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That is contrary to your answer to the written question, which said:

“The Scottish Government was unable to provide a definitive response to question S6W-41921, as the pilot plan will require continuous updates and adjustments. Consequently, it is not possible to confirm a date for when the plan will be fully finalised.”—[Written Answers, 9 December 2025; S6W-42266.]

I will, but I am more than happy for this to be a four-way, six-way, eight-way or 10-way discussion, because the issue affects all our constituencies and regions. I will give way to the minister after I make this point. He says that we are not in the breeding season, which I agree on—we are in December—but in his own written answer he said that he cannot provide a date for the gull management plan.

This group of amendments is on marine planning, protection and enforcement. Therefore, we have to look at how we enforce any wrongdoing in our marine environment. For three decades, we, as a country, have been very well served by an aviation asset based in Inverness that has been involved in exactly what this group is talking about—the enforcement and protection of the marine environment and the waters around Scotland.

I come at this issue as a local MSP who has been approached by constituents affected by the Scottish Government’s decision to dispose of the two marine aviation aircraft that look after the marine environment. I know that other ���˿��� on the committee have been contacted about this, too, and there have already been questions in the chamber on the matter.

This element of the bill provides an opportunity for further dialogue, and I am approaching the issue in what I hope is a constructive way, so as to get answers from the Government. I wish to state clearly from the outset that what I am asking for is a review of the Government’s decision. Ideally, that review would accept the shortcomings of the Government’s decision and would provide an opportunity to reintroduce an asset that has served us well for 30 years.

That is the next stage, however. The first step is to ascertain the impact of removing the facility, not just the two aircraft—and I will come on to speak about what has replaced them. The hugely skilled, dedicated and committed staff who worked on the aircraft are passionate about protecting the marine environment and want to continue to do that to the best of their ability, but they need the best tools in order to do that. The decision by the marine directorate and the Scottish Government to move away from the aircraft was clearly taken on financial grounds. I understand that they will not be the cheapest vehicles to use, but they are the best. They have been replaced by three ageing vessels, which are extremely slow to operate, in what is a vast area.

If we are seeking to protect our marine environment, we need a quick and reliable service when something is going on that needs to be addressed and captured, so that enforcement action can be taken. It is not possible to monitor the fifth-largest exclusive economic zone—EEZ—in the world, as was previously done by the two aircraft operating out of the base at Inverness, with drones and three very slow vessels. It is simply not possible.

I would like to hear from the cabinet secretary and the Government what they believe the outcomes and implications of their decision have been and whether they accept that our marine environment is not protected in the same way now as it was prior to those aircraft being lost.

I should add that the aircraft are still sat there at Inverness. They have been put up for sale. To my knowledge, there are no interested buyers; they have certainly not been sold. If that was intended to be a capital receipt for the Government, it has not been realised. The use of the drones and the vessels does not protect areas that should be protected, and certainly not as quickly.

The main aim of the formerly used aircraft was to act as a deterrent. They were called on for time-sensitive missions—to catch a trawler in a closed box, for example. The aircraft could get up in the air very quickly, with their skilled, dedicated and committed staff, capture images and send them back to the marine directorate. Enforcement could take place very rapidly. Now, if someone knows that the ships that will be chasing them in order to take the same images are hours or potentially days away, the deterrent is gone. The trawlers are in and out of the closed boxes before the vessels have even turned round to try and catch them. We have lost a crucial deterrent. Therefore, a lot of the amendments in the group will be the poorer for the lack of a deterrent and an enforcement mechanism, which we previously had, as a country, and which was lost.

There was also a great deal of concern at the lack of engagement with those involved in the operation prior to the decision being taken. They had operated successfully for 30 years, but the Government very quickly announced its view and said what was going to happen and what the replacement was going to be.

My amendment 264 proposes a review to ascertain what has happened and how enforcement and the deterrent have been affected. If the Government and the marine directorate had taken a bit more time in the process of getting to this stage and had been engaged with the staff, they would perhaps have seen the benefit of retaining the asset that they have had for so long.

