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I welcome that response, particularly in relation to the justice recovery fund.

I have constituents from Fife who have been held on remand in the Polmont young offenders institution for up to a year, locked up for up to 22 hours a day away from home, without access to adequate support. That is obviously no way to treat any young person in Scotland today. How is the Scottish Government applying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in Scotland, and how will forthcoming bills ensure that young people are not unnecessarily deprived of their liberty and are treated with trauma-informed and age-appropriate support, which is important?

Reading the submissions, I was struck by the lack of consistency across councils when it comes to setting targets, the scope of the targets and the plans that are being developed to meet those targets. Why is that? Is that a problem?

In your working group in COSLA, is there political unanimity behind having a more consistent approach to targets? There are all these issues around how best to deliver targets in different-sized local authorities and so on, but is there political unanimity in your working group around having more consistency in how targets are set and planned for?

Thank you.

David Hammond, when it comes to council officers, is there a need for more of a framework around how plans are developed to tackle climate change and how targets are set?

Does George Tarvit want to add anything?

To pick up on that last point, we are aware—and we had some evidence on this from the previous panel of witnesses—that there is a lot of inconsistency among local authorities. The majority of them do not have area-wide targets, although the majority do have targets for their own emissions. What are your organisations doing to develop a more coherent approach across local authorities, in order to achieve a common understanding of net zero and how targets should be applied? That question goes first to Gail Macgregor to answer from a COSLA perspective.

You are saying that such bottom-up collaboration will help to build consistency.

Absolutely—and I have been a CPG convener in the past. I have resisted taking on too many CPGs, both as a member and in any kind of convening role, but I feel that this group represents a genuine space where there is interest and enthusiasm for the topics that will be covered. I am prepared, and my office is prepared, to work with the secretariat and make the group a success.

Thank you very much, convener.

Yes. The subject is the nature and climate emergencies. There has been a lot of discussion among members, particularly in the previous parliamentary session, about the interrelationship between those emergencies, how the climate crisis is affecting nature and how some of the solutions to mitigate climate change can come from nature—for example, blue carbon and peatland restoration. It is about bringing together conversations involving people who work in different subject committees across the Parliament and in different spaces.

From discussion with non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders, we thought that creating a CPG space in which we could explore some of the interrelationships between the climate emergency and the nature emergency would make sense. We had initial informal meetings to discuss the way forward, and that brought good cross-party interest. That interest has continued into this session, including among members who now sit on the Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee and the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee in Parliament.

I think that it will be a good cross-party group. I have been a convener of previous cross-party groups and a member of this committee, and I recognise that a lot of cross-party groups are currently in operation. We will be looking at topics that interest a wide variety of members and also at the agendas of other cross-party groups to see whether joint meetings on areas of mutual interest are possible.