Meeting of the Parliament 16 March 2016
Thank you, Presiding Officer. I start by drawing members’ attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests.
I thank the clerks to the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee for the quite extraordinary work that they have done over the past five years. They have been a phenomenal team. I entirely empathise with Sarah Boyack’s closing remarks, because the committee has had an enormous workload and, without the clerking team that we had, it would have been considerably more onerous. I am delighted to have this opportunity to put that on the record.
This is the last speech that I will make in the chamber, and I only wish that it could have been on a more consensual subject. I do not like finishing on a negative note, but I am going to have to do that, because I am sorry to say that we will not be able to support the bill at decision time. As members are aware, we did not support the bill at stage 1, and I am afraid that nothing has happened during stages 2 or 3 to change our minds. In fact, I believe that it has become a bill that simply cannot achieve at least one of its policy aims—a fact that I think the cabinet secretary now concedes.
I have always believed that we should have had two bills: one on the various aspects of land reform and one on agricultural holdings. I say that for two reasons. The first is that we could have undertaken our duties of scrutiny much more thoroughly if that had been the case, and the second is that, although there is much in the non-agricultural holdings parts of the bill with which we have no major disagreements, we cannot and will not agree to the further demise of the tenanted sector of agriculture that I have no doubt will come about as a result of some of the provisions in the bill.
Before I come to that aspect, I will comment briefly on just two aspects of parts 1 to 9 of the bill with which we have some disagreement. My colleague and fellow retiree Jamie McGrigor will expand on them in closing. The first is the community right to buy even from an unwilling seller. It is the latter aspect that gives us some cause for concern, because it is breaking very new ground in respect of community rights. We understand and recognise the right to buy derelict and abandoned land as defined in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, but the bill takes us towards a right to buy land that is neither derelict nor abandoned and which the owner may well wish to retain. That right does not fit comfortably with my vision of a free society.
My second area of concern is the Government’s decision to reintroduce sporting rates on commercial shootings and deer forests. I have not been able to find one valid reason for that proposal, other than that the Government is introducing the tax simply because it can. It is, in my view, a vindictive move, brought in, according to the minister, out of fairness, although I have never yet discovered to whom it is meant to be fair—certainly not to the commercial shooting businesses in Scotland, which bring millions to our local economies and which will now be put at a serious competitive disadvantage compared with similar businesses in other parts of the United Kingdom. The losers will not be the landowners or managers of those businesses. It will be the hotels, the shops, the restaurants and the employees of those businesses, all of which are partially dependent on the shooting businesses, that will lose out. The measure will hurt the wee man, who is surely the unintended victim of much of the legislation.