I will sum up now, as I am more interested in hearing the response to the amendments from the Government—and I will perhaps intervene when the cabinet secretary is responding. This issue is not going to go away. We have had questions in Parliament, but we also have an opportunity here. The aircraft have not been sold; they are sitting idle at Inverness, ready to be redeployed at a moment’s notice. If the Government were to undertake an honest, open and transparent review, looking at all the information, and if the review found that we now have a big capability gap, there is something to fill that gap, which is something that we have used successfully for 30 years.

I hope that the Government will support the amendment and the proposal to simply have a review. Then, at the next stage, if the review says that we should go back to what we have done in the past, the skilled crews and staff, as well as the aircraft, would be available to be deployed. That would be a very welcome move.

I look forward to hearing the cabinet secretary’s remarks.

Will the cabinet secretary give way?

Exactly. He took it very seriously, and many issues have been raised since then. One of the requests is that the Scottish Government change the licensing arrangements for the 2026 nesting season and revert to the pre-2024 guidance, and we discussed that change with the minister. Is that an option? That approach was not ideal and it did not answer all the problems, but the previous year was better, before NatureScot unilaterally changed it. Could it go back to that? That would be a positive move by the Government and the minister.

I agree with that, and I remember Rachael Hamilton making that point to the minister in the chamber.

However, even if the minister does not agree about what happened in that example, he has already said that there were other ludicrous examples. He may not believe that the organisation told people to put dogs on roofs, but he has accepted that NatureScot told people to hire a cherry picker to go up to the roof to take a picture of a nest with that day’s newspaper, like a hostage in a film who proves that they are still alive by showing that day’s paper. That is what NatureScot was asking for—it is not made up or exaggerated; it is the ludicrous approach that NatureScot has been taking.

The minister did not comment on it today, but we also have to look at what NatureScot is currently suggesting, because it is still telling people that they cannot control the nests around their shops but can tell people to use an umbrella to walk towards the gulls. It is still telling people—supported, I believe, by the minister; I will give way if he wants to disagree—to walk down the high street, waving their arms to deter the birds. It is still telling people—this came out at the summit—to draw googly eyes on pizza and takeaway boxes to stop the birds coming down.

I will, convener. However, I will first respond to that final point. This is not about it being a show. It is very telling that the minister said that the reason that he wanted to keep the press, the public and politicians out of his summit was so that those weird suggestions were kept private.

Sorry, but will you give way?

I will come back to the last point, but, first, if the minister is saying that there is progress, I am willing to accept that. What I am saying is that, from the outside, those of us who are not in the ministerial corridor, or who are not officials, cannot see that, because the written answers cannot tell us anything about the progress. That is why Fergus Ewing lodged the first written question and had to lodge a second written question. If the information can be shared in any way, it may provide some reassurance for the communities—particularly in Moray, Elgin, Nairn and Inverness—who are concerned about this issue. That is why the minister travelled to the area to hold the summit.

The point that the minister finished with—that it will not matter who holds the power to issue the licences—makes my point. If, according to the minister, it does not matter who holds that power, we should take it away from NatureScot, because it is not using that power effectively. It is issuing decisions that are, to use the minister’s own word, ludicrous. I would have thought that, the day that the minister decided that NatureScot’s determination of applications was ludicrous, he should have said, “The game’s up. You are not suitable as an organisation to both be in charge of conserving bird numbers and to deal with the applications to control bird numbers.” That is why I believe that those licensing functions should be removed from NatureScot, because of its significant conflict of interest, and that is why I have provided the options of giving those functions to local authorities, taking them in-house to the Scottish ministers and enabling another body that is not conflicted in that way to carry them out. All that I am asking for in amendment 257 is to remove the functions from NatureScot.

Amendment 258 would give the licensing functions to local authorities, and amendment 259 would enable licensing to be carried out by the Scottish ministers.

All three of the amendments call for consultation with interested or affected persons. There is no doubt that there is a feeling out there that there was a lack of engagement from NatureScot until the minister held his summit, and that there has been none since then. It is a top-down body. It tells people what it believes, but it does not listen and it does not respond to local people.

When the topic was debated in the chamber, Rhoda Grant rightly mentioned John Divers, who is a Labour councillor in Elgin. He has been dealing with the issue for a long time in the city that he has represented for many years. He is someone whose great experience should be used by bodies such as NatureScot to learn about the problems in those communities and how to respond to them.

