Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 December 2025
Part 3 of the bill provides a welcome opportunity for us to update Scotland’s national parks so that they can better respond to our nature and climate crises. The timing is really good. The National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000 was one of the first pieces of legislation that our Parliament supported in 2000. I am personally engaged in making sure that we learn lessons from the 25 years since that legislation was introduced and our parks were subsequently created.
I have nine amendments in the group. I thank Scottish Environment LINK, Scottish Land & Estates and the Scottish Rewilding Alliance for helping me to craft my amendments. We need clearer criteria and greater transparency to ensure that national parks can deliver on their purpose. We also need clearer, more accountable processes for creating new parks, supported by defined criteria, an improved national policy framework and independent expert reporting.
My amendments aim to expand the statutory aims to include the promotion of sustainable development, affordable housing and employment and to ensure that national parks contribute to community prosperity. My amendments also tighten the obligations on public authorities by replacing weaker duties that use wording such as “have regard to” and “facilitate implementation” with stronger requirements that seek to further and actively implement national park objectives. I note that, in his opening remarks, Mark Ruskell has suggested that we should act to “actively further” the national park aims.