Meeting of the Parliament 24 May 2017
I am very pleased to speak in today’s debate and to reaffirm my support for having more national parks in Scotland. We have two wonderful national parks, but Scotland has many areas of outstanding natural beauty that merit that internationally recognised designation, and which are often overlooked.
As we have heard, the Scottish Campaign for National Parks identified seven possible sites. Creating new national parks would bring a range of environmental, social and economic benefits to those areas. There is very strong support for creating more national parks among most of the parties, and there are well-developed local campaigns for new national parks in Dumfries and Galloway and in the Borders. There is an extremely compelling case for a marine national park to conserve coastal habitats and our dynamic marine ecology. Indeed, there are convincing reasons to award national park status to any of the seven sites that the Scottish Campaign for National Parks has identified.
I would welcome a broad national conversation and consultation that would take account of local demand for new parks, would seek to protect a range of natural habitats, scenery and cultural heritage, and would fully involve the bodies that are already up and running and which are having such conversations across Scotland.
I hope that the Scottish Government is prepared to listen to the Galloway national park association, which presented a robust case for the local economic benefits that a new national park would bring, as it would attract an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 new visits every year and support between 700 and 1,400 jobs.
The Borders national park campaign points out that the Cheviot hills north of the border are every bit as beautiful and worthy of national park status as the Northumberland national park, which receives 1.7 million recreational visits each year, bringing in around £190 million in visitor spending. It is no surprise that the visitnorway.com website boasts of 44 national parks. Norway is four times the size of Scotland, so that is fair enough, but I repeat that it has 44 national parks. The Northumberland national park brought in that spending in 2013-14 with a budget of less than £2.8 million. I understand that the Government’s hesitance to support new national parks is cost related, so I ask that it take a long-term view, and that we have a discussion and look at the role that national parks play in rural development and the contribution that they make to our tourism sector.
A study for National Parks England outlined that in 2012 England’s national parks generated between £4.1 billion and £6.3 billion gross value added, which is comparable to the GVA of a small city such as Coventry.
The Scottish Campaign for National Parks also points out that it would not be as costly to establish and run future national parks as it was to establish and run our first two, because they would cover smaller areas and encompass areas of only one or two local authorities. Its report on future governance models estimated that their running costs may be as little as £1.5 million to £3 million. That would be an important investment in our rural economy and it would provide vital protection for our natural landscape.
Our national parks can have an even stronger role to play in protecting Scotland’s iconic species. As species champion for the hare, I have asked the cabinet secretary to consider using her powers to introduce a nature conservation order that would prohibit culls of the mountain hare in our national parks. The mountain hare is found only in Scotland but, sadly, they are routinely culled in many of our upland sporting estates, even in the Cairngorms national park. I look forward to any comment that the cabinet secretary might have on that.
Finally, there can be no doubt that, as well as delivering economic benefits and environmental protection, national parks benefit our wellbeing. As John Muir, one of the earliest advocates of national parks, once wrote, national parks allow thousands of people
“to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wildness is a necessity”
and that our natural landscapes are useful not only
“as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life”.
17:40