Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 December 2025
This is a huge group of amendments that cover so many different issues, and it is very difficult to unpack them all in a single debate. Sarah Boyack perhaps summed it up when she said that we need to learn lessons and look to the future.
There are a number of strands here. There are the learnings around the recent designation—or lack of designation—of Galloway national park, and there are learnings around the debacle over the Loch Lomond Flamingo Land application. There are serious concerns that the national park plan has been undermined, and there is a lot of learning there about the primacy of the park plan and the accessibility of park board members.
That is just one area of consideration. There is also a debate about landscape, and there is a debate around the purpose of national parks. Cabinet secretary, you have made a number of commitments to a number of members to have further conversations between stage 2 and stage 3. The conversation around the primacy of park plans, ensuring that all public authorities do not dismiss the park plans but work to further the aims of the parks and the aspirations in the plans, is a really important one. The committee has had evidence that there are public authorities, including Forestry and Land Scotland, that have—in some cases—actively undermined some of the objectives of park plans. On Flamingo Land, there are learnings about the role of Scottish Enterprise in relation to the promotion of a site for a development that was hugely unpopular and was in contravention of the park plan.
Within the nugget of some of the amendments in this group, there is concern about democracy and about the accessibility of park authorities. There is also a desire for the democratically agreed park plan to be delivered, with everybody pulling in the same direction. I hope that, if we can take some of the essence of those concerns into conversations with you between stage 2 and stage 3, cabinet secretary, we can find a form of words that reflects the aspirations of the communities.