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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.

All of that would require development. The costs that are outlined with regard to the bill include those relating to the development of those policies and the engagement that is required for them, as well as enforcement costs down the line. The framework bill sets things in place so that we can develop processes for the next time a product like a single-use vape is produced.

There is no day on which this will be finished; we will always be on the journey towards a circular economy. The bill takes us to the next step by creating the enabling powers. The financial memorandum shows the funding for the next step in relation to the horizon that we can see. For every step after that, as each regulation is brought to the Parliament, there will be impact assessments and the details will be scrutinised.

Absolutely. Extended producer responsibility for packaging, which, I am afraid, does not roll beautifully off the tongue, is a groundbreaking provision that is being brought in, as you correctly said, at UK level. It is a polluter-pays scheme. The idea, at the simplest level, is that all producers of packaging will pay fees to a UK-wide scheme administrator, which will take those fees and allocate them to local authorities all over the UK so that they can run efficient and effective household packaging and collection services.

Those matters are still very much under discussion, and I understand that the discussions are going well. I have been pushing for the process of allocation to be transparent and to take into account the geographic nature of regions—I am thinking, for example, of the additional challenges that lower-density population regions such as islands and rural areas face—so that each council gets a fair allocation. My understanding of the process so far is that that has been accepted by the four nations and that the allocation of the funding will go directly from the scheme administrator to local authorities. That is my understanding of the state of those discussions. I am very keen that that is additional money, and I have discussed that in the conversations that I have had with my ministerial counterparts in the UK and the other nations. If we are asking councils to do more, they need that additionality so that they can implement the scheme.