It's good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 18th meeting of the Rural Affairs and Islands Committee in 2023. Before we begin, I can remind all those using electronic devices to switch them to silent. Arian Burgess will be joining us at approximately 9.45, and this morning we have Emma Harper substituting for Christine Grahame, so good morning. Our first item of business is an evidence session on the Wildlife Management and Muirburn Scotland bill. I welcome to the meeting of our first panel of witnesses from the Grouse Muir Management Review Group. We have Professor Alan Wherity, the chair, Professor Ian Newton, the member and Professor Colin Reid, also a member. This morning we have about 90 minutes scheduled for this session. I'll kick off with the first question. The Wherity report recommended in 2019 a licensing scheme being introduced for the shooting of Grouse. If within five years there was no marked improvement in the sustainability of Grouse Muir management as evidenced by the population of certain breeds of raptors, can I ask you, Professor Wherity, whether there is sufficiently strong evidence of wildlife crime on Grouse Muir to justify the intervention of licensing? Do you believe that the legislation in the face of the bill reflects the position that your review intended? We started in terms of our remit by considering the SNH's 2017 report, which demonstrated that a third of the tag golden eagles had disappeared in mysterious circumstances, the way in which it was put disappeared in suspicious circumstances on or around Grouse Muir. We confirmed that suspicion in our findings. There is a clear spatial association between the recovery of illegally killed raptors and managed land for Grouse shooting. At that stage we are unable to produce a map demonstrating that association, although I understand since then that Hugh Dignan may be able to provide you with such a map. We had privileged access to information from Police Scotland to underpin our recommendations and our support, our findings. Since then time has moved on. I have not had access to the same amount of data which was available to me as chair of that review group, but I turn particularly to Professor Newton who I think can provide us with an update on the situation since we reported. The situation as we understand it since the report is that persecution of birds of prey has not declined substantially in the years since the report was written. In fact, during the year with most lockdown, which I think was 2020, the rate of killing or the number of cases reported to the RSPB was the highest so far this century. In other words, when there were fewer people in the countryside, the level of persecution almost certainly increased. I think the total for Britain as a whole in that year was 146 cases of which 26 were from Scotland. The following year, 2021, the numbers were still high. They dropped somewhat. I think the total for the whole of Britain then was 108 and about 17 for Scotland. The report for 2022, the crime report that the RSPB produces every year, those figures are not yet available, but I understand that the figures are of similar magnitude to what they were in the past. Now there is a limit to the emphasis that we can put on these figures because they depend on carcasses or other evidence being found largely by chance in the countryside and reported. The general feeling among conservationists at any rate is that those figures represent the tip of an iceberg, but nonetheless the significant thing is that they have not really declined statistically significant since the report was written. You are referring to an RSPB report, which is not independent. Surely the national wildlife crime report would be the place where such findings would be reported. Can you tell us whether, I think you said there were 26 cases in Scotland? Do those refer specifically to Grasmure? No, the country as a whole, not all would be Grasmure. Some would be Lowland areas. On the point around the evidence, it is now between somewhere like 8 to 15 years when, since there has been a review from the Scottish Government that would inform the national wildlife crime report, why are we about to bring in legislation that would appear to depend on research done by RSPB? RSPB has traditionally been the body that has collated this sort of information, but one has to remember that it is not the RSPB that collects this information, it is members of the public. Most of the survey work of raptor populations in Scotland have been done by what we now call the Scottish raptor groups. These are groups of interested amateurs. Citizen scientists would be the word we use these days that go out and monitor raptors of various species in their home areas by checking all their known sites every year. There is a broad body of people that are responsible for collecting this information. People drawn from all walks of life. The fact that RSPB collate the information or most of the information is because they are the organisation concerned with bird protection and have the biggest interest in it. The bill sets out a range of relevant offences in relation to which a section 16AA licence may be revoked or suspended. Do you agree that this list of offences is relevant and appropriate? Yes, it is. The problem so far, as I am sure you are aware, is that one needs criminal evidence or sufficient evidence for a criminal court to prosecute, but most of these offences take place in remote areas where there are no people to see them, so it is very easy to hide this. We have very hardly any cases of somebody killing a bird of prey being witnessed. There are a number of cases filmed, but you can appreciate how difficult it is to do that. The important thing is that we can use circumstantial and other kinds of indirect evidence to indicate the scale of this killing. Can I ask if you think that the current scope of relevant offences is proportionate? The current one of relevant offences. Yes, the difficulty is in getting a prosecution under criminal legislation. There is a choice to be made here in these situations.  You can approach that from a very narrow approach that all you are doing, looking at, is their conduct in exactly the same area of activity, which would be very narrowly confined, or you can say, well, this form of behaviour is reflected as shown by the way that people react in other situations. If you think about all sorts of other areas where licensing is involved, there are considerations. Do we look just at what is, if you take for example, I am trying to think of a example. I know that this is a risen in relation to firearms offences. If you are deciding to not to give somebody a licence, do you look only at the way they have behaved in relation to firearms, or do you look at other forms of behaviour that suggest that they are not to be trusted, they are unreliable? That is a policy choice to be made. That list could be a lot shorter, it could be a lot longer, and you could make cogent arguments both ways. I am just keen to explore a wee bit further. The range of relevant offences includes part 1 of the Wild Life and Countryside Act, Protection Abadgers, Part 2 of the Conservation and Natural Regulations Act, section 1 of the Wild Wammol Protection Act, Hunting with Dogs, Scotland Act 2023. It includes all of those things in the bill. Given that your review was specifically looking at raptor persecution, do you believe that including all of those things is proportionate in taking the bill forward? I would say that our remit was not just to look at raptor persecution, but to look at grouse management more widely. One of the points that we made in the report is the need to look at this in a wider context. It is sensible to fragment the different bits too much. The offences in there are ones that could be seen as generally—people who commit those offences—showing an attitude and approach a willingness to behave in relation to the natural environment in a way that is in line with the things that the bill is trying to stop in terms of the legislation. If you see this measure as being purely about raptor persecution on grouse moors, then that is taking a very, I would say, an excessively narrow view of what this bill was trying to look at. Indeed, one of my regrets is that the bill that is coming forward. Despite the time since we haven't seen the wider review of the context of upland management, we default for integrating the outcome of the deer review, the legislation that is coming to that. By now, we would have hoped that the post-Brexit rural support systems would be clearer what is happening in relation to carbon management and so on in the uplands areas. Looking at any one bit in isolation is a danger. However, in terms of this particular issue, you could say that we are going to have a very narrow approach and say that only the immediately involved offences, activities are the ones that are going to be deemed as relevant here, or you could have a much wider one that anybody who has shown a disregard for the elements of the natural environment that we value, should be enough to be relevant for those purposes. There are quite a number of points that you have made, Professor Reid. I just want to clarify some of them. Within the Warrity report itself, are you saying that what the Scottish Government has done in the shaping of the bill is actually broadened what you had recommended in terms of the scope of triggering a license for suspension and revocation? I would like to explore what Warrity believed was the causal link between raptor persecution and grouse malls. On the first issue, I do not think that that is the case. We were asked to look at this widely. We expressly did not look at the details of a licensing scheme because we are so much aware of issues such as this, an issue that we may come to the duration of licences and so on. We very consciously identified a number of issues that would have to be thought about, but we did not explore those in detail and consciously left them for this next stage, knowing that there were a sense that there could be a range of options, all of which would be reasonable in working through the details. We did not do that, but what I am saying in terms of the breadth is that raptor persecution was not just the trigger for setting up the review, but it was not the only thing that we were asked to look at. I suppose that the point is that what has been shaped by the Government covers a broader range of crimes. What has been identified as being relevant indicators of putting a licence at risk is to capture a range of behaviours in relation to the natural environment, not just raptor persecution. As part of the Warrity review, do you also believe that the question has been asked by both of my colleagues about proportionality? Do you have any comment with regard to the recommendations that you made specifically about the proportionality? We did not get into that whole and into that issue because we did not work through the details of a licencing scheme. We recognised that you could design a licencing scheme that would be wholly disproportionate. You could describe a very light-touch scheme that would have absolutely no problems in passing any test or any legal or political sense of proportionality. It is a question of exactly what the balance has to be looked at. In looking at the issue of proportionality, you have to look at the legislative package as a whole. What are the tests for getting or intervening? What are the appeal mechanisms? What are the procedures? What are the sanctions available? It is very much a package rather than identifying one particular measure as being in isolation. To press you on the licencing scheme itself, Professor Reid, I was on the committee that looked at this originally back in the day. I read through the papers and you said that we want to see a licencing scheme that is more flexible and responsive than a black-and-white scheme whereby you have to apply every year to get a licence, but 16AA and 5B provides that licences be granted for a maximum of one year. In that sense, with regard to what you said at committee session, would the scheme be improved if licences were granted for a longer period? My personal view is that, given that the activities affected our long-term management of the land, given that businesses do not have an expectation to be able to plan ahead, annual licences are unnecessary. I think that there is a longer-term licence subject to the point that the licences can be amended, suspended and so on. Again, it is this idea that the whole package is that if once a licence was granted, you could do very little afterwards, there is a stronger case for having annual licences, because that would be the only way, the annual renewal would be the only way of keeping an eye on things, changing things, affecting things. Given that the bill is providing quite wide powers for the ministers of nature of scot to modify a licence to suspend it, to revoke and so on, then I think that having annual renewal is probably unnecessary. The bill, sorry, your own review, rather recommended Scottish Natural Heritage, or is it now as NatureScot as the body, the licensing authority? I just wonder if the bill that we are looking at now allows for a scheme that you still feel that NatureScot is in a position to deliver. I think that NatureScot is the obvious body to undertake this regulatory function. I cannot think of another public body who could take that on board. They currently operate a general licensing scheme, so they have experience in managing licences. I very much concur with what Professor Reid has just said. In my personal view, I think licences up to five years on a rolling basis would be welcomed. I am sensitive to the concern about the bureaucracy and the costs that are involved, so I think it should be as light touch as is commensurate with effective delivery of regulation. Perhaps I should point out the nature of the remit that we had as a review because we have been focusing entirely on licensing thus far. Licensing was only one of the possible options that we explored. Given the wide-ranging nature of our review, which was to look at the more sustainable management of grassmores in the round, we did not zero in on licensing in great detail. Anticipating as Professor Reid has said that should this come to this stage where legislation is being proposed, a whole set of new questions would emerge hence your questioning. However, our review was very wide-ranging and perhaps triggered a number of quite separate conversations and discussions. Without second guessing what SNH or Nature Scott might now do, I wonder whether Professor Reid had any views about what the choices are that they face in terms of licensing. You mentioned that it should be light touch.  I think that they will build on their experience of operating general licenses, which they have done for a number of years now. I have confidence that they have the professional capacity to undertake this. As a public body, they clearly need to be concerned about public perception of how they operate. If they were to be unduly heavy-handed, that would not serve them well. They have to negotiate an understanding with landowners. The vast majority of grassmores are well managed. We are looking at a very small minority, where raptor persecution is a major concern. I think that, with goodwill on both sides, they can negotiate a system that is effective, but not unduly generous. Just on that, on the light touch that we have referred, Professor Reid said back in 2020 that licences should more or less automatically be approved. Do you believe that the license application tests at section S16881 and S212, how do they compare to the vision that you had on the light touch? Will the bill be improved at the moment? The bill could always be improved, however, wherever it is. In any licensing scheme, there is a choice to be made between rigidity, which gives you clarity and certainty, and flexibility, which inevitably involves amount of a degree of discretion and uncertainty.  