Seòmar agus comataidhean

The first of the new petitions is on an important public policy matter that is in the eye of the public at present. PE2190, which was lodged by Mandy McGurk, calls on the Scottish Parliament to commission an independent grooming gang inquiry to identify and understand the prevalence of child grooming in Scotland.

In its response to the petition, the Scottish Government states that it is prepared to give every consideration to an inquiry if it is deemed to be necessary. The response highlights the national child sexual abuse and exploitation strategic group, which brings together key services and expert stakeholders. The submission notes that there is currently no comprehensive national data on the prevalence of child abuse in Scotland. Therefore, the Scottish Government is working to address that.

To review its operations and response to the issue, Police Scotland has taken forward a series of actions such as creating a timeline of action on child sexual exploitation since 2012.

After the Scottish Government issued its initial response to the petition, it announced that an independent national review of responses to group-based child sexual abuse and exploitation would take place. The review has begun, and ministers plan to update the Parliament more fully on the review by the end of February. Additionally, the Scottish Government has announced financial investment and support for victims and families who are impacted by sexual offending; access to training for professionals; and improvements to Police Scotland’s forensic capabilities.

Clearly, important issues are raised in the petition.

That brings us to the end of our session in public. On Wednesday 21 January, the second meeting of 2026—an additional meeting of the committee, as colleagues will be aware—will take place.

11:54

Meeting continued in private until 11.59.

Good morning, and welcome to the first meeting in 2026 of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee. We have just six meetings left after this one to deal with what is still a very considerable number of petitions, and it will be a difficult task, given the importance underlying many of them. Therefore, a lot of what we will be trying to do is to identify what we can still hope to achieve in the balance of time left to us.

Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Are members content to take in private item 5, to consider changes to the determination on the proper form of petitions, and item 6, to consider the evidence that we hear today?

Members indicated agreement.

Agenda item 2 is the next in our series of themed sessions with cabinet secretaries to try to do justice to as many petitions as possible. This morning’s themed session is on energy and, of course, relates to energy-related petitions. I have to say that, other than by their use of word “energy”, they are hardly connected at all with regard to their scope and range of concerns, unlike some of the justice or health petitions, where there was an obvious thematic connection. They raise quite complicated and sometimes quite technical issues, too.

We are joined by the Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy, Gillian Martin, and by the following Scottish Government officials: Catherine Williams, deputy director, onshore electricity, strategy and consents; Robert Martin, head of legislative change and governance; and Antonia Georgieva, head of battery energy storage systems—which are a plague on my constituency, if I am allowed to say so, but such issues will no doubt be touched on as we progress. A very warm welcome to you all, and thank you very much for joining us this morning.

This morning’s evidence-taking session will cover a number of petitions: PE1864, on increasing the ability of communities to influence planning decisions for onshore wind farms; PE1885, on making offering community-shared ownership mandatory for all wind farm development planning proposals; PE2095, on improving the public consultation processes for energy infrastructure projects; PE2109, on halting any further pumped storage hydro schemes on Scottish lochs holding wild Atlantic salmon; PE2157, on updating planning advice for energy storage issues to ensure that it includes clear guidance for the location of battery energy storage systems near residences and communities; PE2159, on halting the production of hydrogen from fresh water; and PE2160, on introducing an energy strategy.

Cabinet secretary, I understand that you would like to start off this morning’s proceedings with a short introductory statement.

Thank you. I will make a couple of points before I bring in colleagues. Although I talked about the petitions being quite technically varied, community engagement is an underlying theme, which is sometimes prominent and sometimes discrete.

In relation to outages as a result of last week’s weather event, you said that, mercifully, we have been much more fortunate than we were a year ago. Was that in any way due to resilience planning in the interim, or were we just luckier this time than we were the previous time we had bad weather?

Before you continue, does Fergus Ewing want to come in on that issue?

I will bring in Mr Ewing in a second, but there are a couple of questions that I would like to follow up on, given that Mr Golden has been kind enough to reference my constituency and the Whitelee wind farm, of which members of the community are all immensely proud.

It has been an interesting journey, which, in some ways, is typical of what happens with such developments. I can remember the community having very fierce objections to it, yet anybody who has been born during the lifetime of its existence simply accepts the fact that it is there. I might include in the community benefit of the wind farm the incredible leisure opportunities that have been provided in its precincts, which include the visitor centre and the bike trails. Those facilities are very widely used.

Having said that, although the people of Eaglesham and Waterfoot thought that the community benefit would all go to their areas, as Mr Golden said, that was not the case. As a resident of Waterfoot, I can say that we are very proud of our park bench, which appears to be the only community benefit that we received, because the council moved in and decided that it would assume responsibility for the community benefit, which now goes to the entire council area, including parts of the Leverndale valley such as Barrhead, Uplawmoor and Neilston that do not see the Whitelee wind farm, unlike the people of Castlemilk. Sometimes, as you say, the benefit can be quite widely spread. Of course, as some suspect, a council could start to use the benefit to subsidise its own core spending as opposed to delivering the incremental benefit that I think many people would hope would transpire. Have you come across that sentiment, which might be widely held?

I will now bring in Fergus Ewing.

I will bring Fergus Ewing in in a moment, but we have a petition on pump storage hydro in Scotland and wild salmon—PE2109—and I want to touch on an issue arising from that. How do you set out that impact assessments on hydro projects should take into account the overall or cumulative effect on salmon populations?

I will draw that conversation to a conclusion.

I am not sure whether we touched on this earlier, but is there a date by which you anticipate the new energy strategy being published?