Meeting of the Parliament 29 January 2026 [Draft]
::I congratulate Mark Ruskell on getting his bill this far. However, I am here to speak on behalf of the Rural Affairs and Islands Committee and to set out the findings of our stage 1 scrutiny of the Greyhound Racing (Offences) (Scotland) Bill.
In commencing its stage 1 scrutiny, the committee ran a targeted call for views between August and October 2025, which was followed by evidence sessions with the minister and the member in charge of the bill. On behalf of the committee, I thank everyone who has contributed to our scrutiny of the issue.
The committee has considered the issue over an extended period, having previously held a short inquiry into petition PE1758, which urges the Scottish Government to end greyhound racing in Scotland. We agreed to pause consideration of the petition when the bill was introduced in order to let the bill complete its passage through Parliament.
The committee as a whole supports the general principles of the bill. However, not all committee members are persuaded that the evidence gathered to date justifies a ban. Tim Eagle, Rhoda Grant, Beatrice Wishart and I take the view that a sufficiently robust case has not so far been made.
Before I speak directly to the bill’s provisions, I want to lay out how the committee’s scrutiny has highlighted important questions, which we look forward to discussing in the debate. At the time of our petition inquiry, the Scottish Government’s view was that, although statistics relating to injuries at tracks that were regulated by the Greyhound Board of Great Britain were “unacceptable”, there was insufficient evidence that the welfare risks at independent tracks are comparable to those at GBGB tracks.
For those who do not follow greyhound racing in detail, there is one track in Scotland—the independent track at Thornton in Fife. In our report on the petition, we asked the Scottish Government how it intended to gather data from that independent track. Although there has been no new data since our petition report, the Scottish Government supports the bill. The minister told the committee that he believed that there are inherent welfare risks associated with greyhound racing at speeds on oval tracks—risks that, in his view, cannot be fully eliminated through regulation or good practice.