Chamber and committees

Arrangements between the Scottish National Investment Bank and CSL are a private matter between those two organisations and I am not involved in that.

I am interested in the convener’s saying that there is a “chance” that CSL might be needed in 2025. The UK Government has committed to launching a scheme in 2025 and we very much support that stated ambition. The smoothest path to a successful UK launch is to keep the expertise that CSL has created. It is for industry to decide whether its smoothest path is to keep CSL going until the 2025 launch or to take another route.

All the schemes in the UK will require scheme administrator organisations and the UK Government will ask industry to put together what it refers to as a deposit management organisation. We call it a scheme administrator. The UK Government has said that its timeline for putting in place its DMO is 2024. One can imagine a scenario where CSL and its producers work together using their expertise and investment to apply to be the DMO for the whole of the UK. That is one route forward, but it is for industry to decide how it might want to take that forward.

That is not my position. That is not what I said. I said that CSL has its existing funding, but to go forward it needs to work out what path it is going to take. There are various paths available, but that is for CSL to work out with its producers, who are its source of funding.

Industry will need to decide how it is to comply with regulations. We will lodge amendment regulations saying that the scheme will go live in October 2025 in line with the UK scheme. Industry has to decide how to comply with those regulations. To do that, it has created CSL, so it now needs to decide whether it will keep CSL going in order to comply, or take a different route, such as creating a different body. That is for industry to decide. We as the Parliament make the regulations and industry has to comply with them. The DMOs and scheme administrators are the tools by which industry complies with our regulations.

Certainly, our impact assessment of the deposit return scheme shows that, overwhelmingly, councils will benefit from such a scheme. Overall, it will reduce their costs, particularly for handling litter. I am happy for any of my officials to come in on the benefit to local authorities of the deposit return scheme.

The final point about glass is that it provides a level playing field so that all drinks producers can be involved in the scheme. If the producers that primarily use glass are removed, there is a bias or tilt in the market for businesses that primarily use cans or plastic bottles. Applying the scheme to all materials that are used for drinks containers makes for a fairer playing field.

In my previous answer, I went into some detail about how removing glass from deposit return schemes reduces the environmental and littering benefits. As David McPhee said, we know from the UK Government’s own analysis that including glass in the scheme would increase its environmental and economic benefits by 64 per cent, which is a substantial increase.

It is also, of course, normal to include glass in deposit return schemes. Of the 51 territories and countries that are operating deposit return schemes, 45 include glass. I think it was WWF that asked on what planet does a bottle return scheme not include glass bottles? It is a commonsense inclusion.

My officials might have something to add on the technical details about the benefits of including glass.

There are two elements that I would like to include in response to that question. One is that I have a meeting arranged tomorrow with the UK Minister for Environmental Quality and Resilience, Rebecca Pow, to have exactly that discussion about how the UK would like to work with us going forward. Our scheme in Scotland is well advanced. We have passed our regulations and amended them in line with industry, including the amendments that are being considered by the committee today. We know that we have a coherent scheme on the books that is workable by industry and we have been a significant way down the path towards delivering it.

The question for the UK is what interoperability looks like to it. Does it look like the UK Government going away and inventing something entirely different that it imposes on us, or will it take on board the learning that we have done in Scotland, the many years of work that we have done with industry and the expertise that Circularity Scotland Ltd has developed? CSL has within it not only the expertise on how the policies are to be implemented, but the industry connections, and it was well on the way to delivering the information technology systems and infrastructure that are needed.

The matter is with the UK Government and our discussions are to understand how to carry it forward. However, I have a substantial question about how we work with the UK Government, given that we no longer have the common frameworks. The common frameworks are the tool by which we work with the UK Government, but those have, in effect, been smashed up by its 11th-hour intervention. Euan Page is our expert on the frameworks. Perhaps he can add some detail on how we might move forward, given that we do not have the common frameworks any more.

The common frameworks exist as published documents about how we are supposed to work together, but because they have not been followed, it is not clear to me how we move forward. As we have said many times in the chamber and as we have published online, the Scottish Government followed the common framework process all the way through, but that did not result in the exclusion from the internal market act that we needed in order to launch our scheme.

It is not clear to me how we move forward, if that common frameworks process can be disregarded without proportionate analysis and impact assessment by the UK Government at a very late stage, after years of working together. It is unclear to me how we progress, but I will discuss the matter with Minister Pow tomorrow and I also intend to raise it at our intergovernmental meeting in September, to understand how the UK Government intends to work with us going forward, if it does not intend to adhere to those common frameworks.