Jamie McGrigor MSP (Highlands and Islands) (Con) on The Crofting Bill

Speech in yesterday's Parliamentary debate on the Crofting Bill.:

I refer members to my farming interests in the register of members' interests and inform them that I am a member and vice-convener of the cross-party group on crofting.

I thank Rural Affairs and Environment Committee members, including my friend John Scott, and the committee's clerking team for producing a thorough, balanced and useful stage 1 report. In recent weeks, I have spoken to many crofters on visits to Shetland, the Western Isles and Caithness and Sutherland. Many of their concerns are—rightly—highlighted in the committee's report. Views on the bill are varied and strongly held, and major anxieties remain. This week, a crofter from Kinlochbervie wrote to me to appeal for the bill to be withdrawn. The crofters rights emergency action group shares that view, but it is not the position of the Scottish Crofting Federation or the committee. Others have asked me where the need for crofting legislation came from. I believe that it might have emanated from one line in a long-forgotten Lib Dem manifesto. However, we are where we are, and we must use the rare opportunity in Parliament to make it easier for crofters to run their crofts.

Like the SCF, I am particularly pleased that the committee's report makes it clear that regulation alone will not ensure crofting's survival, as the minister said. Crofters want practical measures that are designed to aid their good work, which is why I have fought hard over the years to retain measures such as the bull hire scheme, to ensure the high quality of crofters' breeding stock, and proper support for croft housing—inflation has eroded that support in recent years. As my friends Norman Leask and Patrick Krause of the Scottish Crofting Federation have argued for many years, crofters need carrots as well as sticks. That is very true.

Many crofters and farmers are concerned about predation by sea eagles on their lambs, which are their livelihood. The Government must listen to their concerns—they would not say that they were suffering predation if it were not happening.

If the SNP Government really wants crofting to continue, it should listen to the practical points that crofters make. I have looked at the list of land managers options, hardly any of which seem relevant or helpful to a crofter's basic needs. LMOs are available to everyone who has an agricultural holding. Unlike other agri-environmental schemes, LMOs are not competitive, so surely it would be just and fair to have priorities in the menu of LMOs that would serve crofters well in practical terms. Crofters might be able to use the options on vernacular buildings and rush management, but not many options are relevant to them.

As we have heard, the crofting register has been a difficult issue. Crofters are right to fear the extra cost that they might incur and the further bureaucracy that will be involved. The estimated costs have been revised downwards, but £130 per

registration is still a significant expense for many crofters—that is the profit on anywhere between six and 10 lambs gone. The SCF says that it is pleased with the broad agreement on its voluntary community-led mapping initiative, which it believes is a positive initiative, in contrast to the Government's suggested compulsory trigger-point mapping. I would be interested to hear more in the minister's closing remarks about the Government's response to the initiative; I was encouraged by her opening remarks.

The Scottish Rural Property and Business Association has said that it is "not convinced" that a new register is justified in terms of costs and benefits. It has made a sensible suggestion that crofting communities should be able to get together to map their areas on the register and that that activity should be free of charge for a period of 10 years from the implementation of the bill. In a previous speech, I suggested that integrated administration and control system maps could be used for registration purposes, but that was before I learned that only between 5,000 and 6,000 IACS forms have been completed by crofters. A new mapping system might encourage more IACS applications, leading to better downloading of subsidies for crofters in the future. That is one positive aspect of the system.

I agree with the committee's acceptance that the commission should continue as the main body with responsibility for regulating crofting. We believe that only crofters should have a vote in elections to the commission and that, at the moment, first past the post is the simplest system of election. Further work needs to be done on the contentious issues that are connected with absenteeism, such as the limit within which a crofter is deemed to be ordinarily resident. The committee is right to say that we need to have a clear strategic plan to address neglect, based on the factors that would determine why an apparent case of neglect would not be tackled.

I emphasise that the Scottish Conservatives remain wholly supportive of crofters and the crofting sector. We want the sector to thrive and to continue to produce environmental benefits for all our people, while helping to sustain local communities in some of our most remote and fragile rural and island areas. I know that in Stornoway, for example, crofting filters through the whole urban environment and makes people who live there aware of the importance of being self-sufficient in foodstuffs.

I point out that the Scottish Conservatives have a proud record of legislating in the interests of our crofters, from the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Acts of 1886 and 1887 to the Transfer of Crofting Estates (Scotland) Act 1997. If the SNP is able in the bill to produce anything as useful as those acts, it will be doing well. All of us are praying that the bill is nothing like the chaotic Crofting Reform etc Bill of 2007, which was a prime example of bad legislation.