Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
I accept that point. I am delighted that the cabinet secretary was not annoyed with me because of the point that I kept making—that is fine. However, the developer did not engage. I will talk about this story next week, but the first thing that we knew came in a message that went to fishermen—it was literally two rectangles on a map of the sea. Nobody knew anything before that. That was why, over two venues, 600 people turned up—a level of scrutiny that is unheard of post-Covid.
I want to get this point across. I do not think that it is right that we, in the Parliament, say that we have to wait for an application, because, by the time we get to the application stage, a huge amount of money, energy and time has already been spent. There should be a process before that, when the Government can listen to communities and come to the conclusion that a project is not actually in the right location and can go to the developers and say “Stop”—or “We urge you to stop”, as we cannot prevent them from putting in an application. We can urge the developer to stop and we can then carry on. That is the point that I am really trying to make. One day I might get an answer to the question—perhaps next week, during the Moray FLOW-Park debate.
Emma Harper has talked about cumulative impact. Interestingly, she said a few times that that is something that we need to think about. We are well beyond the stage of needing to think about it; we should have been actively working on it. We should now have in place plans to ensure that communities are thinking about the effect of cumulative impact. Cumulative impact is happening not just in the south of Scotland; the Highlands has experienced it to a massive level. We are now well beyond that stage.
The Government should have application support for communities in place—and finance needs to come along with that from the companies that are applying. More importantly, there should be a regional energy strategy, so that we do not have widespread community impact.