That is an area where the scientific evidence is uncertain, where the scientific evidence is changing, where the natural environment is always changing, where you are dealing with a vast range of size, scale and nature of enterprises. I think that a flexible system is almost inevitable and is the best way to have a fair and proportionate way of operating a licensing system, because any other thing else, you would have to have rigid tests that would mean one size would not fit all and certainly would not fit all with the changing climate, the changing environment, the changing understanding of the natural environment, the changing pressures on it. So, yes, I can quite understand why some people are concerned about the uncertainty of this, the breadth of the test, the fact that it's not fully defined, but the alternative of having something much, much clearer, I think, would have equal, if not more problems. As Professor Wyrty has said, we're relying on a public authority that is subject to internal controls, subject to appeals, subject to external controls and ultimately ministerial control to make sure that it operates the system in a sensible and proportionate way. Given the gravity of the consequences of losing a licence and the other legislation in place, as I've referred, the Wildlife and Contract in 1981, the Badgers Act and so on, is there the safeguards within the legislation at the moment to make sure we don't see potentially the gravity of losing a licence on what could be a minor offence? We've got the flexibility about the safeguards. The safeguards, the appeal mechanism that's provided provides a safeguard. There's also the potential for judicial review eventually, ministerial control, the Ombudsman, but it's always a matter of choice. Unless you're going to have an absolutely checklist system, that's by the way, and have items on the checklist that you can absolutely prove one way or another, there's going to have to be flexibility, and that means giving discretion to public authorities. But our entire public administration system depends on discretion in the hands of licensing bodies, Government grant awarding bodies and so on. It's remarkably few situations where you're absolutely entitled to certain licences and so on. There's always an element of discretion. Jim Fairlie. Thank you, convener. First, we're coming back to the point that you made. The debate has definitely started. It's kind of focused very narrowly in on this is about licensing grouse moves, and clearly your report is much wider than that. I think you considered at some point the power to impose fines on grouse moves managers in the same way as SEPA would have the ability to impose fines. Was that in addition to, or was that a separate thing to licensing? Were there two different things or did you think that both of them would work together? In addition to the review group I had for the special advisers assisting me, and one of those was a senior official from SEPA who manages their regulatory controls on particularly on discharges into water bodies. It was picking up on how they operate that I thought there might be an analogy situation in terms of licensing grouse moves. SEPA issues permits to discharge into water courses, controlled in terms of the specified pollutant or whatever which is going into the water course and has the ability to monitor that, and then charges a fee for so doing. I was particularly picking up the point that there is income recovery for SEPA from this activity, and I noticed that in the bill as currently drafted, there is no mechanism for recovery cost by NatureScot. My understanding is that NatureScot at the moment does not seek to recover the cost of issuing licences. I wonder if it would be wise to revisit that following SEPA's experience. My concern here is that at the end of the day compliance is crucial to the success of this whole enterprise, and one has to monitor that compliance. If NatureScot does not have the resources either by gathering a fee from a licence or from an increase in its Government grant, I am very concerned that SEPA may not be able to monitor the performance of this bill, should it become an act in an effective manner. That was the context with which I thought the SEPA experience might be an interesting one. I might be misinterpreted and misunderstanding here, but if we were going to find somebody because they had done something on their grouse and were on their land, which would be subject to a fine, you would need a burden of proof to do that. Given that the licensing scheme has got a potential for the investigation to have the licence suspended, does the fine element of it not make it a lot harder to retrieve any money and would there be more cost in trying to get the burden of proof to a level where a fine could be imposed? I am doing quite follow you on that. If I could come in. I am possibly misunderstanding. There are several different issues going on here. The Regulatory Reform Scotland Act has created a system that was generally known as civil penalty, civil sanctions, so that when somebody has a licence, one of the responses to discovering a breach can be to use the powers as in this bill to suspend or revoke the licence or modify it so that you put extra conditions that make behaviour in future different. In some areas of environmental and other law, the regulatory body has the power itself to impose a fine, either a fixed fine or a variable fine, or to take an enforcement undertaking. There is a whole range of sanctions that are provided for in the Regulatory Reform Act. Those are not being copied here. It may be a question whether they should be. For those, as you say, there still has to be a question of proof. The Scottish legislation has generally used the civil burden of proof as the basis for imposing fines, but as all was subject to appeals and later controls. One option in the bill would be that Nature Scotland ministers, when they find things are going wrong, rather than being forced to suspend or revoke the licence knowing the major consequences that that is going to have to the state, to the enterprise, to do it, could be impose a penalty and then face with the further questions as well, for what sort of breaches are, is this appropriate for what sort of breaches are, and again you'll have endless arguments over these things. I'm sorry if I'm sounding very uncertain about this, but in designing a regulatory scheme there are all these choices to be made and trying to think about all the circumstances that are going to be relevant, what's going to make sense, what's going to be practical and how the different bits fit together. It is complicated and there's never going to be one right answer. There are going to be plenty of scope for argument on all the different bits and how they fit together. You've definitely added more questions than answers, haven't you? I'm sorry, but that's the job on this side of the table. I think that this will be the last one for a few moments on licensing Rachel Hamilton. Well, it's on the suspension of licences, so I just need to get some clarity. You explained pretty well there, Professor Reid, but in terms of the powers that are proposed in the Bill for NatureScot to suspend licences, even if they're not satisfied to the civil burden of proof that an offence has been committed. Of course, there will be an official investigation into an offence and the person that has been accused of committing an offence. What are your observations on that particular section, 16AA, if you've had an opportunity to look at it? Would you consider that that proposal was a lower evidential bar to suspension than the Warrity report had envisaged? We didn't get to the detail of envisaging what the bar for different interventions would be. I can see why that provision is in there. It's enabled to enable interim quick action to be taken where you don't perhaps have a complete case, but there is strong indicative evidence. That may be useful in some way. It is, of course, a power that only may be exercised. I can't imagine it would happen in many circumstances at all, but it is there to cover the situation where, because either formal investigations take a long time, certainly getting to the stage of a prosecution takes a long time, there may be thought to be a desire to intervene more rapidly than is possible, but I would see it as a fairly strong power that I would envisage being used very rarely, if at all. Stakeholders in the previous session had said that going back to the appeal, that the appeal could take a long time, it could take up to a year. Again, from your vision of how this was to be shaped, would you consider that sheriff should have that power, discretionary power, to decide that a penalty imposed by NatureScot is of no effect pending determination of the appeal? That is a provision that appears in several environmental licensing schemes. It is either the question is which danger do you think is greater and evidence, not in relation to Growsmoor, but in other areas have been that in circumstances where sanctions are put in abeyance during an appeal process, that appeal process has in some areas been seriously abused by people dragging out the appeal process as long as possible to make sure that the sanction isn't actually imposed on them. The public interest suffers that way. If you make it the other way, the private interest suffers because the person who is subject to the sanction goes on. Again, it's this question of who do you trust, how are you going to have the balances? I would expect that the length of time the difficult appeal is something that NatureScot and the ministers would take into account in deciding whether they were justified in suspending a licence during an investigation rather than beforehand. As I see it as a very extreme power that I can't imagine being used. Just a quick last point on that. I just wondered if you think that an investigation should be triggered by a vexatious allegation or should it be triggered? Investigation is triggered by something that isn't incredibly strong evidence. I can't imagine the ministers or NatureScot deciding that that's a basis for suspending a licence because the whole point of the investigation is to find out whether something is going wrong and the decision to suspend, I would totally expect, will be taken because there are things going wrong, we need to act immediately. If it is a single, possibly vexatious complaint, I don't see how SNH could come reasonably to the decision that we need to take the strong action immediately. Having read the previous evidence session, I accept the concerns that there aren't the absolute written guarantees, but that's inevitable unless you're going to have an incredibly fixed rigid system that can't respond to changing circumstances, it can't respond to situations where there may be real problems, you can't respond quickly to situations where there are real problems. Thank you. I think that where the difficulty lies is whether there are serious allegations or serious evidence and on what basis then can a licence be suspended, that's the difficulty and, as you say, the safeguards around that. We're going to move on. We now have a question for Alasdair Allan. I suppose on focusing here on the licensing system what we haven't really allowed you to do is to explain why you came to the conclusions you did in terms of the abuses that you felt it was necessary to legislate to fix. You've mentioned that the vast majority of the states operate responsibly, but what was the evidence that led you to conclude that there was a need for, for instance, a code of practice? What were the incidents, what were the evidence, if you can give us a flavour of, that drew you to the conclusion that a code of practice was necessary? The main issue in ground management was the illegal killing of valued birds of prey and most other measures that might reduce this persecution have been tried in the past nationwide over the past six or seven decades and yet the practice still persists. So at that stage licensing provided the next potentially big deterrent to this. It's the penultimate measure, if you like, the ultimate measure being banning grass shooting altogether, which we didn't want to get to that stage, but this was the only situation, or the next situation, open to us. It also, we felt with licensing that it would raise the profile of the activity both to the applicant and the general public and provide some reassurance to concerned members of the public that grass shooting activities are being taken seriously. Some of these members of the public would otherwise call for the banning of grass shooting, which we didn't want to happen. The other advantage of a licensing system we've already covered, I think, that the current penalties rest on criminal convictions, which are almost impossible to obtain, but licensing opened up the possibility of taking much more account of circumstantial evidence and introducing a number of penalties or sanctions of varying severity, ultimately leading to suspension or evocation. By acting largely on circumstantial evidence, penalties would move us from the criminal burden of proof to civil burden of proof. But even though a licence might be offered for, let's say, three to five year period, it would provide an opportunity for NatureScot to ask for annual information on such things as the number of animals killed, what sort of animals were killed and so on, associated with grass shooting, both the bag sizes, the numbers of hares, the numbers of predators and so on, and give NatureScot an opportunity to learn more about what happens on grass mores and how it proceeds. I mean, most major land uses, annual statistics are available, for example, for forestry on the number of hectares that are planted each year, the kinds of trees that are planted, that's readily available for agriculture, we have the information on the crops that are grown and so on, but for grass shooting there is absolutely no evidence that is fed into a central government on anything that happens there, so that seemed a way of filling that gap at no major cost to landowners, but would be useful for NatureScot to monitor the situation, the animals that are being killed to become alerted to any expected changes and follow population trends, so it fills an important evidence gap in land use in Scotland, so for those various reasons that we were persuaded after a lot of discussion that licensing was a sensible option. I'll just interject for a moment. One of the most striking findings, which perhaps isn't as self-evident as it ought to be from our report, was that our key recommendation was that subject to the trend in raptor numbers over a period of five years, if it continued to deteriorate, then we actually recommended licensing. That was a unanimous recommendation by the whole group, which included two members effectively representing the grass shooting sector. I imply from that that there is a willingness across Scotland to regard licensing as an appropriate way forward when in a sense everything else has failed, and I think that's where we feel we've got to. We did look at a number of alternatives, we looked at self-regulation, it hasn't worked, we looked at accreditation schemes, we looked at financial incentives which might be introduced, we looked at a whole range of alternatives, we did not likely descend on licensing immediately as the way forward, effectively we set up a whole range of options, explored them in some detail and you can see that in our report, and we came to licensing because we thought it was the