NatureScot should be speaking to Elgin community council. It was not invited to the minister’s summit and has planned its own summit for next year. The organisation is spending a significant amount of the Elgin common good fund’s money to deter gulls in the area, because it is not getting the action that it requires from NatureScot.

I would love NatureScot to listen more to the Nairn business improvement district and to the Inverness business improvement district. I know that they were invited to the minister’s summit, but Lucy Harding and Lorraine McBride know more about NatureScot’s licensing and operations than anyone else I have met. They have been through the problem year after year after year. They proposed sensible solutions to licensing that were dismissed by NatureScot at the summit.

In the end, what came out of the summit was a recommendation that—I will not do the actions again—people should wave their arms when walking down the high streets to deter the birds or draw googly eyes on pizza boxes. Those are the recommendations that NatureScot is making, rather than listening to people who are on the front line dealing with the issue day in, day out, month after month, year after year, who have the expertise.

Another person that I would urge NatureScot to listen to is Bruce Robertson. I know that he wrote to the minister and received a response recently. Like others, he has a wealth of knowledge and experience that is not being utilised by NatureScot, because it is a body that thinks that it is untouchable, that what it believes is gospel and that no one else’s views count.

I urge the minister to at least accept that the consultation element of my suite of amendments is necessary, because NatureScot is not engaging widely enough.

I will move on to amendments 260 and 261. Amendment 260 would require the Scottish Government to conduct an analysis of the spend by local authorities on gull management and deterrence. Why have I lodged the amendment? The big flagship announcement from the minister’s gull summit was that £100,000 would be committed to local authorities to deal with gulls. That is a drop in the ocean, and we need to know what funding is required. I know that my local authority, Moray Council, has spent around £100,000 in recent years. That is one of 32 local authorities. I know that Aberdeenshire Council has spent a huge amount of money on the problem, and I know that Dumfries and Galloway Council, in the convener’s part of the world, has spent a huge amount of money on it, too.

However, we do not know the total spend. Some of the spend has been pieced together through freedom of information requests, and some of it is set out in committee reports. Surely, if the minister got advice from his officials to go up to Inverness and announce £100,000 to be spent across the local authorities in Scotland, that figure came from somewhere. Was that based on how much councils are currently spending or projected to spend, or was it just plucked out of mid-air so that the minister could get some positive press coverage out of his visit to Inverness and the summit? We have no idea how that quantum of money was reached and how it will be spent. We still do not know whether that will be sufficient. Based on the limited information that we have in the public domain, we know that it will not be sufficient to be spread across 32 local authorities.

The most surprising thing about amendment 261 is that it was supported by RSPB Scotland. I noticed in its briefing that it was the one amendment in my suite of amendments that the RSPB supports—it gave it a green rating. As a former member of the RSPB, I think that it has lost a bit of its appeal for me. I no longer pay my membership—but not for those reasons. It has been against a lot of what I have said about gulls. It takes a very different view from me, and I respect that. However, even the RSPB agrees that we need an annual survey of gull numbers in Scotland.

Time and time again, this minister and others will come to the chamber to say that gulls are a protected species because their numbers are reducing. They may be reducing in coastal areas, which is their natural habitat, but they are increasing in our urban communities. The minister and his officials do not have the information that they require to make the case that licences should not be approved in those areas, because the numbers are going down. I and others believe that the numbers in urban areas are going up. If even the RSPB can support amendment 261, I hope that the minister can, too.

I take this issue very seriously, because it affects many of my constituents. I will not reiterate the many horrifying cases of people being badly injured by gulls, but the situation will only get worse unless we have proper licensing, which we are not getting from NatureScot. Let us support the amendments that remove the licensing functions from NatureScot. Let us give those to a body that is not conflicted in the way NatureScot is. Let us ensure that we know how much local authorities are spending on actions to deter and control gull numbers. Let us have an annual survey of the numbers in urban and coastal communities, so that we can make informed decisions going forward.

I move amendment 257.

Before we move on from what the Scottish Government has done, I accept that the minister acted quickly. I remember the call that we had with him—I think that he had been up in Inverness that day.