Chamber and committees

The budget for your portfolio is minuscule compared with that for many other portfolios. It is several orders of magnitude smaller than that for health. That poses challenges, particularly when your portfolio includes responsibility for major events on an international stage involving big, multimillion pound budgets, as well as responsibility for culture, the budget for which is primarily about funding the incredible organisations that exist in our communities and all the benefits that they deliver.

It feels as though there is a tension there with regard to funding. What you have announced today suggests that there has been quite a major shift in thinking within the Government about how major national events should be funded. Could you explore that a little more? It feels as though that shift is partly to do with lessons that have been learned from hosting the UCI world cycling championships, which I agree were a fantastic success. Are there other factors to bear in mind in that context?

The nub of the concern from the creative sector relates to the demand on the multiyear fund that Creative Scotland has set up and the expectation that organisations that did not get approval for multiyear funding would be able to apply for a separate fund, which would come out of Creative Scotland’s reserves, to provide more single-year funding.

How does the current set of decisions impact on that? Will Creative Scotland still be able to fund those organisations that have not been successful in achieving multiyear funding and are still very much on the brink and in need of that year-on-year funding to survive into the next financial year?

I am aware of the background, and I think that many people who are watching this will have watched last week’s evidence session and they will be in the thick of it with regard to putting in applications. I come back to the question, which is: what changes now?

What do you see as the role of the UK Government in funding those major events? We have discussed previously that despite the UCI world cycling championships being a major success, there was really no funding from the UK Government for what was ostensibly a Great Britain event. Do you see a way of working with the UK Government that could bring in more partnership funding from that side for other events that are still to be bid for?

I thank John Swinney for bringing forward this members’ business debate, which I gather is his first in 17 years. I was trying to remember what the previous debate was about—I might even have spoken in it. It is clear that he has been a strong advocate for the communities in his constituency and for community action in his constituency for many years. I am delighted that he chose Climate Cafés as the topic for the debate, because they are a Perthshire success story that has spread around the world.

I notice that many people who have been involved in Climate Cafés in Scotland are with us in the chamber. I have met a number of those wonderful people, who do fantastic work in their communities. I pay tribute to Jess Pepper, who has been an astonishing climate leader in Scotland for many years, following on from her father’s work, and a fantastic community activist in Dunkeld and Birnam.

I would like to mention a young woman called Ruby Flatley—a young activist who came through Dunkeld and Birnam Climate Café. At the age of 13, she led and spoke at the huge climate march that took place here in Edinburgh just ahead of the Paris conference of the parties. At that time, she was running a series of youth projects through Dunkeld and Birnam Climate Café. I am pleased to say that I understand that she is still involved in the Climate Café movement today. I welcomed her to the Parliament in 2016, when she was my nominated local hero at the opening ceremony. It is wonderful to see the movement nurture and empower young people.

It is clear that communities need to be at the heart of climate action. Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen climate action undermined and we have seen conspiracy theories being given a platform at the highest level of United Kingdom politics. The need for public discussion, education, awareness and empowerment is so important.

We can never take it for granted that some kind of implicit social licence comes with climate action. The conversation will change over the years. I notice that the conversation in Dunkeld and Birnam about the A9 dualling project, for example, is very different and has changed over the years.

Climate Cafés are important for education and as a laboratory of ideas for action. I do not know whether Mr Swinney remembers the first agreement between the Scottish Greens and the Scottish National Party, which was back in 2007. It was quite thin, but we did agree to establish a climate challenge fund to provide effective funding and seed action in communities. That fund was successful and ran for more than a decade. The Government is now investing in climate action hubs to take action up to the next level and pull together initiatives on the ground. Last week in Stirling, the minister, Lorna Slater, announced a range of hubs.

Such hubs can build only on what is established on the ground. The role of Climate Cafés is to incubate new ideas and get the conversation going to build the innovation. An excellent example of that, which Mr Swinney mentioned, comes from the HEAT Project in Blairgowrie, which emerged from a Climate Café conversation that recognised that those of us who live in properties in rural Scotland that are hard to heat need support and bespoke advice. That is exactly what the HEAT Project has been providing.

Perhaps the cabinet secretary can respond to the following points in her concluding remarks. I urge the Government to look at how we can make room within that community climate funding to support that kind of initiative because, important as it is to scale up initiatives that are already there on the ground, even mighty Perthshire oaks have to grow from acorns. The important role of the Climate Cafés is to seed those ideas around Scotland and around the world, so that they can be built on and scaled up and really deliver the action that we need to tackle the climate emergency. I hope that the Government can find ways to support and to grow that movement and to inspire future generations of people such as Ruby.

Hold on.

You piqued my interest, convener, by talking about the licensing of hunting and I would like to get NatureScot’s view on that. Do you think that there is any circumstance in which a mounted hunt could credibly claim to meet the criteria for the issuing of a licence?

That is useful to know.

Are no other changes planned on the back of ESS’s review?

Have you fed that directly into the biodiversity strategy and the forthcoming climate plan?