Chamber and committees

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.

I absolutely agree. Although there are three members who are islanders in the truest sense, in Galloway and West Dumfries, we often feel as though we are an island, and housing is certainly an issue for us.

We might have a remit when it comes to the rural-based enterprise agencies—Highlands and Islands Enterprise and South of Scottish Enterprise—so we might need to consider such matters as well.

Thank you. I will move on to Jim Fairlie.

Thank you. There is certainly a lot of food for thought there, if you will excuse the pun. Your contribution alone gives an indication of the committee’s remit.

I welcome Jenni Minto and ask for her comments.

Item 3 is choice of deputy convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish Liberal Democrats are eligible for nomination as deputy convener. I understand that Liam McArthur is the party’s nominee.

Liam McArthur was chosen as deputy convener.