only credible way forward, and that was agreed by all members of the review group, including those who arguably represented the shooting interest. Thank you Don, if you want to add anything, Professor Boot? Just as an example, are you satisfied that the code of conduct deals with the recommendations on the review of medical grit? Yes, medical grit was an interesting area for us to explore. Our recommendation was for a voluntary code for that one, rather than a legally binding or statutory code. Our concerns there were really twofold. One was concerned administration of medicated grit, and in particular the recommendation that it be withdrawn at a fixed period in the year to prevent it potentially entering the food chain. We were somewhat concerned about the engagement of estates with the veterinary profession to ensure that the administration was being done to the highest possible standard. There were also some concerns about leaching of the chemical attached to the medicated grit into water courses, and SEPA, whilst they could not give us any clear indication as to whether this was potentially inimical. They were concerned that, again, some degree of regulation through a voluntary code of practice could perhaps improve the way in which medicated grit was used. There was no suggestion that medicated grit should be withdrawn. We could see that it was a crucial element in the business model of grassmore management. However, we felt that a voluntary code of practice bringing up all the estates to best practice would be valuable in both those respects. It is interesting to hear that this is not just about the management of grass. Conveners brought up the issues of medical grit, and we have heard about raptors as well. If we introduced a licensing scheme, that would be the optimal way to be able to manage grassmores and track what is happening and be able to collect data. I am looking at Professor Newton, because that is what you have said, as far as that is the only way forward in order to be able to manage or be able to trace what is happening, rather than just have a voluntary code of practice. What was the question specifically? Is the optimal way forward introducing a licensing scheme? As we said, the various other methods that we could use have really not worked. We have driven to this position of licensing because the others have not worked. Introducing licences brings us other advantages as well, which I outlined, particularly this central acquisition of important data on what is happening on a major area of land on which at the moment we have little or no information. One of the striking things that we discovered in our review was that the site space is heavily contested between experts on one hand, peer review journals, publishing their findings in the international literature, and one could call local vernacular knowledge arising from gamekeepers and land managers. There is enormous antipathy between evidence in those two arenas. One of the things that I think we will be valuable from the outcome of this legislation is that we will begin to develop a more credible site space across the whole area of moorland management. What is very striking is how little we know in detail robustly about the way the natural environment of a grass moor operates will probably come on to Muirburn in due course. The Muirburn literature is full of enormous contradictions and uncertainty. As Professor Newton has said, if we can actually assemble a much richer database as a result of this, as ancillary benefit, that will advance the science. There is then a virtuous loop that can inform adjustments to the regulatory system, so that we can begin to tweak the regulatory system as the science becomes more secure and more firmly attested. Arrianne Burgess. Good morning and thanks for being with us this morning. So much good information coming from your experience. You are already beginning to touch on what I wanted to get into here, which is around the bigger picture in relation to land management and grass moors, identifying the fact that we could actually start to create that credible science base there and understand what's really going on. I'd be interested to hear what you think is the potential for sustainable grass moor management in terms of a contribution to tackling the crisis, the climate and biodiversity crisis. Do you think that this bill could support that? Yes, I think indirectly. It could move us in the right direction. Professor Newton will be able to speak with more authority on bird ecology and the significance that the appropriate management of moorland for promoting appropriate habitat for birds. The question of carbon budgets and carbon sequestration in particularly those parts of grass moors, which have a very thick peat layer, I'm sure, will come on to in a moment, there is clearly a contribution that can be made in terms of the climate crisis in how we manage moor burn and its interaction with wildfires and so on. Perhaps I could invite Professor Newton to address the ecological aspects of your question. Grass moor is a fairly unique habitat and it does support a number of birds that are relatively rare and international standards. Also, the predator control on grass moors, of course, a lot of predators can be legally controlled there. That does mean that the species that nest there generally nest with good success. They can maintain their populations and that's not necessarily the case in many other areas, many other parts of Scotland or Britain in general. So, certain species can maintain themselves on grass moors at densities that wouldn't be possible in the rest of Britain and sustain their populations in the long term. So many species are now declining in Britain as a whole, but one of the areas where they're maintaining themselves is on grass moors because of the management, so there's a lot to be said for that. And a few years ago, an exercise I did, I was really looking at the environmental impacts of different major land uses in the uplands of Britain, not just Scotland but England as a whole. With grass moors, if you left aside the raptor issue, they were environmentally the least damaging of all the major land uses. Forestry, for example, had destroyed much more peatland than grass moors have ever done. They've also been responsible for a lot of acidification of landscapes, which puts them in a totally different field to grouse spores. Agriculture in the uplands with huge densities of sheep and so on had had a huge impact over a period of several decades in changing upland vegetation, mostly to species of plants that sheep didn't like to eat and also causing a lot of erosion and soil compaction and so on. So if you looked at the different land uses, the one that had caused the least damage was managed heather moorland for grass, apart from the raptor issue. If you take the raptors out, it stood very good and the birds that lived there were able to sustain good populations. It's becoming increasingly important as an area for maintaining ground nesting open land birds as general predators in the countryside like foxes and so on increase in Britain as a whole, which have tipped a lot of bird species into decline but grass moors are one of the areas where that's not happened. So we have no interest in reducing the area of grass moors at all. Thanks for that. I just want to come back to a bit more on the code of practice and I just wondered, I really am interested in the idea that you're looking at that scientific base and that kind of bigger picture and I wondered if you looked into the issue of lead shot being used and I realise that's being phased out but historically what I'm aware of in parts of my region is that lead shot gets shot on maybe what is a grass moor but ends up being shot into trees on neighbouring land and I just wonder if there's any understanding of that kind of issue talked about the problems of the chemical grit running into the watercourse but I wonder if we've looked into the lead running into our seeping into our ground and our watercourses. I don't know of any research specifically relating to grass moors but obviously lead shot has been tipped onto grass moors now for well over a century or so and one thing that several people have commented to me is that if you get a grass and you cut it open very often they've got bits of lead shot in their crop well grass like a lot of other herbivorous birds they pick up bits of grit and swallow grit to help with food digestion and the assumption is that they pick up little bits of lead shot in mistake for grit if we can put it that way so they are being contaminated indirectly as a lot of other birds are in Britain but I wouldn't say that lead shot is more used on grass moors than it is on any other areas where game are shot is a general problem to reduce the use and preferably eliminate the use of lead shot in Britain it's the last remaining use of lead that the public are still exposed to that we could so easily remove thanks very much thanks convener Karen Adam thank you convener and good morning to the panel just following on from Ariane's question in there when we're looking at the full potential of what the grass moors could do to support biodiversity and the climate change as you mentioned does this bill support that full potential or does it not it's clearly not a primary driver for the proposed legislation so I guess one has to say is it supporting other initiatives which the Scottish Government is developing as we deal with the climate and nature emergency as Professor Newton has just said I think on the biodiversity side of things he's just argued very cogently that it is a positive contribution to sustaining the current level of biodiversity and not to hang out to deteriorate further in terms of climate change it is a much more mixed picture and when we come to muleburn as I said earlier the literature is incredibly confused I don't know whether you have been had access to a recent SNH report published in 2022 which was a meta analysis of all the literature on muleburn and I think the single most important takeaway message was we know so little about the impact of muleburn in terms of carbon budgets in terms of its impact on wildfire in in terms of fluxes greenhouse gas fluxes and so in terms of the precautionary principle which we've mentioned on a number of occasions I think given the lack of clear scientific evidence we need to proceed circumspectly in terms of muleburn and I feel that the regulation which is proposed for muleburn which takes the current system which relates to a piece of legislation passed in 1949 and we discovered was no longer fit for purpose I think a statutory code on muleburn with all the regulations implicit within it will provide us with a very positive way forward and again I would like to emphasise a point which we very much reflected upon in our report this notion of adaptive management that you can and it goes back to what Professor Reid was saying earlier about the need to provide some wiggle room within the legislation not to make it unduly prescriptive because as the science base develops and I would emphasise that the science base underpinning a lot of modern management is incredibly fragmented contested and incomplete as that begins to the gaps begin to be filled in then we can tighten up some of the regulatory models and adjust and move forward in a way that I think could be beneficial for both climate change and protecting biodiversity that's helpful can I just come back in so I don't want to put words in your mouth but could we see this bill more than looking at a full prescription because we don't have the full picture it would be more a vehicle as well to get that full picture absolutely yes thank you two very short supplementaries for Rachel Hamilton Jim Fairlie I'll try and keep it very brief do you think that professority do you think that the socio-economic impact of ground small licensing has been assessed adequately in this process bearing in mind that there was no direct or indirect engagement with businesses as part of the Bria yes this is one of the major challenges that we had in our remit when the then cabinet secretary invited me to take on this this review one of the key elements of the remit was to have regard to the socio-economic impact of any measures in terms of recommendations we did not have either the capacity or the focus to to drill down deeply into that area we did rely on work done by a separate investigation which was commissioned by the Scottish Government the numbers are in our report I think I'm just looking for the the numbers here I think if I remember the the grass sector currently supports about two and a half thousand four-time jobs and generates over 24,000 pounds of gross added value so there is a very significant contribution which grassland management makes particularly to the rural economy given that we're there to be a band let's take that as the most draconian measure on grouse shooting that would have an incredibly adverse impact I think locally on the rural economy and therefore in our recommendations we are seeking to protect those jobs and those interests but encouraging estates which are not demonstrating best practice in terms of how they managed to to achieve that that level of performance I just understand this sorry we've sort of jumped sorry so what I'm going to do I'm going to bring back Jim for his supplementary on where we were previously and then go back to the socio-economic topic so Jim if you'd like to come in with your questions thank you very much come here i'm going to come back to you just something that struck me when you were talking there about the predator control and the effect that that will have on particular species of orange red list ground nester are you saying that the the management in a grouse moor is helping to sustain those red list type birds and golden plover red shank stuff like that snipe are they in are they in better health on grouse moors than they are on unmanaged places is that the point that you're making that's exactly the point i'm making yeah that's the populations as far as we can judge for the most part are good and self-sustaining on grouse moor areas whereas elsewhere in most areas elsewhere that's not everywhere I can't speak for everywhere but and most other areas they're declining and they're declining mainly because they're not producing enough young to offset the usual mortality rate and most of that poor reproduction at least on the uplands is due to predation on the lowlands you also have agriculture is it predation across the board mammals and particularly corvids corvids are particularly good at finding eggs well all the all the ones that take bird eggs or young chicks which are the corvids foxes and mustelids like stouts they're probably the main ones and badgers in some areas great thank you jen do you want to continue with exploring real businesses in the acfr professor where do you have any concerns that have been raised by some stakeholders that the provisions in the bill and licensing may not be compliant the european convention of human rights for example due to the potential of a disproportionate interference with property rights i defer to professor re for this one the anytime you're interfering with businesses and property rights potentially you're falling foul the question is is it a proportionate interference and there are various elements to that one is is the reason for which you're interfering a legitimate one and the european court of human rights our own legislation made it clear that environmental protection is a legitimate reason for interfering so you get through that first threshold the question then is whether the detail of the interference is proportionate or not and that brings us back to the discussion we've had earlier about the precise