Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Chamber

Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2013

13 Nov 2013 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

National Parks

Boyack, Sarah Lab Lothian Watch on SPTV

I congratulate Claire Baker on securing the debate and welcome the publication by the SCNP and the APRS of their report, “Unfinished Business”.

It is great to be having a members’ business debate on national parks, which were the subject of the first members’ business debate in the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. There had been a long-standing campaign for a national park in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, but there was less of a consensus in the Cairngorms area. In fact, in the early days of the Parliament, some were opposed to a national park in the Cairngorms.

I think that our national parks are one of the success stories of devolution. The legislative process in the House of Lords would have been a huge challenge, so national parks were one of Donald Dewar’s first priorities and the National Parks (Scotland) Bill featured in the first programme for government. Such was the success of our national parks that it led to the inclusion of highland Perthshire in the Cairngorms national park. That was partly a tribute to the success of the work of the Cairngorms National Park Authority and its first chief executive, Jane Hope. I want to pay tribute to the contribution that she made, because as well as leading the park for nearly a decade, she was the lead official on the National Parks (Scotland) Bill team and did an excellent job in that role, too.

As Claire Baker observed, although we had debates on national parks in the previous parliamentary session, the Scottish Government has done no serious work to progress the national parks agenda by making new designations since 2007. As the Cairngorms national park and the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs national park have passed their 10th anniversaries, now is a good time for us to come back to that agenda, look at their successes and learn lessons for the future. We should pick up the agenda that the SCNP and the APRS are arguing for, as it is truly unfinished business. The Ramblers are right to point to the centenary of the birth of John Muir as a good time to kick-start that agenda for the future.

The first two national parks were never meant to be Scotland’s only national parks; they were simply our top priorities at the time, from the point of view of effort and funding.

Claire Baker is right that we need a ministerial lead in looking to the future, given the length of the set-up time from thinking about creating a national park to actually designating it. I am sure that there will be competing interests both for and against designations across the country and there is certainly a debate to be had about resources. However, we need to be having that debate now, instead of putting it off to the future.