Chamber and committees

You will have to wait and see.

—evidence is taken and, indeed, ministers change. I have been looking at this for one week. I have watched all the committee’s evidence sessions, I will speak to SL&E tomorrow on its views, I am meeting with stakeholders and I will be speaking to a lot of the people who I would have spoken to already, had I been here at the start of the drafting of the bill. Therefore, forgive me, but between stage 1 and stage 2 is when I will make many of those decisions.

I will bring in Hugh Dignon, but I would not say that I am in a difficult position. I am going to take the bill forward. There are things that I need to be satisfied about, and there was a rationale for the draft, so if Hugh wants to come in on that, that is fine.

The Government can decide what is proportionate and reasonable to put in a bill on the basis of advice and recommendations. A committee then deliberates whether the bill is proportionate and reasonable, and it can make recommendations for amendments. I believe that the bill that is in front of the committee is very much in line with the Werritty report, and I stand by it. Will the bill change before it is passed at its final stage? Of course it will. I am open to speaking to stakeholders about how the bill can be improved, and to hearing from members if they have proposals for improvements. I have said that quite clearly.

The independent reviews did engage with businesses. If you want information on what that engagement looked like, I am sure that it can be provided.

Obviously, I agree with my officials. Every bill that comes before this Parliament has to be ECHR compliant, and the Presiding Officer has to decide whether that is the case, too. This bill is compliant.

Hugh Dignon has something to add.

It is not regulation; it is a code of practice, which will be worked on by NatureScot and in collaboration with the stakeholders who will be applying for the licences.

There are a couple of things there. First, people will be applying for licences, which will be granted when they provide certain information. That process will be quite straightforward. It is not the case that we can say, “If you do not follow the code of practice, you will not get a licence.” People will have a licence and, if complaints are made that they are not following the code of practice, the idea is that NatureScot will liaise with the landowner or land manager in order to ascertain what parts of the code of practice they are not complying with and to establish what it can do by way of advice or assistance to get them to comply with the code. That seems to be the philosophy from NatureScot: it wants to liaise and work with land managers so that it can get them up to code, so to speak, and so that what you are suggesting does not come to pass.

Your second point was about the idea of a disproportionate, almost knee-jerk, reaction from NatureScot, suspending licences based on very little information. I just cannot see that coming to pass. NatureScot would lose credibility very quickly. It is an organisation—it used to be Scottish Natural Heritage—that people know well and it has been working and operating in Scotland for many years. On the whole, it has very good relationships with land managers and the shooting estates.

I get that we are arguing back and forth, but NatureScot has to have the flexibility to be able to act in order to prevent any further damage from happening. The line is in the bill to allow it to do that. It can take a while for a police investigation to take place, but if something so egregious and severe has happened that NatureScot feels that it should take that action, it needs to be able to do that. Whether it will ever do that is another matter, but it needs to have the flexibility to be able to. That is why that line is in the bill.