details of the licensing scheme and how it it operates and the fact that if the legislation were wide enough to allow a very extreme strict harsh intervention that would fall foul just because the legislation allows that to happen doesn't mean the legislation itself falls foul of the convention it's a question of how it's operated in practice and that means looking at the legal tests how they're operated how those operate with the various controls redress mechanisms and so on so the legislation as drafted just now i can see operating in a way that would be perfectly compliant with the european convention i can also see it being operated by a rogue nature scot or a rogue minister in a way that would cause severe problems with it i don't think that imposing the requirement for a license in itself is going to fall foul of the convention unless the hoops you have to go through to get a license are absolutely absurd well let's presume that the hoops are dead easy you just apply for the license and you get it at what point would the license then if you're saying with i think what you're saying was a heavy handed nature scot person imposing certain restrictions at what point does that then breach european court of human rights could european convention on human rights sadly the answer is when it's disproportionate and that would look at that would look and i'll if say that the if the code i'm trying to think about an absurd example say the code of practice recommended people didn't wear sunglasses when out shooting doesn't affect their visibility and it was found that on one occasion one member of a shooting party had worn sunglasses and the result was your licenses being revoked that would be a clearly absurd use of it can i put one off further is that put one further example that has been put to me as a former sheep farmer i may have had the desire to shoot a white tailed eagle because it was lifting lambs and i would be fined possibly imprisoned and i would face the full force of the law whatever that happened to be but i wouldn't be stopped from farming sheep so if i'm a grousmour manager and i do something and the license is removed i am then effectively being stopped from carrying out my way of making a living would that fall into the european court i can the european convention on human rights i think i could almost guarantee that would go to the courts and you never guarantee what the result what the result would be i don't think that although you would be stopped from gross shooting a it would only be stopped for a time you wouldn't be necessarily a lifetime and the question would be well is there other other uses of the land land land at all i'm afraid i mean i'm sorry i apologize for all the lawyers proportionality is by its definition a rather vague test and it is a question of looking at all the factors and weighing the public interest factors the private interest factors together and allowing regulatory bodies an element of discretion so this is going to be interesting i can imagine if you can keep thinking life will throw up an endless range of circumstances some of which will be absolutely in the grey area and exactly the sort of thing we try to think up when making problems for the students to get them to answer this way or that and without really caring what the answer is because it's the the argument that from our as a teacher is what you're interested in thank you i'm very conscious of time and i would like to go on it while live traps but i've got a brief supplementary from Rachel Hamilton very generous of you thank you page 16 of the briar just going back to my original question there professority states that the Scottish government have not consulted on the impact of licensing either directly or indirectly on businesses now bearing in mind what you just said about the challenges around determining the socioeconomic impact of grass more licensing would you have expected the Scottish government to have done that as part of the briar speaking purely personally that would seem to me to be something that they they should have done this whole area is problematic because we know so little about the socioeconomic impact of of grass more management as i mentioned earlier the Scottish government did commission a separate study that study i have to say was imperfect in a number of ways not least because of the challenge of obtaining the appropriate data or very obvious reasons there's elements of commercial confidentiality it is in fact very difficult to drill down into the socioeconomics of of grass more management so i think there's a bit of an impasse here we we don't know really in detail very much about the socioeconomic impact of of grass more management and clearly if the bill to be is to be well informed and at well evidence based we do need to get that additional information and i'm not sure how that how that comes about it was one of the frustrations of my review that this area which we were charged to give to regard to was very problematic because the evidence simply is not in the public domain other than that separate report which i mentioned earlier but which i think we found imperfect thank you thank you but as i say we're now going to move on to wildlife trap set quit from Alasdor Allan thank you convener um can i just ask if you can explain a bit about how you came to conclusion that there was a need for a a new regulation around wildlife traps um and are you satisfied with what the the bill has done in terms of making your your recommendations real professor to speak on this one i mean trapping and snaring we know is a long running and controversial issue there are problems with the misuse of traps by introducing a licensing system the hope is that the professionalism of many gamekeepers land managers will be recognized they will have the reassurance that they can defend themselves they are in speaking to the public they say we are doing it proper way it's been properly assessed using the relevant traps in the relevant way and so on it's the the law on trapping and snaring has been a bit of a mess because it's been rather inconsistent so anything that tries to draw make it simpler by drawing things together i think the experience has been that the the requirement for training the requirement for visiting traps and snares has reduced the problems with misuse problems with animal cruelty and it seems sensible to try to have a greater consistency greater greater controls to make sure the abuse isn't happening while giving this form of reassurance that professionally operated traps are traps can be used is anyone else wish to come in on new issues no can i can ask about numbered traps is this something you can say anything about we didn't look at the details of that i can i've seen the various evidence on that both ways that it's obviously clearly incredibly helpful to be able to identify who's responsible for some of you we drive cars that we've got license plates we know who's responsible for a motor vehicle therefore who has to take it on the other hand i accept the you know i i can understand the fears of some of those in the industry that it you know may lead to identification of personal people and harassment thank you can you just give it given the grave consequences of the inappropriate or the illegal use of traps again we're looking at the consequences of potentially losing a license or whatever do you think that the concerns we've heard from land managers are well founded and that there should be a specific piece of legislation surrounding tampering with traps to ensure that we don't get again vexatious claims where someone with their own intent could take a tagged trap set it in a legal manner and then call the police which could result in the loss of a license which which reviews on a specific new criminal act regarding traps the activity like that would already be criminal under malicious mystery for possibly vandalism so it's a question of whether it merits a separate crime and this is a again another long-standing issue in many areas of law that is a value in in having a specific crime that signals particular form of behaviour is unacceptable on the other hand you then end up having endless layer upon layer of crime which actually makes it harder to understand what's going on harder to enforce and so on you know in one sense almost you know about half the crime in scotland could possibly just be dealt with as breach of the peace yeah but we want to have separate name crimes doing different things for a variety of reasons so an exception is a question about whether it's thought that the political the public signal of having the specific name defence is important enough to justify something that is already criminal i mean there are lots of examples of activities that are already criminal where another crime is put on top for policy public signaling reasons and depending on your views that's either a helpful useful function for the Parliament or it's simply creating unnecessary complication yeah so do you think that the and i'm not going to repeat the law that you just stated that people who tamper with traps might be convicted of there's a very low rate of convictions using that piece of legislation do you think well i think you from what you say would appear that potentially a specific law relating to tampering with traps may have a positive effect i'm not i'm not convinced it would be because you're going to hit exactly the same problems as with raptor persecution in terms of gathering the the evidence so the suggestions are that the number of reported wildlife offences is a lot lower than the number that occur that occur in reality i'm sure the same exists in relation to tampering certainly some of the evidence i've heard in other contexts and often the the marriage review is that gay and gay was landowners tell people this is happening but they don't report it to the police if they do report it to police you then have exactly the same problems of finding the evidence beyond reasonable doubt in rural remote areas okay rachel hamilton then jim fairly i've got the question just now jim fairly your last okay that's that's gonna we'll move on to to mureburn and we have questions from eroda glant you talked earlier about the science around mureburn and whether or not it was beneficial or not and what was the impact so just to ask what why you came then to the conclusion that it should be subject to increased legal regulation the current system is a voluntary code and our experience was that the voluntary code is not working we had evidence presented particularly in the cairngorms national park of wildfires that could be associated with mureburn outer control so i think our starting point was the current system is broken we need to move from a voluntary code to a statutory code regulated and well conducted mureburn as professor newton has indicated in his comments on upland bird ecology can can be very positive so it's important that mureburn is conducted in a way that's a compliant with the code which meets the the the regulations imposed and which can be properly reported another issue that we were very concerned about was and it goes back to this lack of evidence as how mortals are being managed in the code it would be necessary to report where the mureburn was taking place in addition to all the other permissions that needed to be gathered in advance so i think a statutory code for mureburn is a major positive step forward perhaps professor newton might speak more about the the impact of mureburn more likely yes i think it's important to realise that for driven grouse management mureburn is is central to the whole thing if you couldn't burn heathermore you would not get the densities of grouse that you do under burning the idea of burning in on grouse mores is to burn it in small patches as you probably know because the idea is that each grouse each pair of grouse in its territory is nesting territory has some patches of short heather rapidly growing heather on which it can feed and long heather in which it can take shelter from predators and so on or in which it can nest so that's the reason for the small patches of patchy burning that you see on on grouse mores and generally it's burnt there every on a rotation of every 10 to 15 years so it's not that frequent but that creates a structure on grouse mores of patches of ground of different heights of vegetation and it's that that is really important in increasing biodiversity because you get some animals that occur in the very low patches of low vegetation and others that only live in the high vegetation and so on whereas if you were to burn the whole lot in one go it would be absolutely uniform so the impact of burning on grouse mores is environmental impact is lower than it would be you know if you burn it in much bigger patches and the other advantage of that patchy growing in patchy burning or strip burning is that it provides a firebreak against so if there is an accidental fire it doesn't spread quite as rapidly as it would otherwise and of course the other advantage of fairly frequent burning as I'm sure you've discussed already it prevents the build-up of a lot of dry trash that would create a really hot fire that gets out of control it's very interesting to look at all the case well-known cases in recent years where fires have got out of hand and burnt many square kilometres just in one go all of them are in summer they're outside the proper burning season so they're not resulting from controlled burns and they've all the big ones have been on areas that have not been burned for several decades so there's a huge build-up of dry trash on the ground to get the fire going and it's under those circumstances that we mostly have the cases of the fire penetrating deep into the peat and that's where the problems start but most of the control burning that's done more frequently every 10 years or so the ideal is to get the fire going spreading rapidly through it's it's called a cool burn it doesn't last very long just sweeps over the ground without penetrating the the peat below it which releases most of the carbon so how could we out with grouse mers so obviously that has a benefit and it stops wildfires and the devastation we've seen quite recently because of wildfires how do we get that kind of land management or at least management to stop wildfires and the damages that that causes how do we replicate that elsewhere out with grouse mers well the rest of the burning i would imagine is carried out on land for agriculture sheep grazing land in the upland and so on and make sure that if you are going to burn that there are there are always fire breaks on hand if anything goes out of control and don't burn it every year it i can remember in the 1950s and 60s a lot of sheep farmers were burning every year but that's too frequent but you need to control it in somewhere by having fire breaks by preventing the buildup of trash and so on over a number of years so as well as licensing we should maybe be saying to landowners that they need to control the risk of wildfire on their land as well yes i think they're all at least the ones we spoke to they're all very conscious of the risk of wildfires and the management of fires in general at least on grouse mers i think has improved enormously during my lifetime a lot of growers now sorry land managers now when they're having a fire they take water up onto the hill you know tow it up in a trailer so they've got water on hand to control it and they have enough men on the job round about to keep it under control a lot of the control fires that got out of hands were often due to insufficient manpower or wrong weather conditions and so on but i think the code of conduct has helped a lot here and my impression on our meetings with landowners is that they were much more conscious