Chamber and committees

My understanding is that, under the 1991 act, you can only resume land providing that that is part of the lease and that it is not a fraud on the lease—that is, doing so would not make it impossible to continue farming as things stands under the original lease.

There is a set formula to compensate for that, is there not? What is that?

Fixed equipment does not include houses, does it—or does it?

I want to make sure that I understand that. If deer were to come marauding out of Forestry and Land Scotland’s woods and they went into a march field and knocked the fence down, would the landlord and Forestry and Land Scotland be jointly responsible for repairing that? Would the responsibility be split 50:50, or would the landlord or Forestry and Land Scotland be responsible for that? There is confusion there.

In that case, there would be no claim.

There is scope there for some work to be done.

It has been a long session, in which we have looked at all sorts of issues. I am loth to ask each of you how we can change the bill to make it better, because I am sure that you will all have a long list of views. However, is there anything that we have not touched on that you think that we ought to look at?

Thanks, Bob—that is a thought for the financial memorandum.

On that note, I will suspend the meeting. It is 10:28, and I ask everybody to be back at 10:35 or thereby.

I reconvene the meeting.

I will ask the next question, so it was appropriate that I had a break to get myself ready for it—although I was ready for it anyway. The Scottish Land Commission hosts the tenant farming advisory forum. How much has the development of part 2 of the bill been based on agreement in that forum? Bob McIntosh is probably the expert on that.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 21st meeting in 2024 of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. The first item on our agenda is to make a decision on whether to take in private items 3, 4 and 5. Item 3 is consideration of the evidence that we will hear on the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, item 4 is further consideration of visits and engagement as part of our scrutiny of that bill, and item 5 is consideration of our approach to a proposal for the United Kingdom Government to legislate in a devolved area. For the record, I note that we propose to formally dispose of that notification in public at a meeting in the near future; today’s item involves purely preliminary consideration of our approach.

Do we agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

We can definitely hear you. I am wondering whether you are about to ask the question that I was about to ask—but crack on, Bob.