Seòmar agus comataidhean

Practically, what will the British Council be doing in relation to the Copenhagen hub? Where do you see the opportunities lying? Do they involve the creative sector and the screen sector, for example?

That is good to hear. We took evidence a couple of weeks ago from the Scotland Malawi Partnership, and there was considerable concern about the pulling of the Malawi small grants scheme. There are concerns that the scheme was evaluated against objectives that were incorrectly written and that the full benefit of the scheme as it operated was not properly evaluated or reviewed. I recognise that that is quite a granular issue to hit you with this morning, but are you aware of those concerns? What commitment might you be able to give to ensure that they are properly addressed?

Yes, that is helpful.

Professor Nolan mentioned horizon Europe and some of the potential delays in getting associate membership of that programme. What are the delays? How have they manifested themselves? What are your hopes for a resolution?

I do not have time.

Planning for that transformation means listening to passengers and workers, and ensuring that their voices are heard, including at board level. It is clear that ScotRail and previous operators have not run meaningful consultations on service delivery for many years. The most recent ticket office assessment was in 1991, and I do not think that there has been a national timetable review in living memory. The consultations that have taken place over the past months have been badly managed. The decision to conduct a massive consultation on timetabling during a pandemic, when passenger trends were deeply uncertain, was clearly flawed.

Last September, I ran an online town hall event on the timetable review for my constituents. Their concerns were very clear. Passengers were angry about the removal of direct services from Kirkcaldy to Perth and the increased waiting time for connections at Ladybank, which was a particular concern for old and vulnerable people and women. Passengers were also angry about the proposed dramatic increase in journey times from Perth to Edinburgh, especially when ScotRail representatives suggested at the meeting that rail could never compete against cars using the Queensferry crossing.

I welcome the fact that ScotRail has backed down on those damaging changes. I also congratulate the hundreds of my constituents who joined our campaigning action to help to make the case and force change. Let us see that as an early win for people power that can set the tone for a people’s ScotRail that listens to the needs of passengers and to the workers on our railway.

However, there is still more to do, including retaining customer-facing staff in stations and ensuring that the commitment that the minister has given that there will be no compulsory redundancies is carried over in full to the new contracts.

The issues with ScotRail will not disappear overnight. There is serious work to be done to make a people’s railway a reality, and that means recognising the challenges that we face and working hard to resolve them.

Does the minister recognise that many ScotRail workers are concerned that the protections that they currently have against compulsory redundancy might be under jeopardy with the move towards the public ownership of ScotRail? What reassurances can she give on that?

I welcome the focus of this afternoon’s debate, because it is clear that we need a reset and relaunch of all public transport if we are to meet climate targets. This has been a great week for the bus, with the launch of free travel for under-22s at last and the promise of increased funding to protect bus services as they come through the pandemic. I also look forward to the launch of the community bus fund to take more bus services under municipal public ownership.

However, we need to take that same transformative approach to rail as we recover from the pandemic. A people’s ScotRail must respond to the needs of current and future passengers while retaining, valuing and investing in its workforce. The concerns that rail unions, passengers and other have expressed about timetable changes, ticket office closures and the fear of redundancy underline the fact that the Government and the new minister have work to do to build confidence that a genuine people’s ScotRail will emerge in the months to come.

Let me be clear that I share many of those concerns. However, although there is much in Labour’s motion that I agree with, it looks backwards to the pre-Covid world when we should be looking forwards to the services and timetables that will be needed to get more people out of private cars and on to the railway.

Our vision is for better services, electrified routes, new lines, accessible stations, better pay and conditions for workers, improved ticketing and fair fares. That does not mean that there should be no changes to the way in which rail services are run, but it does mean that any financial savings must be reinvested back into rail services and the workforce that is needed to run them, rather than being stripped out of the rail system.

I thank Evelyn Tweed for bringing the debate to the chamber. I enjoyed her speech, especially her deconstruction of electricity market deregulation and the impacts that it has had on investment.

One of the most surprising aspects of storm Arwen was the arbitrary nature of how it hit Scotland. Although parts of the Stirling area were less affected, there were pockets of destruction, particularly in the area between Doune and Callander, where there was a huge amount of devastation. I remember going to look at the Wood of Doune the morning after the storm. It did not look as though a storm had hit it; it looked as though a twister had hit it. It is just a small area, but it was absolutely devastated. Many communities that live alongside the River Teith were affected and had power outages for many days.

We saw such environmental destruction across Scotland. I learned only recently that 800 seal pups were killed in the storm at St Abbs in East Lothian, and that an area of forestry the size of Dundee was flattened. Therefore, it is welcome that the Scottish Government has conducted an early review. I look forward to progress against the recommendations on lessons learned being reported to Parliament in June. I also welcome initiatives to engage with people who were affected by the storm on their experiences—in particular, I welcome Stirling Council’s use of its Engage Stirling website. I was interested to hear of Evelyn Tweed’s work to reach out to people in her constituency in an effort to understand how things could be done better.

I would like to focus on a couple of the recommendations from the Scottish Government’s review. One that struck a chord with me and many of my constituents was the recommendation about the need for better assessment and communication of restoration timelines. The power companies certainly had an extremely challenging situation to deal with. They had to deal with a succession of faults—they would fix one fault, put the power back on and it would trigger another fault down the line and they would be back to square 1 again.

However, the companies were not great at communicating when power lines would be fixed; they created an expectation among householders that it would happen within a couple of hours. People who used the app or the customer phone lines often got contradictory information about when energy would be restored. As the storm and its effects stretched from a couple of hours into days, it was clear that restoration deadlines were being missed and that power was not going to be restored for some time.

The power companies were also poor at communicating what compensation was available, which made it difficult for people to plan ahead. In such situations, householders need information that allows them not only to hope for the best, but to plan for the worst. I know that it is hard for the power companies to provide such information, but there needs to be a balance. They must not create an expectation that everything will be sorted in a few hours when it is clear that there are more significant problems that people need to plan how to deal with.

Another recommendation from the review is that processes for identifying those who are most at risk be improved. In Stirling, it is not clear that any door-to-door checks for the most vulnerable people took place. We really need to get a handle on that and ensure that there is consistency across Scotland.

That is good to hear, but we need to ensure that there is consistency within council areas and across Scotland. There is probably room for improvement, there.

Another recommendation was around the need for better voluntary sector partnerships. We need to understand what capacity exists in our community and we need to build that into resilience plans. My community—I was staying in Deanston at the time—started to gather blankets and food in order to set up its own welfare facility. It was not aware that another facility was being set up down the road in Doune. Better planning and training are needed.

I thank all the people who helped to restore power and to support communities. With climate change, we are going to see far more events like storm Arwen. The only silver lining is that we will, as a result, end up with stronger and more resilient communities.

Is there potential for conflict, and a potential limit on capacity for transmission? We may have projects competing against each other, with onshore versus offshore versus solar. Is that a realistic prospect, or does NPF4 allow everything to be built out?

It would certainly be good to take some more evidence on the NatureScot report.

I understand that the peatland restoration budget was underspent this year. Is there an issue there? We can keep putting in more money but, if there are reasons why landowners are not signing up to spend it or there is a lack of skilled workforce or equipment or whatever, we will continue to not meet the target for other reasons beyond the budget.