Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am trying to retrieve from my mind the most recent update on that. We have appointed Professor Lorne Crerar, who is a well-respected lawyer, to advise on the board’s remit and its setting up and so on, and I hope to receive an update on that shortly.

Thank you very much.

I am not going to pre-empt what I will tell Parliament, because there are still decisions to be made and a great deal of work is on-going. I will set out, with a backstop of autumn this year, the next steps on the dualling programme.

It is not a case of not having an idea; it is a case of being a responsible Government and minister and looking at all the matters that we have to consider against our commitment to review the corridor as a whole.

I will lay that out as soon as I possibly can, with a backstop of autumn this year.

It is very pertinent that we should discuss adaptation after discussing mitigation. You will be aware of the second Scottish climate change adaptation programme—SCCAP2—which contains 170 policies, most of which are within my area of direct responsibility.

Flood risk is one of the greatest adaptation challenges that Scotland faces. We have been funding that to the tune of £42 million a year and will continue to do so. We have also made more funding—£158 million during this session of Parliament—available for distribution to manage flood risk in Scotland.

We also fund work on coastal erosion, which I know is of interest to Mr Kerr given his region. The dynamic coasts project works with local authorities and provides funding not always to shore up coastline but with an understanding that coastlines need to move and that our communities must adapt to deal with that.

We are also developing a programme that is due to be published in 2024 and will respond to the CCC’s comments and to the need for adaptation in Scotland.

You identify an important point. A lot of that is exactly what the strategic board will look at. I expect there to be an extent to which it will work with local government and also have that public-facing and awareness-raising role. However, a great deal of that is still under development and I will update the committee in writing.

If you do not mind, it would be helpful to separate those issues out in my thinking, because they require different things. I often think that I sometimes hope for rain and sometimes hope that the rain will stop—there are different issues.

First, given that we are in a period of the year in which water scarcity is a problem, I arranged for a round-table discussion last week because I understand how much the issue might affect constituents just now. Ultimately, I am very confident that, between us in the Scottish Government, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, which is the independent regulator that oversees CAR—Water Environment (Controlled Activities) (Scotland) Regulations 2011—licences and abstractions from the environment, and Scottish Water, which is responsible for the public water supply, we have a robust means of monitoring water levels in the country virtually 24/7, 365 days a year.

The political challenge is on abstractions and what happens when the water levels are particularly low and SEPA observes that there could be a risk to the environment. We then get into the situation where licences for abstraction have to be curtailed. Last year was the first summer that we have ever had to do that, and we were very deliberate in the aftermath of that to take time to learn all the lessons from it, including that we should have communication as early as possible about the risk of prolonged periods of dry weather. We also had a clear idea for farmers, businesses, aquaculture and hydro businesses about the conditions in which their abstraction licences might be changed. On your question about the suitability of the current framework, we have tried to do all that.

I move on to flooding, which is another significant issue. There are two points to make about flooding. The first is about funding and the second is about the future framework and preparedness. I mentioned in response to Liam Kerr’s question on adaptation that, under an agreement that we reached with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities—in 2008, I think—we have provided £42 million per annum to councils for flooding. It was agreed that 80 per cent of that would be spent on the strategic project, and 20 per cent would be distributed among the other 32 councils for other projects. We have made £150 million available in this parliamentary session.

However, it has to be said that, as the risk of flooding increases, the need for investment in projects is beginning to outstrip the funding that is available. We have a Scottish Government, COSLA and local authority working group that is looking at funding for flood mitigation schemes across the country. It is looking not only at levels of funding but at how the funding is distributed. I await recommendations on that because I recognise that we have some very expensive schemes in the pipeline, and I want us all collectively to be prepared to do what we can.

I have slightly forgotten what my other point about flooding was. Yes, sorry—it was about funding and the strategy. The other bit of work that we are doing is about making sure that we are as up to speed as we possibly can be on everything that flooding demands of us, as we set out a new draft strategy. It is the very beginning of the process, and we are working across civic society on it. In particular, I have asked that it be made a great deal clearer whose responsibility it is on the ground and that there is better joined-up working among agencies.

As we all know, in our constituencies, when something happens, you wonder whether it is the road network and gullies that have caused the blockage, what SEPA’s responsibility is, where the council comes in and where we come in. I hope to make that much clearer.

I might come to my colleague Phil Raines to say something about the monitoring report and the comparison with the CCC report.

I welcome the CCC’s guidance throughout, including the paper that it published in December last year on our progress on mitigation. I published my response to that last week when I made the statement on emissions reduction for 2021. We accepted 98 of the 99 recommendations, the last one being entirely reserved and not in our gift.

Things have moved on somewhat between the CCC’s report in December and where we are now. We have done a number of things; for example, my colleague Mairi Gougeon has made progress on the vision for agriculture, the decarbonisation of food production and the move to regenerative farming. That means that we have moved on from where we were when the CCC first published its report.

In our policy prospectus, we have upped our commitment to peatland restoration in the near term. We are also taking forward work on the route map to reduce car kilometres by 20 per cent.

I accept what the CCC said in December but, when we compare that with where we are now, we can see that there has been movement in what the Government has taken forward. Does Phil Raines want to add anything?

Dan Merckel might want to say something about the interaction with the UK Government and the MOD. What makes answering that difficult is that we are limited in the information that we can give regarding the specific use of the chemical. It is for a defence-critical capability. It is small and critical and the chemical is used and disposed of by professionals, so it pertains to that specific use, the exact details of which we are not liable to share.

The other critical point is that the current scientific research suggests that only that substance provides the high level of protection that is required for that unique capability, which is why that exemption is required in that instance. There might be nothing to add on the MOD aspect.