Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am meant to be at another meeting but, of course, I am happy to take more questions from the committee.

I am not in a position to provide a detailed response as yet, because—as I am sure that members will appreciate—we only recently received that judgment. We are giving it full consideration, and are working at pace to look at how we can implement a practical and proportionate process to ensure that we can continue to make those authorisation and enforcement decisions in line with the judgment. We will provide more information on that in due course.

We engage regularly with retailers on a host of matters that are relevant across my portfolio, and I am happy to engage in that conversation with them.

We are in an exciting place in Scotland, as world leaders in relation to the roll-out of REM. We are working with other nations, as they are looking to mandate REM, too. That will put us on the front foot when it comes to REM roll-out and all the potential benefits that may result from it, which I have highlighted in response to previous questions from the committee.

We recognise how important that point is. I want to be absolutely clear about this. I am not saying that we are making all the data publicly available: that is absolutely not what I was suggesting. I was saying that there are elements of it that we could make available, but only after it has been aggregated and anonymised, recognising the commercially sensitive data and personal data that would be a part of it.

We have produced a data protection impact assessment, which I would be happy to share with the committee. It addresses many of the points that you have raised. We also have a privacy notice, which will cover all of that in detail, and which we would issue once the SSI is approved.

We know how important the use and storage of data and the privacy around it are. The raw data would not itself be used outside the marine directorate. That is all included in the impact assessment and, as I mentioned in response to an earlier question, we have worked with the Scottish Information Commissioner in relation to all of this, and we are ensuring that we are compliant with the general data protection regulation as well as protecting the information.

No, we are not considering that at the moment. The committee has heard different views on whether it is something that should be Government funded. That consideration is about the balance and how we could potentially justify any Government funding for those systems. The roll-out of REM to the vast majority of the scallop dredge fleet was previously funded through the EMFF programme, as it was. We have set out in the BRIA the expected costs and the rationale behind all that, but we are not considering grant funding at the moment.

In response to those comments, I fundamentally disagree with some of the misrepresentations of the regulations that have been made today.

My final point is that we have very clearly set out the rationale for these regulations, why we need them and how we could use them in the future. I ask the committee not to jeopardise the potential for Scotland to be world leading in our fisheries management and the potential uses of REM in the future. Again, I urge the committee to support the SSI.

Well, we have set out penalties in relation to the regulations. I might ask Jane MacPherson for a bit more information on that point, but I want to point out that all the data that is collected from REM has to be uploaded. We have set that out in the regulations. We have also set out the timescales for which that data must be kept, for how long we have access to it and what we do with the data from that point on, as well as how we could potentially use it in relation to any suspected activity. Do you want to add anything to that, Jane?

The key thing about REM is that it is an important tool for compliance and enforcement. It is really important that we have that element. I have a huge respect for our industry and the really good job that it does to provide us with a low carbon source of protein. However, there are instances of activity that we need to tackle and get to grips with and, ultimately, the roll-out of REM will help to achieve that.

In the past few weeks, our aerial surveillance caught an incident of quite a large quantity of dead pelagic fish on the surface of the water. If we were hoping to catch the people who could be responsible for that, we would be dependent on catching them in the act, which, as I am sure you can imagine, is incredibly difficult given the sheer size of the marine area that we have to cover with our compliance monitoring, whether that is vessel monitoring or aerial surveillance. REM will be a game changer in that respect, as I said in my opening remarks, as it will allow us to tackle the activity where we have seen it take place. It is very important in that regard.

In my opening comments, I touched on just how important REM is for the reputation of our seafood as a whole and what that means for retailers. We had responses to our consultation on the VMS from the Marine Stewardship Council and responses to the consultation on REM from the likes of Marks and Spencer, and all of them have said that it needs to be rolled out across the whole fleet because it enhances our reputation for sustainable fisheries and gives us the ability to show that process. They think that it can give us a market advantage, too—indeed, it has spin-off benefits.

The science element—the evidence that we can gather from the data that we are collecting—is also important. As the regulations bed in, we can start to develop and use the picture of all the information that we are receiving from that data to underpin the science that we use for fisheries management. What we can look to gain from that is quite exciting.

Jane MacPherson highlighted the process that would be gone through. Would you like her to repeat that?

I will bring in Ellen Huis on that point.