Meeting of the Parliament 06 November 2025
I congratulate Audrey Nicoll, the member for Aberdeen South and North Kincardine, on her excellent members’ business motion and particularly for highlighting the concerns in relation to the River Dee. Those concerns give light to wider issues to do with the river basin management planning process in Scotland and how we are dealing with improvements to water quality and riverine protection in the country. The Government’s policy seems to be centred around the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s management of river basin management plans, but there is a lack of clarity on how those integrate and on how SEPA can be held accountable for them, and that situation certainly requires improvement.
I had recent cause to engage with this somewhat esoteric issue through a public petition. One of the great aspects of the Scottish Parliament is that the public petitions process can bring to light a lot of issues that are otherwise obscured by the parliamentary agenda. I particularly commend author Louise Welsh and architect Jude Barber, who have recently produced an amazing award-winning podcast called “Who Owns the Clyde?” They set about establishing, in a fairly iterative way, the complex patterns of land and river ownership. A lot of interesting aspects have been unpacked, which precipitated and stimulated a public petition about the idea of creating legal personhood for the Clyde so that certain rights would be attributed to it. Sadly, the Government was not in agreement with that proposal, and the petition was closed last week.
Nonetheless, the process of discussion and the different stakeholder representations elicited a lot of interesting ideas. The fundamental issues are control and accountability. There is no formal mechanism for all stakeholders—there is a vast number of them—who might have a role to play in a river basin to be represented in a coherent manner. There is a real opportunity for further development. Myriad private owners with significant interests are in control of our river landscapes and hinterlands, but there are no formal obligations for them to engage or consult with stakeholders beyond fairly threadbare planning and statutory obligations, which often do not get considered in the round but are considered in little silos by different local authorities. There is a need for greater oversight. For example, the way in which we have developed the national parks process could be a benchmark for future arrangements for our rivers and river basin management.
The Clyde has a long, complex history. Responsibility for it was originally held by a trust port that was established in 1770, before coming under the scope of the River Improvement Trust in 1809. It was then further developed by the Clyde Navigation Trust in 1858, which was subsequently privatised in the 1990s. Those bodies were primarily concerned with the development of industry on the river, but wider considerations now need to be brought to the fore.
In the greater Glasgow and Clyde area, we now have the Glasgow city region and its Clyde mission. They have made it clear that they do not have a role in dealing with the preservation and protection of the Clyde. That is not within their remit; they are purely concerned with economic development considerations. The question then turns to who is responsible for preservation and protection and whether that responsibility should be joined up.
Although the minister is likely to refer to the river basin management plan process, I ask her to consider in her response how those responsibilities, particularly in relation to the Clyde, can integrate better with the Glasgow city region that has been established in the past 10 years and its new role in adopting the Clyde mission. I also ask her to consider how we can bring all that together so that the environmental impact of development of the river, rather than just issues of economic development, are brought into the consideration.
Other rivers in the world have such guardianship arrangements, whether that is the River Ouse in England, the River Atrato in Colombia or the River Meuse in the Netherlands. In her 2025 book, “A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future”, lawyer Monica Feria-Tinta notes that rivers should have rights. We need to recognise that emerging reality and the fact that we need a much more considered approach to the development of our river landscapes in Scotland.
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