Chamber and committees

That is not what I said at all.

I do not know whether we have any comment on that.

Conversations on food waste are continuing as we work towards the target of a 33 per cent reduction by 2025. Action so far has included running a school food waste reduction pilot with Glasgow City Council and conducting food waste audits of more than 100 hospitality and food service sector businesses. NHS Scotland has also been working with Zero Waste Scotland to tackle food waste in healthcare settings. We have published our consultation on our route map for our ambitious waste and recycling targets, one of which relates to food waste prevention.

Food waste reduction is a global effort, and we are signatories to WRAP’s world-leading Courtauld commitment to reduce food waste. Through that forum, we engage with the UK’s biggest food and drink businesses and other devolved Administrations, and we have access to best practice, research and interventions.

A full review of progress against the commitments on food waste will be published this year. There has been a bit of a delay due to Covid. Since 2019, we have run two consumer and household-focused food waste reduction media campaigns, and we are providing £100,000 of funding support for FareShare’s surplus with purpose scheme, which follows on from £200,000 of funding in 2021-22. Scottish potato supplier Albert Bartlett recently announced that it has redistributed the equivalent of 5 million meals through its FareShare partnership, so that is a great success story.

Okay—I was taking some quick notes. I will go through the UN high seas treaty and the EU law aspects.

The Scottish Government welcomes the UN high seas treaty. A historic agreement has been reached after more than a decade of multilateral negotiations. We have been at the forefront of ensuring protection for the high seas throughout the UK’s membership of the OSPAR Commission—it is responsible for implementing the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic—which has been adopting a series of high-seas marine protected areas in the mid-Atlantic since 2010. Scotland has designated MPAs covering 37 per cent of our national waters, and 10 per cent of our waters will be highly protected marine areas by 2026.

We are already doing some excellent work in the marine space, and I absolutely welcome the work that is being done outside our territorial waters. As the treaty has just been agreed to, we have not yet incorporated it, but our strategy is still in draft, which gives us the opportunity to incorporate that new bit of work into our strategy.

We are very much working together. The biodiversity strategy covers many types of land use, including forestry and agriculture, so it is not just me contributing to or working on it; other ministers with relevant portfolios are contributing, too. Indeed, officials in that space, including those at Marine Scotland and NatureScot, are working with all of us together; they are not separated in that work. That is one of the nice things about having overlapping portfolios between me, Ms McAllan and Ms Gougeon: we are very much able to work together on these matters.

Sorry—I will write to the committee.

When does retail registration close?

They are not obliged to, but a cafe or a small bakery where customers might get a sandwich and a drink and leave the venue with them is obliged to. However, as I say, those venues are likely to have grounds for an exemption.

We have yet to see consumer patterns. Will people do as they do with bags since the 5p charge was brought in and just keep them in the back of the car and take them back with them when they do their shopping at the weekend? One concern that has been raised with me by small retailers is that people will take all their bottles back to the big shop so, as a result, small shops will get less footfall. We have yet to see exactly how that will work out and thereby to understand the volumes that businesses will get. Consumer behaviour is something that we will need to observe and adapt the system for.

However, I point out that the regulations contain a proportionality provision under which small and especially manual return points can refuse to take containers. If someone rocks up with a van full of cans to a small shop that does not have the space to take them, the shop can turn the person away; it is not obliged to take the cans.

We have had several gateway reviews of the project. One is under way this week, and we will receive the results from it imminently.

The gateway review teams usually speak with 12 to 15 interviewees, including relevant commercial and external stakeholders such as prime contractors and consultants—the people who are actually doing the work. They will give their assessment and then we will find out exactly how they think we are getting on.