Chamber and committees

Cabinet secretary, you said that you will meet the Secretary of State for Scotland on Monday. What will be your main priority in that discussion?

I have a brief question about the next theme, which is national parks. The Government announced a commitment to have a new national park or parks. The process began back in 2022 and we have had two years to build up a framework to take that forward. As you know, Galloway was announced as the preferred option. That decision was some 24 months in the making, if you like, but the formal consultation that will advise you on your decision on whether to designate a national park will run for only 12 weeks. That is incredibly short, and Christmas and new year will be slap bang in the middle of that, so, in effect, the consultation period will be significantly less than 12 weeks.

In Galloway, there are real concerns that the process is now being rushed, given the uncertainties about the park boundaries and the planning authority status of the national park, along with a whole list of other concerns. Will you consider delaying the final decision, given that it appears that the timescales for the process that are now being announced are far shorter than had previously been imagined?

Would it not have been sensible, as part of the process, to carry out a full and thorough investigation of how existing national parks have impacted on policy outcomes?

We will now look at those themes in a bit more detail.

We are making good progress. I suggest that we take a 10-minute comfort break before coming back to tackle the big challenge of fisheries.

I suspend the meeting until 10:20.

The next theme is fisheries and Rhoda Grant has the first question.

I am not sure that I am clear on exactly what you think the impacts will be of the delayed climate change plan. We will have to have new schemes to support low-carbon beef production, and the suckler beef climate group has reported on those. There will almost certainly be conditionality in the environment aspects of legislation, so there must be an impact on your development of that. If we do not see a climate change plan being laid in November, what is the likely impact on developing agriculture policy?

I mean the Bew review money.

To finish this section on marine, there has been—as you will be aware, cabinet secretary—a two-year research programme into the cockle population in the Solway Firth, and I believe that a report will be published very soon on the sustainability of the stocks there. On receipt of that report, will you be able to set out the Government’s approach on any future commercial cockling in the Solway?

In the previous programme for government, there was a commitment to look at extending the 2021 statutory animal licensing framework, and the Government consulted between July and September last year on its proposals. However, the current programme for government makes no mention of it, and there has been a cut in the budget for animal licensing. What are your plans in that regard, given the consultation that was carried out last year?