high in general across the sector and it is very concerned to note the extremely high mortality rates at particular sites. It is of the view that no expansion should be permitted at sites which report high or significantly increased levels of mortalities, until these are addressed to the satisfaction of the appropriate regulatory bodies.”

Throughout these evidence sessions, we have heard about high mortality. One example is of a salmon farm in Loch Seaforth in the Western Isles, where more than a million fish died in a production cycle in 2023, and the level of suffering carried on for six months without any consequences. What do you think about that?

From our evidence sessions, it seems to be the case that already high levels of mortality are increasing—possibly due to climate change but maybe for other reasons—but nobody in the process seems to be responsible for the mortalities. We cannot quite get to the bottom of it. Do you have any thoughts on that and on what we can do about it?

So, when you consent a farm, you do not have any data on mortality. You said that we might need to look at spatial mapping. At the moment, you do not have any data on the trends. I think that Rachel Shucksmith said that there is a fluid and changing picture when we are dealing with the marine space.