of mureburn than they used to be and doing it correctly for their own benefit apart from anything else brief supplementary alaser allen some of the evidence that we've taken has has concentrated on some of the things we've looked at has concentrated on the distinction or the proposed distinction between peatland and non-peatland and 40 centimeters peat and all the rest of it and some of these questions but i'm just trying to get a picture from what you've just said there as to whether mureburn per se is responsible as other if there is evidence that is responsible for the kind of fires that you're alluding to there where peat burns on the hill but or is this an entirely different type of fire is mureburn a factor here in the type of fire where peat burns on the hill well it's bound to be a factor in that occasionally you must get a fire control burn that gets out of hand to some extent and some of those in the past may well have led to to local peat fires but it they've not in general had the sort of impact that the wildfires have had in recent years simply because of the amount of stuff there is to burn and the length of time the fire rages over an area but inevitably if you're burning something something's going to get out of control sooner or later but you've got to make sure that you have the equipment and the manpower on the ground to stamp it out as soon as possible we learned during our interviews for the committee that landowners did occasionally have control fires get out of hand but they generally bought them under control themselves without the need to call the fire brigade because they were prepared for it and I think that's improved in recent years. I'd like to ask your views on the proposed license and system for mureburn. Do you feel that it meets the needs of the recommendations that were in the review? Broadly I think it does. As we've repeatedly said in the review we didn't drill down into the level of detail which we're now scrutinising at this legislative phase. I think our strongest recommendation was the existing code was because it was voluntary was not proven to be effective. The code itself the existing code is is by large very well constructed but because it was purely voluntary we felt that there were loopholes there were occasions when non-adherence was producing the problems we've just been speaking about so I think as far as I'm aware we don't have details what that code might look like yet that will presumably emerge at a later stage in the legislative process but if it follows the existing voluntary code suitably tweaked and adjusted I would regard it as meeting our recommendations. I don't whether Professor Reid has any thoughts on this one. Just the same challenges arise in relation to designing any license and system how much flexibility are you going to have how much are you going to have rigid requirements and conditions so exactly the same the same sort of debates. Thank you. It would appear that most of the peak damage is done when fire gets out of control so wildfires whatever it seems quite strange to impose regulations based on peat depth on that and following on from that your report Professor Whitty suggested that there need to be an increase in regular to control relating to the Mureburn code do you think provisions in the bill adequately address that? I'm satisfied in the regulations that are currently written in the bill as delivering on what we were recommending. You described the habitat benefits of Mureburn and on the question that Alasdair Allan asked you and the convener with regard to the peat depth and the cool burning aspect do you think there should be a single licensing scheme rather than two for under 40 and over 40? I don't know I'd be very happy I think for one one licensing scheme to cover the lot but this this magical figure of 40 or 30 or 50 or whatever it may be that's a difficult question to answer because we don't know how much you know if you were to lower it by 10 centimeters or raise it by 10 centimeters with no idea of what acreage of land would be affected by that you know the more you lower it the more land is taken into that if you're going to burn it for example if you were dropping it by 10 centimeters or 20 centimeters how much acreage would that include in which you're going to burn it so it's very different those figures to my mind the definite figures of 40 30 or whatever I can see the value of them but it doesn't really tell you all you need to know which is who's going to be affected and over what sort of area okay um professory would like to come in just as an example of the difficulty of you could just say one license for mureburn wherever it is and assume that the licensing body is then going to reflect differences in peat and so on in a license but that gets you back to its very flexible it's very uncertain he you've got an attempt to provide greater certainty greater knowledge by having a specific requirement in the bill but we're seeing the problems that that gives rise to as it is appropriate to have it at all what should the measure be and so on so we've come back to the same issue that there's the two sides of the coin the precision the certainty has advantages on the other hand the flexibility discretion has advantages and the scientific data and scientific and the opportunities for the scientific data to change which is why on this measure it's specifically provided that that figure can be changed to reflect the fact that the science on this is is developing thank you that's a short supplement for a man harper and then jim fairly just a short sub about training and education it's not you know it's professing if you described how how complex it is like small patches and you know and managing the fire make sure it doesn't get out of control so should licenses be issued in correlation with a requirement to provide education and training for you know our gamekeepers and land managers we did make that recommendation in our in our report if you're going to have a code which is strongly adhered to then all the personnel involved need to be up to speed in terms of best practice um so i think training and updating that training from time to time is also quite important so i think we would we would see training all the keepers now as as a fundamental part of the proposed code i very much hope it'll be included okay thanks it's training for all aspects not just mill doing that trap operation and employment and medicated grit everything really needs a good background of training okay thank you thank you jim fairly and beatrice wishart thank you convener um prist read i'm going to come back to you a wee setting of what you just said in terms of the licensing you know 30 40 50 whatever it is um there's currently weaknesses in the muir bird code and that few provisions of the code and car penalties and there's no robust system a monitor and compa compliance and given the fact that we're now actually going to put something in place um do you think the bill provides um solutions to the issue of actually getting compliance and are there around a bust enough penalties to ensure that the you're going to need a license serious non-compliance with the code is going to be a ground for revoking modifying suspending the license as we discussed with the the gross shooting licenses there could be a scope for financial penalties as an alternative remedy for for that the whole point of because you now have the requirement for a license the code moves from being something that's voluntary which if you ignore there are absolutely no sanctions from from something where if you ignore it your license is at risk the third step would be to say that every provision of the code by itself is if you breach it it itself becomes a criminal offence and i think that has huge problems because it's over criminalising things it would mean that the code would have to be written in a way that you could judge black and white whether whether an offence has been committed so i think the the current position is an appropriate one subject to put the possibility of reflecting would there be scope for fixed penalties for for say for example you don't give adequate notice to your neighbours perhaps a fixed penalty notice for that might be appropriate rather than ministers or nature scots face will either we we revoke we don't grant a license to you we revoke it and so on for minor breaches having those more minor sanctions might be appropriate yeah would it not also require nature scot to be able to go out and actually measure the depth of pete for that the peatland issues there's uh the measuring is a is a problem yes thank you okay thank you um arian Burgess thanks convener um i'd be interested to hear if you feel that the recommendations on your burn have been addressed addressed in the bill and if there's anything else you'd like to see on the face for example in your review you you recommended increased training which you've already addressed with my colleague Emma Harper but also you recommended that a fire danger rating system for Scotland should be introduced to better support decision making about where and when to burn and you also pointed to the Scottish Government to explore changes to the current arpid support payment so just wonder that they may not be appropriate to put on the face of a bill but how do we make sure that those recommendations get pulled through but also if there's anything else you think should be being addressed in the bill i'd say very much these are not appropriate for a bill they're policy matters that should be pursued with the with the government through the stakeholders and this committee and others is there anything else that you think needs to be in the bill or are you are you content with the way it is now specifically on your burn on your burn i think obviously until you see exactly what the code is going to cover and what it's going to say it's a bit hard to say but it's it's creating a structure of framework which i think is adequate meets the requirements thanks for that i picked up earlier when we were talking about the wildfire aspect that what we're going on is we need to go on the precautionary principle and there's you know the desire to move from a voluntary practice to a regulated practice a licensed practice is because we are going to be seeing potentially more wildfires happening maybe that's of natural causes or but what i understand from you know talking to people who are work in this area is that actually it's always at the hand of the human whether it's error or intentional and i think i picked up from what you're saying there is that as we see an increase in wildfires we're going to have to have an increase in workforce equipment on hand to attend to those and so regulating your burn is a way of actually moving into that more precautionary space so that we're limiting the amount of what might happen from in other in other areas and so that we're not because i think already what we've seen with the fires in canach and curry more is is cory money is that the deployment of people to actually go and attend to these fires is quite challenging i would concur with what you just said let's see right direction of travel thank you just just before we move on the last couple of questions can i have your views on what the presumption is against murburn and that it should be the last management tool given what you've said about controller wildfire and improving species habitats and also do we need more accurate data on peak depths so more accurate to you know 50 centimetres rather than 40 before we bring in any regulations to give land managers a little bit more certainty the problem with p depths is that i understand existing map is based upon 50 centimetres and if you migrate away from that then clearly you have a challenge in how you determine that although i think in some of the commentary on the bill there are ways of dealing with this using probes over say a hundred metre by a hundred metre square it would be good to have perhaps the james utton institute give us more detailed information on scotland's pizza oils particularly seeing that they are so so vulnerable but that would be a major undertaking to effectively remap scotland's pizza oils and in the interim i think we're going to have to rely on the measures in the bill and and i very much hope that nature scot and grassmore managers will be able to find a way of determining pete which is not again unduly onerous in the demands it makes on the on the estate managers but satisfies the requirements in the bill okay and just on the point of the presumption against murburn i think that the provision that no other method of vegetation control is available is setting a very high standard possibly reasonably available or something like that might be more appropriate i think that again you've got the problem if you're setting a rigid test that takes away your flexibility your ability to to respond to different circumstances and people will differ on whether or not other control is available to put in rocky ground on steep ground and so on there can be issues so a bit of fudge a bit of fuzziness can actually be helpful for operating the system thank you arian Burgess just coming back to the peat depth piece my understanding on on why we talk about peat depth is actually a historic measurement based on the i guess it was the UK government at the time trying to identify energy sources so it's actually a measurement that's about something different than what we're looking at in terms of damage to you know on the one hand we've got this peatland restoration initiative in scotland where we're funding land managers to restore peat and it seems to me that we're kind of talking about two different things when we start to talk about depth when peat is actually a continuous cover and no matter what depth we need to be protecting that in terms of our carbon emissions i just wondered what your thoughts are on that the soil map would have been produced many years ago and wouldn't have had in mind what we've just been talking about certain terms of peatland restoration that's a whole different area not really within the remit of this inquiry or a report it just seems odd that on one hand we're trying to protect peat because we recognize that it's a super carbon sink and on the other hand we're i mean i think it's great that we're moving potentially to the licensing of it but it just seems odd that we're funding on one hand protection of it and on the other hand we're saying it's okay to okay restoration program is really taking degraded peatlands and restoring them to as near as can be back to their original pristine condition so that very often involves raising the water table removing trees it's a totally different agenda to what we've been talking about in terms of grass mowers so although you you can see certain parallelisms between the two areas they are really quite discreet and separate in terms of the underlying science i would say that we're needing to move to an ecosystems approach and look at everything as a whole thank you very finally are there further recommendations that were in the review on areas such as satellite tagging, further sentences and consolidation of wildlife law can you tell us to what extent do you believe that those have been implemented within the the bill that's before us and are there any recommendations of whether those recommendations should be in the bill itself or form part of a non-legislative approach because all your recommendations haven't been adopted how would you like to see that addressed that's like lots prefers a newton to speak about satellite tagging because i think there has been some development well satellite tagging has turned out to be one of the main methods we have of monitoring how birds of prey die and it's revealed as