Chamber and committees

I am grateful to the minister for the offer to work on a possible amendment at stage 3 on the issue covered by amendment 107. On that basis, I will not move it.

Amendments 107 and 108 not moved.

Section 1 agreed to.

Section 2—Offence of purchasing glue trap

The regulation of some traps, which the bill will introduce, marks a big improvement, and I very much welcome it. However, as we know, that concerns only live-capture bird traps and traps covered by the Spring Traps Approval (Scotland) Order 2011, as amended. A variety of other traps are commonly used in Scotland, some of which are completely unregulated—those used for moles, rats and mice, which can cause a great deal of suffering. I therefore believe that the Government’s approach of not considering those traps is inconsistent from an animal welfare point of view.

Amendment 109, in my name, would add mammal cage traps, which are used to take and then kill mammals, to the list of traps for which users must have a licence. Animal welfare organisations have understandably been calling for a review of all traps, examining both the reasons for their use and their welfare impact. I would support such a review, and I would be keen to hear from the minister whether the issue of live traps will be kept under review.

The policy memorandum for the bill says that the traps that I have referred to are not included because

“the activity does not pose a risk to raptors, and in the majority, such activities have no link to grouse moor management.”

Although the traps that I have referred to do not pose a risk to raptors, they will have an impact on any animal trapped in them, and bringing them under the trap licence scheme would ensure that best practice is followed to minimise their impact. Something is not cruel just because it is linked to grouse moors. The Government recognises that with the comprehensive ban on snaring under the bill, which is not linked just to those moors.

I have worded my amendment 109 in such a way that it specifies that the traps concerned are for taking animals that are intended to be killed. Researchers and welfare groups would therefore not be affected, and the good news for Edward Mountain is that neither would his wife’s actions.

The aim of specifying

“for the purpose of destruction”

in the amendment is to exclude any trapping for welfare reasons that subsequently leads to humane destruction. I hope that the minister will agree that that overcomes any objections on the basis of unintended consequences.

Amendment 110 would alter the wording of the requirement for trap users to try to avoid untargeted species getting caught in traps. The current wording in the bill is:

“the person took all reasonable steps to prevent the killing, taking or injury of any other animal (other than an invertebrate) not intended to be taken by the trap.”

Amendment 110 would replace the word “reasonable” with “practicable”, which sets a higher standard. One legal dictionary says:

“Practicable means available and capable of being done after taking into consideration cost, existing technology, and logistics”.

It is a common word in legislation. It has been suggested that it would mean someone having to stand by a trap 24 hours per day, but that is simply not true. That does not meet the interpretation of “practicable” in law. Using the word would mean, however, that steps should be taken if it is possible to take them. “Reasonable” is a lesser test and, if we use that, we could easily end up with an individual’s view of what is “reasonable” dominating. Given the high numbers of untargeted species that we know have been caught and have suffered in traps until now, I believe that we should aim to set a higher bar.

I am particularly interested to know why, given how common the phrase “reasonably practicable” is in Scots law, the Government has chosen not to use it but to use “reasonable” only.

Amendment 113 seeks to draw attention to an inconvenient truth and the elephant in the room in this debate. According to the explanatory notes to the bill, the Government wants to

“ensure that the management of grouse moors and related activities are undertaken in an environmentally sustainable and welfare conscious manner.”

However, the reality is that the bill allows for the continued killing of hundreds of thousands of foxes, stoats, weasels and crows and a huge number of non-target species, such as hedgehogs and people’s pets, each year for one purpose and one purpose alone: so that there is an unnaturally high number of grouse to kill for sport.

I will be giving you a lot more detail on this, but my first answer to your question is that it would give us the numbers that are being killed by particular traps. It would give us information on, for example, non-target animals that are being trapped and killed, which is an important consideration and something that we should be looking at. It would also, in my view, be beneficial to include the manner of death, in order to shed light on how well traps are operating in the field. I hope that that will become part of the licence conditions in due course.

Apparently, newer designs of spring traps are better at killing instead of injuring, and they are less likely to catch non-target species, but we will not know that for sure unless records on those traps are kept and reported on. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. I think it legitimate to ask those who do not support the amendment why they do not believe that that information, which would already be collected, should be reported. What do people have to hide who do not want this information made public?

Coming back to my earlier point, I note that, at committee, Jim Fairlie asked:

“What is your view on the suggestion that licensing should be supported by statutory reporting? In other words, if you set 100 traps, you have to say where those 100 traps are, what you have caught in them and how many animals are killed each year.”

In response, Alex Hogg of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association said:

“We would agree with that and, again, it is about training. We do it with snaring at the moment, so it could easily be done with trapping. It would provide feedback to the Government and NatureScot about what animals were being trapped and dispatched or whatever.”—[Official Report, Rural Affairs and Islands Committee, 14 June 2023; c 58.]

The minister says that NatureScot can make this a condition of a licence, so clearly it is possible to do this. However, it should be more than that; it should, and clearly can, be a requirement.

Finally, on amendment 118, Hugh Dignon, the head of the Scottish Government’s wildlife and biodiversity unit, said in evidence to the committee that one of the Scottish Government’s intentions with the bill was

“to improve animal welfare outcomes even when those traps are used lawfully ... ensuring that the highest standards apply and that people are operating to those high standards”.—[Official Report, Rural Affairs and Islands Committee, 31 May 2023; c 62.]

I agree that that should be the basic principle, but it should be reflected within the bill.

There is something else that you have not been able to put a timescale on yet. Four years after the legislation to establish the bank was passed, you have not yet established an advisory board to oversee its work. Do you have an update on the timescale for that?

Following on from those questions, we know that the budget is challenging, but we have heard that the budget overall is up. The departmental budget is down by 8 per cent, but the cuts to the enterprise agencies are three or four times higher than the overall cut in the budget—particularly for South of Scotland Enterprise, which will see a 22 per cent cut. Given the huge economic inequalities across Scotland—for example, the south of Scotland has the lowest wages and the highest level of outward migration of young people, because of the lack of high-paid, high-skilled jobs—what does the budget say about tackling the economic inequalities in those areas, when you are cutting the enterprise budgets in peripheral areas by so much?

I think that we will see more investment, and what we will certainly see from a UK Labour Government is growth, which we have not seen from the Scottish Government.

Sticking with the issue of financial transactions that you mentioned, cabinet secretary, what progress do you expect on SNIB’s ability to access existing capital beyond them? One of the issues raised with the committee by the chair of SNIB was securing the regulatory permissions necessary to manage third-party capital. What progress do you see taking place in the forthcoming year to enable the bank to do that and to access other forms of funding?

Just give me an idea of the timescale.

We are seeing those opportunities; as the minister knows, the south of Scotland has the highest number of wind farms in Scotland. So far, though, we have seen very few of those renewables jobs, and I hope that that will change.

As well as the cuts to enterprise agencies, the Scottish National Investment Bank is seeing its budget being cut by a third, to the lowest level since it began to operate, despite the fact that the chair of the bank says that the planned £2 billion public capitalisation will not be sufficient to meet the bank’s mission. Why is that cut so large, and is the Scottish Government still on track to provide the £2 billion that is committed to SNIB? Do you still expect, for example, the bank to be self-financing by 2025?

Is there a timescale for that yet?