Hansard

I, too, thank the Scottish Crofting Foundation for its help and support throughout the bill and pay tribute to the cross-party group on crofting. Of all the cross-party groups in the Parliament, few can have played as significant a role as the one that is chaired by John Farquhar Munro.

I also thank the staff of the Crofters Commission. Due to their position, they were not able to speak out, yet they are the people who deal with crofting issues every day and they possess among them great expertise. They no doubt experienced tensions at some points, but rather than dwell on those I want to look forward. I express gratitude to the former Deputy Minister for Environment and Rural Development, Rhona Brankin, for taking the decision that Crofters Commission staff will retain their civil service status. That is to be welcomed.

As the minister said, the terms of reference of the committee of inquiry will include looking at the role and function of the Crofters Commission. We accept that. I hope that, as part of its work, Professor Shucksmith's committee will consult in detail the individual Crofters Commission members of staff, who basically keep crofting on the road. I hope that the committee will go out of its way to do that so that it can put right the wrongs of the past, when failure of consultation led to the tensions to which I alluded.

The major power in the bill is the capacity to create new crofts. When I attend the opening of Forest Enterprise's new offices in Inverness on Monday, I will discuss with its staff the huge potential that that power has. I know that forestry staff are up for it. They want to be able to use the new powers, alongside their existing powers, to create new housing in the Highlands. If any landowner has the capacity to do that, it is the Forestry Commission.

However, one problem that must be overcome is that the existing schemes by which the Forestry Commission is encouraged to create new housing are, in my view, incredibly complex and unnecessarily bureaucratic. Another problem that is perhaps more pertinent than the rules of the schemes—those could be changed—is, to speak directly, the difficulty of nimbyism, which is always with us wherever we try to create new housing. If the Forestry Commission could designate parts of its forests for housing, that would go a substantial way to overcoming nimbyism, which is—let us face it—a facet of human nature. According to the old story, the difference between the conservationist and the developer is simply that the developer wants to build a house in the woods whereas the conservationist already has one. I hope that the Forestry Commission will be able to create many more such conservationists.

I pay particular tribute to the former Deputy Minister for Environment and Rural Development, Rhona Brankin, for the way in which she took some difficult decisions. Crofting has many friends. The fact that substantial changes were made to the bill as introduced is proof positive of the influence and power of those friends, who are to be found across the political spectrum. For her decision to make fundamental changes to the bill, she should be commended. Rather than crow over what might be said to be a climbdown or U-turn, we should congratulate her. I can assure Rhona Brankin that she has many friends on this side of the chamber.

Personally, I hope that the committee of inquiry will look carefully at the situation in Strathspey. The concerns of the Strathspey farmers, who were led ably by Hamish Jack, were not fully considered by the committee. I recognise that the committee did a good job in giving careful consideration to the problems in Arran, but I think that the problems in Strathspey have not yet been fully addressed.

I agree with Jamie McGrigor, Maureen Macmillan and others that SEERAD must take a more proactive approach to enabling crofters to access the loans scheme. Like Mr McGrigor, I think that the bull hire scheme is perhaps the most complex scheme with the least money available to it that God has ever invented in the public service. The scheme must be sorted out. I suspect that ministers want to do that, so I hope that positive progress will be made.

A fundamental problem that the Parliament is still to address—although I do not believe in any of the conspiracy theories about venal or malign forces at work subverting decisions—is the treatment of inadvertent errors that farmers and crofters make in filling out their forms. Genuine mistakes in integrated administration and control system forms are still being penalised. The tribunal that Mr Finnie set up was somehow supposed to address that. At the time, I argued that setting up a tribunal would not of itself alter the rules that had to be enforced. I understand that, in a recent case, two members of the three-member panel found that a crofter should not have been penalised for a mistake, but the minister overruled the majority decision and supported the SEERAD member on the panel. I am perplexed as to why that should have happened—