you know a lot of interesting results that the bulk of the mortality in several species occurs on or near grass mowers so that's been a major source of evidence and it may be necessary to continue that tagging into the future just to keep monitoring how the situation is going but it really has been extremely revealing both for the golden eagles that really started this whole process and also for hen harriers and others that have been tagged one thing we haven't touched on so far can be if i can just mention is what the evidence is that birds of prey do suffer in the way they do on grouse mowers the evidence is a lot more substantial than one might believe it's not just finding a few carcasses on a grouse mower that's a trivial aspect of it but the populations that live there are monitored annually again by so-called citizen scientists and the evidence that things are going wrong on grouse mowers is the multiple strands to that but one thing a lot of the known territories each year are much less frequently occupied than they are on areas outside grouse mowers birds disappear during the breeding season pairs disappear much more frequently on grouse mowers than they do outside grouse mowers the nesting success of the birds there is really very low compared to elsewhere and also a lot of the or quite a lot of the breeding population of some species consists of young individuals individuals that wouldn't normally get the chance to breed in a bird population but they can because the adult population has been reduced so terraces become available to them so the proportion of youngsters in the breeding population there's lots of evidence collected for individual species and these are highly significant differences between grouse mower and other terrain and secondly if you do have a change in the management of grouse mower you immediately get a response in the case of the raptors either they go down because a different manager comes in or they go up so the actual management the way the moor is is managed and their attitudes birds of prey is immediately reflected in what what happens to local raptor populations so that's just one other line of evidence we have on consolidation of the legislation this bill is clearly a backward step because we're talking about introducing a section 16 ab into the 1981 wildlife and countryside act i'm delighted to see that the scolish law commission's new programme of work includes consolidation of wildlife legislation as one of its medium term plans and anything this committee and others can do to make sure that actually happens and the government supports it i would be absolutely delighted at thank you professor where it is i have no further comments okay can i thank the witnesses for for attending this morning that's been a hugely useful session i'll now suspend the meeting for 15 minutes to allow for a change over in witnesses we'll reconvene at 10 55 and now welcome everyone back to our meeting and we have our second panel of witnesses joining us this morning with liby anderson is a member of the scolish animal welfare commission ian andrew the chief executive officer from the british pest control association ross ewing who is a director of moorland and from the scotchland in the states we have chief superintendent mike flinn from the society scotch society for the prevention of cruelty to animals we have liz mclochlin the wildlife management team from nature scott and alec hog the chairman of the scottish gamekeepers association and again this morning we have a we're approximately 92 minutes scheduled for this session so i'll kick off with the first question um do you agree that the provisions within the bill on the ban on the use and purchase of glue traps which follows the advice of the scottish animal welfare commission do you agree with it and that a ban on the use of glue traps is more appropriate than a licensing system and we'll kick off with alec hog i'm sorry i've got no comment on that one because i just does not come under a remit so that's fine more more uh yeah probably might you appropriate with this if we brought in the ian thank you thank you um we our position is very clear a public ban on the purchase and use of road and crew traps is absolutely the right thing to do however as professional pest controllers it would cause quite devastating results if we lose these tools they're the only tool we have to capture rodents quickly absolutely we have alternatives we've got biocidal products although the lifespan of those are in question and we've got break back traps but alongside that we've got increasing resistance to biocidal products genetic resistance and increasing behavioural resistance to both break back traps and biocidal products rats and mice are clever creatures they understand that these things are not good for them so if we lose the only tool we've got to capture a rodent quickly then it is going to have the results that it will will see increased populations which in itself isn't good for animal welfare we're also going to see businesses and organisations from supermarkets restaurants pubs hospitals schools where there are infestations being closed for a longer period of time at the moment an environmental health officer that goes in when there is an environment when there is a rodent infestation they want to see three clear instances of no capture on glue boards so that the premises can reopen quite quickly biocidal products approximately two weeks two weeks of businesses being closed before they can be reopened break back traps again it can take many days before rodents will go anywhere near them from an animal welfare perspective actually the glue trap is just a method of capture if the rodent isn't on the glue board for any considerable length of time and is then humanely dispatched their actual position on from an animal welfare perspective compared to biocidal death and compared to break back trap death is actually more favourable but of course the issue with glue traps has been misuse some of the things that Mike's team have found is where glue traps have been put outside of buildings i can't think of any conceivable excuse for a glue trap being deployed outside a building internal use high level infestation in high risk areas that the only way of capturing it and in response to the financial memorandum alongside the bill we've made a very conservative estimate that if you ban them the closure of businesses will have an impact of about 22 million on the Scottish economy every year and that was that was half of all the restaurants shops supermarkets being closed once every 30 years i think that was very conservative and closed for a week 22 million pound of commercial impact on the Scottish economy so absolutely animal welfare is critical but it's got to be balanced with public health got to be thank you any other comments liby thank you convener um clearly i'm a member of the Scottish animal welfare commission which provided the report on which the Scottish government formed the view that it would go for the full ban and to explain the history of the report we took evidence from many stakeholders including Ian's organisation the pest control industry animal welfare advocates environmental health and enforcement organisations and we considered it all very seriously and the first thing to say is that nobody disputed and and i'm grateful to Ian for agreeing here that glue traps cause severe and generally prolonged animal suffering and the wide view is that this is at a level that is so unacceptable that an outright ban is now justified and i could go into some of the detail of the injuries but you may not you may not need that so to look at the the reasoning in the report we took into account the public health risks and we took into account the severe animal welfare consequences and we looked at other models for example new zealand where a very strict licensing scheme actually an individual ministerial approval for use of any glue trap has been brought in since 2015 and in the last year or two the number of approvals has actually dwindled down to zero now we do accept that there is a different demographic and different pattern of living in new zealand so we're not necessarily comparing like with like but we can see that with the approvals literally at zero we can see that it is effective in many situations the other thing that we did in our report while saying that the animal welfare issues merited a full ban and that public opinion i think would back that we did set out a potential failsafe licensing scheme which again would be very very specific very case by case basis and for a limited period and we offered that as a potential alternative that might see us through the period while further developments arise in in technology and the science and i know that the industry work with scientists and they are keen to develop it i know that they acknowledge the suffering and the point that Ian has just made there about the trap itself being relatively quick but of course the industry code requires inspection of the traps twice daily so that would be 12 hours potentially after being trapped in this very horrible painful situation and to require almost immediate inspection would be so onerous on the industry i think that that would be difficult so it is a balance the commission's view was that an outright ban is justified and we're pleased that that's the approach the the bill takes jim fairly yeah a couple of curiosity just curiosity what is a glue trap and how does it work it sounds ridiculously simple but what is it and how does it work it's a piece of board covered in glue and so typically you would form a barrier in say it was a supermarket and there was a rat running around you would identify where the point of ingress was you would form a barrier so that the rodent had to cross that glue trap they fix to the glue trap and absolutely the worst case would be 12 hours but certainly from a bppc perspective we're quite happy that our members stay on site so that it's nowhere near 12 hours but that it just catches them and then they are humanely dispatched usually by blunt force trauma how have other countries if as let me say is new zealand has dwindled it down to zero how have they managed to go from using them to not using them it's comparing apples with pears they mean we've got near pandemic levels of rodent infestations particularly edinburgh glasgo city centre the populations are different they have no genetic resistance to biaisidol products in new zealand they've got little and there's no research but it would appear there's little evidence of behavioural resistance to traps in new zealand and it's just a difference now they don't have the big cities that we have so population levels of rodents are much less significant in that country in other countries they've got other methods for example in europe the drowning traps very effective and very popular but it's illegal in this country mr andrew what are our populations of rodents compared to other countries if you could compare a like for like country if you have that figure sorry no there's very little data i mean there's been a lot of press speculation on increased population i think it's probably more a change of behaviour of rodents during lockdown for example where takeaways and restaurants were closed and so they were foraging in other more domestic environments urban environments so but actual numbers another measure perhaps that you have looked at could be or methodology of working this out could be the number of operators who have been called out on an increasing basis to various institutions such as maybe a hospital or supermarket or wherever i mean i don't want to cause alarm with the public but you are indicating that we have got increasing problems with rodents so it would be good to get some understanding behind how you've come to that conclusion yeah our members are busier than ever are getting increasingly busy now it's not just rodents they're dealing with obviously and there's a high level of seasonality but they are getting busier and busier and therefore they have got increased pests to deal with and be absolutely clear if glue boards are banned my members will do much better commercially because it's going to take so much longer to get a rodent infestation under control so for my members if they're banned their businesses will boom but there's little by way of data on specific data on volume it is mainly anecdotal there was some research recently or that included Scottish local government callouts that would indicate that there was a slight increase but of course most local authorities are only dealing with local authority housing stock they're not dealing with takeaways hospitals supermarkets etc so sadly there's no tangible data thanks convener and what's your kind of understanding of the current extent of use of glue traps across hospitality and you know settings like hospitals yeah i mean it's thankfully fairly rare but it is all down to if there is an infestation then in a high risk area particularly a food environment for example then the food safety legislation has got to be adhered to there is a risk to public health and therefore the rodents need to be dealt with swiftly but i've got i mean my my technical manager who was pest controller for 15 years used them twice in her career so but again there'll be geographical distant differences there'll be on the buyers road in Glasgow i suspect they're used daily for example because there is that endemic problem that despite the prevention of damage by pest act which gives the local authorities to take a much more global approach to pest control the pick the rats and mice are just moving from one premises to another from one building to another there's no real block approach to to rodent control and each takeaway will have their own pest control company or doing it themselves so actually better use if the prevention of damage by pest act would actually make control so much more effective i was just going to say so that are you saying that there would be public health implications if glue straps are not used absolutely right i'm not sorry i'm not sure i including re-hys they're on environmental health institute for scotland in your research committee i'm not aware it's certainly they're not taking part in any of the the witness sessions that i'm not aware of that alasad allan i just wonder on that theme you know whether i don't live if there's another question for you whether in in coming to a view about banning glue traps it was envisaged or it was discussed or debated what that transition would be to given what ian's been saying i mean what is the transition to in the schools and hospitals well we have to hope that the industry will continue to work to develop improved traps now there are electric traps for example which are not very well distributed around the country but there are new traps coming along all the time and when we come to talk about spring traps later we may sort of consider those as well but that is being developed all the time but i hear what ian says that rodents don't readily go into new traps you're looking at the conventional solutions are things like improved proofing and prevention and there's no doubt that many pest controllers will come along and do that or advise you to do that first of all and in an industrial or a health premises that would have to be on-going constantly rodent sites we we know anticoagulants are are pretty cruel as well so it's not something you would just say well just use those and that's fine as a result you don't generally see the animals that have died as a consequence but if you do it's it's not very attractive and so the commission was very aware of potential unintended consequences and this is why we did think give it time but the overwhelming weight of