Chamber and committees

Welcome back. To continue our discussion about wild salmon populations in Scotland, we will now hear from Fisheries Management Scotland. We are joined by Dr Alan Wells, the chief executive of Fisheries Management Scotland, and I welcome him. We have approximately an hour for this session.

I will kick off with a nice, simple opener. What is your broad assessment of the progress that has been made in implementing the recommendations that were made by the REC Committee and those in the report from the salmon interactions working group?

We will move to our third theme, which is escapes. We have a question from Emma Roddick. [Interruption.] I beg your pardon—I have jumped Colin Beattie. My apologies. We will go back to Colin for questions on sea lice regulatory reform.

We will now move on to escapes.

Thank you, Dr Wells. That has been fascinating. We could probably have kept you here for another couple of hours, and I appreciate that you have spent a bit of extra time with us.

Our third item of business is consideration of a UK statutory instrument consent notification. Do members wish to make any comment on the instrument?

As there are no comments, are members content to agree with the Scottish Government’s decision to consent to the provisions that are set out in the notification being included in UK rather than Scottish subordinate legislation?

Members indicated agreement.

I am a bit confused. Can you tell us exactly what remit SEPA has when it comes to protecting what is now an endangered species—Scottish wild salmon? Where does your responsibility lie, or do you not have any responsibility at all in that? Are you just interested in the treatments that may reduce the impact on wild salmon, or do you examine the impact on wild salmon as a species?

We are going to move on to the issue of enforcement later in this session, so we will cover that question then.

It is quite all right.

Continuing on the theme of environmental impacts, Ariane Burgess has a question.

Okay. Thank you.

I have supplementaries from Ariane Burgess and Emma Harper.

I am sorry, but we have to move on.