Meeting of the Parliament 01 November 2023
Understanding is important, and I will come to that later, because with understanding comes confidence that we will be safe. We need to have the understanding in order to plan for the future so that we can adapt much more significantly than we ever thought was possible. I have never really witnessed such extreme weather events. Of course, there have been individual events, but the frequency and the extreme nature of recent ones are much more significant, and we therefore need to revise plans for the future.
Another lesson from the past few weeks has been the ability of the emergency services to respond. There is no doubt that they deserve huge credit for what they did in Angus and Aberdeenshire, Tayside and Perthshire. In extreme circumstances, they came together and made a significant impact. However, the capacity of local authorities to respond to extreme weather events is limited. I have witnessed many communities who cannot get through to call centres, partly because of the volume of calls but also due to the limited capacity of teams at the other end to respond to them. Fire services are also much more limited. That is why we will support Labour’s amendment at decision time.
John Swinney is right about community resilience. If we have community resilience teams in areas that are able to have the expertise and knowledge to be able to respond and work in partnership, they could act much more quickly than any emergency service. If they have the knowledge and understanding, they can also assist. I have to call out Fraser Kotlewski from Auchtermuchty, who has done a tremendous job over the past few weeks in supporting his neighbours. We need more people like Fraser across the country in order to be able to make a real difference.
I will come back to common understanding. I am a strong supporter of farmers, who are great custodians of the land and are the experts in it. They know how their land works, how it has changed, where water flows and where it does not and how they deal with all of that.
We have some brilliant advice, examples of best practice, research and guidance from various institutes. We have funding in place for special schemes, such as at Eddleston in the Borders and the West Sands in my constituency. We have agricultural support in relation to swales and reservoirs. However, we need to go a step further, because I am not sure that neighbours next to farmland really understand whether the land that is neighbouring their property has been properly managed and is adapting to the change that is coming, which John Swinney has rightly highlighted.
Over the weekend, I received reports about dredging in the River Eden. It has not been dredged significantly for some time, and the current view is that dredging is not in vogue and that we should have a much more naturally flowing river. However, there is anxiety in the community that the lack of dredging is holding the water back in the tributaries and is having an effect on the ability of the water to flow freely. There is a lot of expert advice on that, but the communities clearly do not understand it and do not understand how it applies in their communities. Therefore, an extra job needs to be done in order to get a common understanding.
I am leading some work in Strathmiglo, the village that I grew up in, along those very lines. I am getting the farmers together with the council and various authorities to get a common understanding about dredging and also about rewilding in that community, as well as about issues such as how potatoes are sown in the field. If they are planted up and down the field rather than across, what difference does that make? Apparently, the machinery only allows the planting to go up and down the field. However, people with properties neighbouring the field get concerned that the dreels go up and down, because they think that the water is going to go right into their houses—and, in some cases, it has. How do we deal with that? Do we continue to grow potatoes next to certain properties? All that needs to be properly explored, and I am not sure that that is happening.