evidence about the suffering that is caused by glue traps led us to believe that they had to go and certainly everyone agrees that they should not be used by the public yeah perhaps it's not your remit to see you know what the alternative is but it is kind of like the big question that will we're all going over here what is the alternative for a for a hospital there is no one solution and i you know we wouldn't be correct to say that we can recommend an alternative but we can see for example in the in the uh the notes accompanying the bill there's a note that says that 11 out of the 14 local authorities that responded to the bill said they did not use glue traps there are many organisations that do not use them Ian has has mentioned they're very little used in the industry and i'm pleased to hear that so it seems to me it is feasible given the overwhelming evidence about animal welfare and and the goodwill and the productive thinking that a couple more years should bring better solutions i can't tell you what it will be but there are many of science out there and we you know we hope that that will be the case i think that's a reasonable assumption thank you haian it is but hope isn't a strategy yeah so we hope that we'll have alternatives but just to be absolutely clear at the moment we don't the glue trap is the only means of rapid capture and when used professionally rapid dispatch through blunt force trauma it's the only thing we have everything else takes time biocidal products take time break back traps take time and that means hospital wards will be closed for much longer periods school canteens will be closed for much longer periods and rest the already fragile hospitality sector will probably be the first to suffer because environmental health officers have got no choice they have to close those premises until they're free of of infestation i've got a supplement from jim just to clarify here you set up a barrier of a blue trap rack comes over the top with you're saying that the use of a break back trap will take much longer but you more or less know the behaviour of a rat i get that there'll be some resistance to it but is there not some method that you can use by break back trap which will catch the rat because what i'm trying to think about is the the behaviour of the rat so if it's coming out why is it coming out in the first place if it's going to come out it's coming out for a particular reason it's not because you're driving it out so therefore if you're saying it will be done quickly somebody's going to be on site in order to alleviate the problems that we've talked about if you're using break back traps would you not just use more of them and make sure they're baited appropriately yeah now absolutely i mean a break back traps that more or less that size a glue board is more or less that size so you'd be putting down literally thousands of break back traps how many rats you try to catch with it if you're putting down thousands i'm sorry i'm not trying to be facetious i'm trying to get a picture in my head what this looks like all i'm i mean if if there was a point of ingress behind the convener for example and that's identified as the point of ingress nothing to do with the convener being there this actually once happened in committee many years ago okay then it's effectively the barrier so a dozen glue boards would be placed around the convener so that the rodent had to cross it to get to any food source or harbourage or water because that's why they're coming in it's it's food water or harbourage so so with a what difference between having glue traps and break back traps and exactly the same numbers but the problem is that a break back trap is literally that size you would you would have thousands of them needing deployed it just the practicality is such that it it just it's just impractical okay thank you thank you i've got a supplement from aran Burgesson then Karen Adam thanks convener i wasn't quite sure where to bring this in but i just want to kind of clarify we're talking in detail and it's really very helpful in thank you very much about how they're used and where we'd be using them and i get the sense that this is kind of we need to do that 360 degree look if we're bringing in this legislation but primarily this legislation is being reduced to address raptor persecution and so in the policy knows objective number 13 it says that the use of glue of glue to trap birds in an offence i think that's what we're trying to tackle here isn't it a glue traps in this situation yes well i understand that but why so i became confused as to why we're talking at length about glue traps and i'm just trying to get clarity here that we're talking about them because this legislation is bringing in legislation on a glue trap but this legislation is about wildlife management and mure burn and specifically around the raptor control so i'm just going to get these provisions don't relate to our life control specifically about glue traps um Karen Adam thank you convener i'd like to ask there is proposals for a transition period um and i'm just wondering what your views are on that are there Libyan Ian well the commission recommended that the proposed very strict licensing scheme should last for no more than three years and we made that recommendation two years ago so it's fairly simple we we would like the transition to be as short as possible yeah i mean we fundamentally don't want a transition period we want to keep glue boards um as the the only tool we have for rapid capture but um a license it's licensing scheme i mean we're already our members are already licensed by Liz's team for bird work for for gall work in particular we're carefully and closely and robustly licensed to do other aspects of pest control similarly our members can't purchase rodenticides with a proof of of qualification and and shortly proof of cp continued professional development same applies for insecticides so there are control measures and licensing schemes already in place that work very effectively the gall licensing we've it's the sorry the bird licensing online now Liz and very effective and the same applies south of order as well so it's we don't want to transition we believe we can have a very effective licensing scheme for professional pest controllers that limits the their use absolutely to high risk situations and at south the border they're looking at the training the qualification the cpd if anyone that's licensed to use glue boards which is absolutely right um but we we need we need to keep the access to these tools we don't want transition won't work phim flin yeah thank you very much convener yeah just i pick up on a couple of points here just on the last point that mr andrew raised not every pest controller is a member of your organisation so they've no going to go to that governing body nobody needs a license to use a glue trap and i'm really pleased to hear mr andrew saying they should totally be banned 100 for general public use um i must admit it's the general public that has caused concerns for ourselves and a lot of that is that not everybody has got the kind of confidence and where we're we're with all on how to destroy an animal once it's been caught on it and so we have had them being put live on the glue trap in bins we've had them getting drowned horrendous things to use they're totally indiscriminate if they're used now it's been illegal since the late 50s to use any kind of glue to trap a bird and so i mean there's already a president for that and these things will catch anything we've had home made ones made not the traditional i mean for the traditional ones you can you used to be able to buy them for 99 pence bnm's and anybody could use them put them in their loft and then forget about it and but we've had handmade ones that have caught up to a fox we've had gulks caught on them where they've been totally misused and that's got nothing to do with a reputable pest controller but it's just an easy way and they do cause suffering and okay 12 hours is better than just being left there but that is still a long time for a sentient mammal to be trapped and doing whatever it is to try and free itself thank you convener yeah can i bring in briefly and back to caron yeah the 12 hours i mean we're more than happy if we're required to actually stay on site you can't stay in the same room because that will stop the rodent coming onto the glue board but you can stay on the premises for three or four hours or whatever and on the technology point that there is greater use of cameras for example whereby they can be monitored remotely and as soon as something goes on to the trap then the pest controller will have visibility of that so the 12 hours is very much the extreme caron thank you i'm just moving on to my next question please scotland have advised that perhaps the possession as well as the use and purchase of glue traps should be included in the ban can i ask for views on that no nothing really nothing to add i don't see the same position as well as possession yeah i mean the reality is professional pest controllers get their products whether it's biocidal products break back traps glue traps from about half a dozen suppliers in the UK the public that's a different story but professional pest controllers we use about half a dozen for rodenticides there are point of sale checks so you've got to show that you've done your qualification before you can purchase them our relationship with amazon and ebay for example we get things taken off almost overnight so if they were banned for public use and they came on to ebay that our relationship was such that they'd be taken down immediately i'm looking what arianne did you want to come in on a supplementary i do i do actually want to pursue the question i was raising earlier because if i look at the policy memorandum in the legislation and the bill is bringing in a ban on glue traps it says here that the bill is being introduced to address raptor persecution and ensure that the management of groundsmoors and related activities are undertaken in an environment that is sustainable and well for conscious manner so i'm what and then in policy note 13 it talks about the use of glue to trap birds is an offence so i just wonder are glue traps used i mean is that what what we're trying to do here with the no no it's quite clear that the provisions on glue traps are not related to groundsmoor management they're they're related to general animal welfare so then there's some concerns in the policy memorandum that maybe needs to be clarified with the government bill team okay i mean i just i just wonder why they mention that the use of glue tracks uh glue to trap birds is an offence so are glue traps used to trap birds uh no well i don't i sorry it's not my position as convener to my understanding is no yeah uh jim did you have a supplementary glue traps before we move on to wildlife traps that was mike probably answered it thank you okay we're now going to move on to the theme of wildlife traps and i've got a question from Beatrice Wishart thanks convener um i'm not sure who's got to answer this but the question is do you agree there's a need for additional regulation of the use of wildlife traps and what's your experience with the use of spring traps and live capture bird traps and what evidence is that traps are misused in relation to both animal welfare and wildlife crime concerns who'd like to kick off ross thanks convener um so i think what i'd refer to in terms of the rationale for this is broadly i would say set out in the policy memorandum so paragraph 58 refers to the illegal use of traps on around grossmores and qualifies that with two references to incidents where raptors were persecuted using a spring trap it then goes on to say where live capture traps have been used to persecute raptors they are usually either ladder traps or funnel traps so the inference that's being made in the policy memorandum is that traps are sometimes used to persecute raptors on grossmores the only thing i draw the attention's committee to really in terms of the actual evidence base for this is the official wildlife crime record and you'll see it from the latest record which was published in this year and dates back to 2021 because of the lag that trapping raptors instance of birds of prey crime involving trapping is consistently lower than it is for example for shooting or poisoning so if you're looking at the actual scale of the issue it is by far and away less than the issues associated with shooting and poisoning and the other important thing to say and it needs to make this point really clear is that wildlife crime record does not specify where these incidents have taken place so it we cannot say with certainty that those trapping incidents for example all happened exclusively in relation to grossmores so i think there is i would say a fairly weak evidence base to be honest for the introduction of further regulation on the use of certain wildlife traps in this context and it's regrettable i think that the policy memorandum has not expanded on those in a little bit more detail um as i say i mean the fact that we're going to be talking about introducing a licensing scheme for numerous spring traps the supportive evidence for which is summarised in two anecdotal references to raptor persecution i think is largely deficient and i think is something that probably needs to be clarified further by the Scottish government just all that you ask um Hugh Dignan in previous sessions referred on more than one occasion to fen traps but it's my understanding that certain fen traps is illegal at the moment so those fen traps wouldn't come under any new potential licensing scheme so the the traps that are used by far i couldn't speak the exact legalities around it but the traps that are generally used on grossmores are our dock traps um and i'll probably defer actually to alec to speak in a little bit more detail about the sort of traps that are generally associated with grossmore management okay guys well last year before maybe the i think it was the russian federation wanted to they made it illegal for fen traps to kill stotes because they weren't the killing them in 38 seconds well break back trap which we were using was a fen trap so we all had to change our management and every person who now catches a stoke or back catch other things but the stoke was particular in this one every person that now catches a stoke has either got a dock or a tulley trap that we use and these traps are heavy catch your fingers in them you're going to break them they are so strong and immediately kill the animal they're actually very good traps and every every grossmore has now transferred over that cost of thousands of pounds or you can imagine a fen trap was about nine or ten pounds these new traps are all running about 40 pounds huge expense but we've done it and it works well it works really well the animals don't suffer and that's what's true okay Jim Fairlie are you okay question six sir Rachel Hamilton well i suppose i'll start off with asking whether the licensing scheme is proportionate and workable which includes the requirement for compulsory training and registration for all trap use and a supplemental to that whilst i'm asking this question would be should there be a bespoke scheme that's identified to one serial number rather than individual serial numbers where an operator may not use all of those traps we'll start with Alex Hogg i think we'll we're doing a lot of training we've done all the snare training so we're really up for doing the trap training and getting it right so whatever you can decide on and the finish we'll comply with it and and get the guys up to speed with the training i think i'd add to i mean your question was is it workable and proportionate i think broadly given the