Chamber and committees

I declare an interest in a farming and letting business, and I am a member of NFU Scotland.

Thank you very much. I appreciate your kind words, and I am absolutely delighted and honoured to take on the role as committee convener. I note that the committee’s acronym is, unfortunately, RAINE, which is not quite as nice as the acronym of the predecessor committee that I sat on, which sounded like “éclair”.

I am quite sure that this committee will be a fascinating one. It will have a huge amount of work to do in an area that I know all the members have a particular interest, and I look forward to working with all of you, the clerks and the Scottish Parliament information centre over the next few months.

Absolutely—I could not agree more. Our work on that could be built around work on the wider issue of succession planning when it comes to farming businesses. As someone who was involved in young farmers groups for many years, I know that that was an issue way back then—it must be 30 or 40 years ago now. Succession planning was an issue, but we did not look specifically at women in agriculture, which was a failing.

There is quite a bit of work to be done in that area. We must ensure that we bring through future generations of farmers. Entrepreneurial behaviour in farming tends to be exhibited by the young people. That is not always the case—I do not want to be ageist—but we certainly need to pay due regard to how agriculture will develop in the short and the long term.

Item 4 is a provisional discussion of the legacy papers produced at the end of session 5 by the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee and the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee. The papers summarise the committees’ recommendations on ways of working, based on the experience of the session, and highlight work that this committee might wish to focus on.

I invite members to highlight any aspects of the legacy papers that they consider to be particularly important for our work programme. I will not call members alphabetically to comment; instead, I will begin with those who had experience of the previous committees, starting with Liam McArthur.

Absolutely. I think that the members on the previous committees, certainly on the ECCLR Committee, worked very well together to come to the best solutions. That involved compromise on each side, but we had very few divisions and our committee reports were consensual. I would like to think that, going forward, we will gather evidence from stakeholders and work in a joined-up manner to try to get the best policies, laws and solutions for everybody. That will involve compromise in some cases, but I am sure that we will be able to reach the best solutions.

We could probably talk for the next week about our remit and set out what we think we will need to achieve over the next few years, but unfortunately we only have until 10.15 today. If members agree, we will programme an informal business planning event towards the end of the summer recess. My preference would be for committee members to meet physically in Parliament, rather than virtually.

Unfortunately, because of the Covid restrictions and where we are at present, we will be unable to have an away day. An away day is always a fantastic team building opportunity because it allows us to speak to one another both formally and informally and to get to know one another a little better, but we will not be able to do that before the Parliament reconvenes in September. However, I hope that we can have a face-to-face business planning meeting at some time towards the end of August.

If everyone agrees, the committee clerks will be in touch with members regarding the arrangements for that informal planning session, which will be organised in a way that takes due regard of the restrictions that are in place at the time.

As there are no other comments from members, I thank you all very much and say once again that I am absolutely looking forward to working with you all on what I believe will be the best committee in the Parliament. Not only do I have the best constituency, but I now have the best committee. I am delighted to go into the recess on that basis. I look forward to the committee’s hard work and to getting to know you all better when we have our next meeting.

Thank you. I should have said at the outset that we recognise that there will be outstanding questions about where our remit falls, and whether there is crossover with the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee. After this session, I propose to write to the Scottish Government to ask for clarity in advance of our business planning meeting. However, I ask that members do not hesitate to raise topics that they think fall within the remit of this committee, and we can then clarify the position before we move forward.

Thank you, Jenni. I am glad that you mentioned that last point. Kate Smith from the participation and communities team, whom we briefly met in the briefing session, did a fantastic job for the ECCLR Committee in the previous session. She made sure that we got opinions from not only stakeholders—or opinion holders, as some people like to call them—but a broad selection of people, in order to get a range of different opinions on the various topics. I look forward to working with Kate Smith to ensure that we get a broad spectrum of opinions from across our communities and stakeholders.

I will move on to Karen Adam, whom I welcome to the committee.

I congratulate Liam McArthur on becoming deputy convener, and I look forward to working with him over the coming months.

I will make some comments now, but if anybody wants to comment further, put an R in the chat box; then I will call you and we can turn your microphone on.

The comments in the past 15 minutes have certainly given us a wake-up call about how much work we have to do. For example, we could be the lead committee when it comes to Scottish Water, NatureScot, Marine Scotland and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. There is quite a bit of work to do on scrutinising SEPA’s work alone and ensuring that it is efficient.

We have touched on aquaculture, for which a report was produced in the previous Parliament. The ECCLR Committee and the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee worked on the report, which attracted a huge amount of public interest. We might need to look at the issue of the wild salmon population, or at the freshwater environment on a broader scale with regard to non-native, invasive species that impact on our biodiversity, which is in crisis, as we all know, and is affected by the climate change crisis that the world faces.

We will also probably need to look at some of the Government’s mitigation plans for hitting our net zero targets. They include forestry planting, which has implications for our natural environment as a whole, and peat restoration. We have touched on blue recovery in the marine environment and the seas around our coast. We might have to do a bit of work on looking at species decline, which goes hand in hand with the issue of our inshore fisheries.

In addition, of course, we have the issue of rural payments and new rural policies, which Jim Fairlie touched on—I think that we are past calling it CAP reform. We need to look at how that will tie in with land use strategies. The work of the new land groups that have been set up to look at how farming and environmental issues can be progressed together will be relevant to that.

There are also the on-going implications of Brexit. I am glad that Jim Fairlie mentioned parliamentary scrutiny and our role in relation to the United Kingdom internal market and animal welfare and food standards in future trade deals.

Work will also need to be done on crofting and the Crown Estate, as well as on animal welfare. There is a huge amount of work to be done. When they put together the legacy papers, some of the members of the predecessor committees must have had a good idea that they would not be coming back to serve on this committee, because they have given us a massive workload.

Communication is a big issue—it is really important that the work that we do is communicated not just to everyone inside the Parliament but to people in our communities. We should have as much engagement as possible. The ECCLR Committee was particularly good at that in the previous session.

That is a good question, Rachael. We have a big task ahead of us, not just in covering all our remit but in tying it down. I think that the previous committees’ huge remits inevitably resulted in them, in some areas, only scratching the surface of the topics that they engaged with, and probably not scrutinising them enough.

We need to be aware that we might have to focus on some topics more than others, but we can discuss that as part of the work programme meeting that we will have, I hope, at the end of August, just before formal meetings resume in the Parliament. The clerks have a lot of work to do to pull together some suggestions for the work plan for us to discuss at that meeting. We also need to clarify exactly what the remit is and where it crosses over with the remits of other committees.