Chamber and committees

There are many provisions in the bill. I assume that you are referring specifically to the code of practice for local authorities, or do you mean more generally?

Absolutely; there will need to be investment. I am looking now at the amount of money that we have given Glasgow in this area. It has had £21 million from the recycling improvement fund. The member is correct that there needs to be investment in infrastructure, especially, in order to enable the scheme. That is why we have the recycling improvement fund, and that is why we invested more than £1 billion through the strategic waste fund between 2008 and 2022.

There is an interesting point, though, around designing recycling systems to make things easier. I also live in tenement land, where we have big bins in the streets, and I know that one of the improvements from the recycling improvement fund in Edinburgh is the change in design of the bin lids to make it more obvious what type of material should go into the bin. Similarly, East Lothian Council has a scheme involving some very clever trucks that makes it easy for people to put in the right type of recyclate and more difficult to put in the wrong type. Those sorts of design improvements make a big difference to decontamination. Some of it involves fairly cutting-edge research about how people interact with recycling systems. Sometimes, it is not enough to give people information; you need to make it easy for them to do the right thing. If it is difficult for people to get the big black bin bag into the recycling bin, they will not do it; instead, they will recycle properly.

Particularly in the code of practice, I want to work towards having common good design. That means that, where councils across Scotland are getting good results, we can share the knowledge from those areas with other councils and work together to have the best type of recycling. It is not about just investment. That is one of the challenges that we have seen through the investment in the strategic waste fund. Although that was more than £1 billion, it did not bring us up to the kind of recycling rates that we hoped for, so more is needed. That is why some of the provisions in the bill around targets and the co-design process, which will allow for that information sharing, are also needed. This is not something that you can just throw money at; it needs that design element as well.

It is more about having a proportionate level of scrutiny. With any number of single-use items—cups, vapes, plastic bags—one can imagine that requiring primary legislation for each of those products would not only be burdensome on parliamentary time but mean that we would not be able to react as quickly. Primary legislation would take a great deal of time and mean that any potential pollution problem would last for the many years during which the primary legislation was going through its stages. Secondary legislation allows the Parliament to be nimble in reacting to new products that come on line and allows the level of scrutiny that committees and members of the Parliament deem to be appropriate.

The provisions will also have gone through the co-design process, which will be transparent and will have had input from the stakeholders.

That is exactly the point that we have been discussing, which is about the framework. Look at the example of the plastic bag charge. Businesses are allowed to recoup their costs for that charge. If we had a single-use cup charge, it might be managed along those lines, but it might be managed differently. We do not have that information available because it has not yet been developed to that level of detail.

That is because those things are being developed. Extended producer responsibility is being developed UK-wide, led by the UK Government, which is engaging with businesses on how to develop that scheme.

There is a principle that we would not double charge businesses, so, once the UK-wide deposit return scheme gets going, businesses that have those sorts of packaging will do their producer responsibility bit under the deposit return scheme. They would not be double charged with the EPR. In fact, my understanding is that the deposit return scheme will cost some businesses substantially less than what they might be getting charged under a standard producer responsibility model for packaging. That will drive businesses to want to get the deposit return scheme up and going. It is a big shift in our society from having public funds cleaning up our environment to making sure that private interests, under the polluter-pays model, do it, too.

There is a big point here that I am grateful to Jamie Halcro Johnston for raising. This is also about incentivising businesses to become more efficient and to choose to use packaging that is easier to recycle. At the moment, there is no penalty or advantage, and a business may just decide to use material that is not very recyclable. Once extended producer responsibility for packaging comes in, the fee amount that they will be charged will depend on how recyclable their material is. That will incentivise businesses to change their practice. There is a provision in the bill about reporting on sectoral waste and surplus. It has been shown that, when businesses implement good practice, it helps them to focus on reducing waste and, overall, it reduces their costs. This is part of a big shift in our economy to the polluter-pays model and to efficiency savings. We can drill down into each provision of the bill, if the member wishes, and talk about specific ones.

No, and nor would it be appropriate for there to be one. The relationship between the SNIB and Circularity Scotland, the private business that I believe that you are alluding to, was between them. The Scottish Government was not involved in that.

Absolutely. That was the result of work by Zero Waste Scotland. Alex Quayle can give us more detail on that.

I think that the correct process for bringing forth legislation of this complexity is to first enable, as the bill does, the start of that conversation. If one does not do that, one will end up in a situation in which councils and businesses are asked to invest a substantial amount of time to undertake the development of legislation that may never get through the Parliament; it may not happen. That would be the wrong way around. You would be asking stakeholders to design a process that we did not even have the powers to implement, and you would be sitting in a committee much like this asking councils to develop something that you would not even know whether you had the powers to implement.

We must understand that we have these enabling powers so that we can then say to councils, “We have the powers to implement this. You can have that certainty. Let us work on the detail together.” If you had it the other way around, you could do a whole lot of work without those powers in place, and how would you prioritise that work?

The bill brings forward 11 provisions—I have just counted. Several of those have provisions underneath them for bringing policy forward. There will be separate co-design processes for different elements. For example, under the single-use charges, the initial policy that we are looking to bring forward is a charge for single-use cups. The process for developing that with businesses, householders and local authorities is separate from the process for developing a common code of practice for local authorities and waste, for example. That would be separate from developing targets or, indeed, from developing the reporting for waste and so on.

The bill has many provisions. There will not be a single co-design process. As we bring forward each of the policies under the bill, each will have its own timescale. I believe that those will be enumerated in more detail in the route map. Maybe one of my colleagues can elaborate on that.