Chamber and committees

I was going to ask you about vehicle littering. I believe that the official figure for average costs to councils over three years is £68,000. I also believe that vehicle littering takes place every three seconds. Will that one person really make a difference? What about cameras and so on?

I am afraid that I remain sceptical about the £68,000 figure, but I will move on.

We talked about how recycling bin colour schemes have been more consistent across the country. In places such as Glasgow, there are a lot of other local authorities at a very close distance, so people may have family members who live across boundaries, in places where the colours of the bins are different. You suggested that consistency might be possible going forward, but we asked Mr Devine from Dundee City Council about that, and he said that the cost of changing colour schemes would be “considerable”, which sounded a little bit scary. If 31 councils have to change their colour schemes, that is going to prove very expensive.

Our paper sets out that the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee raised three points, one of which was that

“Regulation 2(b) of the instrument amends the amount specified for the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body, but it replaces the existing figure … with the same figure.”

The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee also stated:

“The Scottish Government advised that the insertion of an unchanged figure was unintentional, but that the figure remains correct.”

Will you explain what that means?

So it was the commentary that was the problem, more than the actual figure.

Does that mean that, instead of there being a specific Ukraine cost in future, a bit more will be spent, for example, on housing, schools and the NHS?

I think that £46 million was taken from the colleges and universities budget because of the teachers’ pay settlement. Is that a one-off, or will it have repercussions for the future?

Okay. Finally, on Barnett consequentials, the paper states:

“The Guide also reports an additional £20.2 million arising from a ‘Home Office comparability factor error’”.

Can you tell us what that was?

Okay. It probably ties in with what colleagues said earlier about what will come down the road.

I will move on to something else. In the section in the financial memorandum on restrictions on the disposal of unsold consumer goods, paragraph 12 talks about the minimum cost being £30,000 a year but the cost being £200,000 a year under a more proactive regulatory regime. Most of us would quite like a proactive regime in a number of areas, and we have just discussed that. Why does the financial memorandum include the minimum figure of £30,000 instead of even going part of the way to being proactive?

I am totally supportive of what you are trying to do. It is absolutely great. Do you know the costs in France? Did France have to put in money itself? Does this need to be front-loaded? Would you need to put in quite a lot of money and resource at the beginning to change the thinking of Amazon and individuals, and the costs would then reduce over time? Would higher up-front costs be needed?

Quite a lot of ground has been covered already, so I will start off by touching on some of that. Minister, you seem to suggest that it would be financially advantageous for councils to enforce the rules on recycling and encourage or educate people to get better at recycling and that that would cover their costs in some way. However, the reality on the ground is that that is not happening, certainly in parts of Glasgow. I live in the greater Easterhouse area, and I see a mixture of issues. Some people do not know what they should put in the bins. They put plastic bags in the blue bins, which, I understand, should not happen. In tenements, we have only a green bin and a blue bin, so they put plastic, cans and paper in the blue bin, and the green bin is for everything else—garden waste and food waste. Glass also goes in the green bin, because most people do not have a car to take it to a recycling centre. In all my experience, I have never seen a leaflet about how to recycle better or had someone come to the door to try to educate me or encourage me to do so. I know that that is happening elsewhere: we heard that West Lothian Council is doing that, with people going round the doors. Maybe it happens in Glasgow when I am here, but I have certainly not seen it happening—maybe they do it on Tuesdays.

Glasgow City Council is very tight for money, so if it thought that it could make money out of encouraging people to recycle better, it would do so. Clearly, it is going to cost that council a lot more money to get the recycling rates up. Do you at least accept that it is not cost neutral?