Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2025
I thank Douglas Ross for securing the motion for debate and for the joint working that we have done, and the Minister for Agriculture and Connectivity for his engagement.
Gulls behaving naturally are a menace to humans. If a gull, a gigantic creature, swoops on an elderly person with poor balance and they fall over and break a hip, their mortality might be reduced by 18 months and they might be housebound. Infants in a pram or a buggy who get guano droppings on their hands or near them will put that in their mouth, which can cause all sorts of diseases—histoplasmosis, cryptococcosis, psittacosis, ornithosis, salmonellosis and E coli—I will give the Official Report the spellings. Those diseases are potentially lethal.
What survey analysis has been done by NatureScot or the health sections of the Scottish Government about the health risk? I am very serious about that. I believe that there has been no analysis whatsoever. If that is so, and there is a fatality, the Government will be held responsible, because it has not looked into the issue.
Under section 4 of the Regulatory Reform (Scotland) Act 2014—I know, because I wrote it—there is a duty on all quangos to take account of the economic impact of their decisions. The economic impact on the business improvement districts is that they have to pay tens of thousands of pounds; instead of improving business, which is their role, they are having to sweep up the mess for NatureScot.
However, I will set out the real problem, which I mentioned in my intervention on Mr Ruskell. Incidentally, I have met NatureScot several times. We have been in lengthy correspondence, and I am fortunate to have had sight of a lengthy freedom of information response that a constituent received. I cannot read it all out—I do not have the time—but I will sum it up.
NatureScot has made its assertions constantly. Understandably, the minister has to rely on the advice that he gets—that is true, to a certain extent. However, once he reads that FOI response, he will see that there is no reliable data for the urban gull population. There were repeated requests for that data in 2021, 2023 and 2024—I could read those out, but I do not have the time—but it never came.
When officials raised the issue with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee of the UK Government, they said that “unfortunately” it had been raised again by an MSP. Why on earth are officials expressing a view that it is wrong for a parliamentarian to raise a concern? I say to the minister that they do that repeatedly. There is bias behind the scenes. The system is fundamentally flawed.
The summit should be chaired by an independent person, it should be open to the public, and it should have presentations from Lorraine McBride, Lucy Harding and others who have done sterling work but who should not have to have done so. As the minister knows, I profoundly believe that. I am not saying it for any effect other than to solve the problem in Scotland. That is what we are here for.
The system is defective. It is flawed from top to bottom. It needs to be completely redrawn. NatureScot should have nothing to do with licences, because there is a clear conflict of interest between that responsibility and its responsibilities for the conservancy of species.
13:22