current provisions i would say the answer is no and that's not i think not it's not through the scottish government's own fault but i think there's been a lack of awareness of the potential unintended consequences of this so let me just allow if you may convener just to set out the key problem and it does relate to the imposition of unique license numbers on traps that are used much more readily than for example traps that are used to catch live birds which are the only traps at the moment they're currently subject to unique license numbers so the impact the implication of putting unique license numbers on all trapping infrastructure including spring traps essentially results in that trapping infrastructure becoming personalised it is tied to a specific operator now that shouldn't be a problem but it is and the reason that that's a problem is because of the extent of trap interference tampering and sabotage in the scottish countryside and this committee has probably got the biggest wealth of evidence actually anywhere to suggest what the scale of this problem is because in the call for views that you ran recently a number of gamekeepers responded to that and made clear the kind of sort of incidents that they were faced with and you'll actually see in your summary of the call for views where you did your analysis under the question do you agree that there is a need for additional regulation of the use of certain wildlife traps those that disagreed one of the key words that was used was sabotage so it's clearly something that a lot of people spoke to in their responses to this committee and the reason that's a problem is if you've got a unique licence number that is a tied to a trap that trap has then be sabotaged i.e. it's been made made illegal through other ways and means for the actions of a third party that trap is then tying the illegally set operation to an individual and that individual is much more likely if there's a unique licence number there to be the suspect in any investigation that then comes down the line and of course we know that under an investigation in the context of this licensing scheme you can have your personal licence to trap suspended but moreover the licence to shoot grouse as well could be suspended by the initiation of an official investigation so you can see I appreciate that that was a lot of steps to go through but the unintended consequence of personalising trap infrastructure where there is rife interference sabotage and tampering with infrastructure in the Scottish countryside has got unintended consequences and I think it's just important that we set that out. I think it's so necessary to say that Facebook as soon as they've done it they put it on Facebook and it's all over the place before they even get back encouraging this behaviour and it's scary it really is. I actually want to explore what happens. So we've jumped a bit so it's not just the nature around table that's good so if we've got some supplementary things that can we focus on the trap tampering at the moment that probably helpful and we'll explore that issue. I think Karen wants to come in and Rachel. Yeah it was just for the purpose of clarity and for the record why would somebody be sabotaging and tampering with traps? It's a really good question so I think some people are ideologically opposed to grouse shootings if they're walking on a grouse more under the trap there they might well take it into their own hands to sabotage it some people similarly are ideologically opposed to the use of traps for wildlife management killing a sentient being for some people is too much and they do not agree with it and therefore they take matters into their own hands and some people frankly don't know what they're doing they come across this thing and they think it's fun to smash it up so there's all sorts of broad motivations I mean that those are I should stress that these are my kind of assumptions but I imagine these are the sort of things that go through people's head when it actually comes to the the kind of sabotaging interference and tampering with trap infrastructure. I wanted to ask about what happens what are the implications of the humane use of traps if they are interfered with and you know what what I know that I've spoken to gamekeepers in my own constituency who have had traps interfered with and that's that is quite distressing but to have a serial number that's related is your suggesting Ross that would indicate that they would then be at potential of prosecution. So one of the most common things that happens in the context of people being kind of sabotaged is that the box or the tunnel over which the spring trap sits gets removed so therefore exposing that trap to the elements now clearly that carries significant animal welfare consequences because if something you know that's not meant to be caught a non-target species get caught in that there's clearly going to be some pretty seismic consequences for the animal welfare components you know that you you most gamekeepers obviously take into account when they're setting these things so the the act of exposing the trap to the elements is is probably one of the things that you see most often and that's certainly reflected in the responses to the call for views and you're absolutely right I mean I think that the big problem here is that if that sort of incident happens if someone removes the tunnel or the box it's exposed to the elements and someone comes across it and reports it then obviously a unique ID number immediately links it back to that individual and they then are the subject most likely of an investigation which as we've heard could come with the consequences for licence being suspended so despite the you know we had the feedback from the call for views but to what extent is it an issue because we heard in the earlier panel that there's very few if any prosecutions on tampering with traps so can you tell us what the extent of it is in your opinion but also what stakeholders would suggest is the the route to to stop tampering so the first point on the extent of it I mean just to give you a flavour so we put on surgeries to help people respond to the consultations associated with this bill given the gravity of the consequences of over a hundred gamekeepers that I interviewed I can count on one hand the amount of people that were not impacted by some way through trap interference tampering or sabotage so that gives you a feel of the skill of the problem obviously you've got the individual responses there I'd also refer you to the public consultation that preceded this bill as well and in the analysis of that it said the potential for malicious tampering with or damaged two traps was a key concern of some of those who felt that the proposed penalties are too severe and also that some of those who disagreed at question 29 which was the relevant question suggested that if proposals are taken forward there should be an equivalent offence of interfering with legally set traps and that is fundamental because ultimately the act of interfering could result in the trap itself becoming illegally set that carries animal welfare implications and the strongest feeling from the sector is that the penalties for trap interference tampering or sabotage should equal those of mis-setting a trap in the first place I mean that seems logical to me but obviously leave it to your view committee okay sticking specifically with tampering before we move on Alec you can imagine a lot of the traps are baited by rabbit tampering and as long as they're covered they work perfectly well but if they're tampered with and the cover's lifted off this rabbit is then exposed to egos or buzzers or whatever that come over and next thing you've got a huge incident what a raptor and a trap and it's just so bad and serious okay no no we're absolutely going back okay so we're just sticking to tampering at the moment and we'll bring another we're going to go back to the questions on regulation whatever in a minute but I want to to stick to this at the moment Mike and just just quickly the back to Rossi's point regarding tampering and stuff if your your tap is registered to Mike Flynn and it's interfered with it's still up to the prosecution to show that Mike Flynn actually said at the time it might be my name but somebody's still got to prove that it was actually me that was operating at the time and I would agree with the country side people there should be a specific offence for anybody that interferes with a lawfully set trap because if it's lawfully set any suffering should be minimised and it's out with their control if it's tampered with and it's I think at the moment it can be malicious mischief possibly theft possibly vandalism but there should be a specific offence. I've got Arion on the same topic. Thanks very much convener and that that's good to hear that point Mike. I just wonder if we've got any developments in terms of technology so we we're aware of digital technology that sports us with the rapt persecution aspect of this. I wonder if there's some kind of digital technology that we could apply to traps so that you know you can see if it's being tampered with just as you can see a vessel's activity in our inshore you could actually see activity on a trap and people Arion do take up on themselves that you set trail cameras where they've set traps the problem is that spring traps are used so numerously across grouse moors that doing that for every single one is probably practically impossible but where we have seen prosecutions successful prosecutions it's generally resulted on either the keeper sitting out and actually watching to see what's happened and you know taking the evidence accordingly or setting a piece of technology like a trail camera but I wonder if we could take that technology further and actually have something within the trap so that you can tell you know whether it's been moved at a time right just as you can you can do that remotely for many other aspects of things surely we could move in that direction. I'm certainly not aware of it's been done at the moment but you know an opportunity perhaps. We're going to jump back to the look for additional regulation I think Jim Fairlie had a question to ask on that. I'm just very conscious of the fact that that has been answered by a gamekeeper and someone who represents Scottish land in the snakes so I wanted to get a balanced understanding. Libby, Mike and Liz do you feel there is a need for additional regulation in the setting of these traps? Let's start with you Mike. Yes I certainly do and I'm all for training which Alex supports in his organisation can do. We have had people who have been on a training course for snares who've then abused it and that kind of knackers on my negative defence for the fact that I didn't know the law, you do know the law because you were trained and you were passed in that training so yes anything that could potentially kill an animal as far as I'm concerned should always be a last resort but if that's got to be used it should be by trained individuals and if they break the law they've got no excuse because they actually as part of that training are told exactly what the law is and my last bit about the tampering way if all this comes in records strict records would have to be kept which would say I visited my snare my trap or whatever on that day and it had been interfered with so that is a defence for the person as well because I've already declared that other than reporting it to the police. Yes thank you. So the reason that live traps and spring traps are included in the bill is because Professor Warrisie's report identified a connection between the use of traps and raptor persecution which gave rise to the bill but from the commission's point of view we would welcome their being included and we'd see an opportunity to improve welfare issues because both live bird traps and spring traps do pose welfare challenges in the case of cro cage traps and larson traps there are known welfare issues to do with the the decoy bird being confined for a lengthy period with all of the birds being exposed to the elements with limited well food and water and is only provided to the decoy bird for example the trapped birds are meant to be there for only 24 hours but that could be a very long period in a winter day up on the mountain so there are inherent welfare issues and there are also concerns about the way that birds are dispatched when the operator comes to inspect them and we've seen evidence of birds being poorly dispatched with suffering as a consequence so this gives explain to me what you mean by poorly dispatched yes yes so quite some years ago i remember the organisation i worked for at the time was observed a keeper going into a cage and attempting to kill the birds by just laying about him with a stick so i'm sure colleagues from the profession would not agree that's an appropriate way to attempt to kill a dozen crows that brings me back on to the point that alec talked about in terms of actual training and the professionalism of the people who are actually carrying out this act would that not be part of the process well i think that's what i would like to move on to to talk about and the advantages of training not only to ensure that best practice is observed but really for accountability and to maintain standards and i as alec said i don't think there's any objection to training the concerns that been identified are more about the id tags and problems about potential sabotage which are beyond my ken frankly if i could just very quickly see something else about the welfare issues around spring traps because while live bird traps are used under a general license and there is accountability and there are welfare standards applicable because they're live animals for the spring traps the theory is that the animals will be killed instantly or rendered irreversibly unconscious instantly now we know that simply isn't always the case and the humane trapping regulations that alec referred to earlier they do only apply to stoats but the same type of traps could be used for weasels, squirrels, rats and there are no specific humane trapping regulations for them so at the moment for spring traps there's little accountability there's no recording of the animals that are caught there's no recording of animal welfare issues there's no need to demonstrate the need to kill these animals and all of that could be incorporated into a licensing scheme and could be the subject of training so these are the advantages that we see can i bring in let's please i would just say that the use we recognize the use of spring traps and other live capture traps for birds have got an important wildlife management tool but if used inappropriately be that because they've been tampered with or they've been set inappropriately or whatever if they're used inappropriately in addition to the welfare issues that we've discussed there's also the risk of capturing protected species and other non target species if they've not been appropriately set just on that so as the expected licensing authority how are you going to go about developing the systems and improve training courses to address some of the things that you've touched on and you know what resources do you think you're going to require will they be available and when do you foresee a decision around you know the cost of this and potentially cost recovery being made so as with our other licensing approaches and schemes that we've got we would we would develop the licensing scheme in conjunction with stakeholders we would we would listen to the the interested parties just the same as we've recently done with with mountain hares and things and we would develop a proportionate approach we we already obviously have a registration traps registration system that we