Seòmar agus comataidhean

No, I am content with the financial memorandum that has been presented. I believe that the context of the question from Michelle Thomson was that, if there were more detail down the line as we develop the policy, I would be happy to come back to the committee. Our information is the best that we have at this time. I am at the committee’s disposal, should it wish me to come back if the situation changes and an update is required, but this is the best information that is available and appropriate to the bill.

The difference is that this is a strategic bill, where we are setting out our strategic intentions to reduce waste, to improve opportunities in recycling, and to be able to create jobs in that circular economy. That is absolutely our strategic intention, and the bill is strategic. The specific pieces of policy implementation will be part of the secondary legislation and, indeed, work on our route map and so forth as we go forward. The details of specific provisions—for example, the reporting of waste from a specific industry, such as the cosmetics industry—will be developed with that industry. That is exactly the point. At this point, this is the strategic level and, therefore, we are putting in strategic level implications.

Over the summer, we have been working with officials to come up with sensible conditions for interoperability, such as how we will agree on how we will set the deposit and on how exclusions will work. That has been discussed among officials, and it is now for DEFRA and the UK Government to sign that off, to agree on what the conditions will be and to set that out in its regulations.

We are waiting on DEFRA’s timescale; I do not have a timescale for that. I do not know whether my officials have more of an update.

That is a question for DEFRA. It is for DEFRA to say how it wants to implement the scheme and how it intends that scheme to operate in the UK.

I am sorry; I was distracted. Could you repeat the question?

If we had been able to run a scheme, Circularity Scotland would have been able to operate it. As you rightly point out, Circularity Scotland was willing to operate a scheme without glass, but none of us can operate a deposit return scheme if we do not know what the level of the deposit will be, so we were unable to proceed.

That is correct.

The challenge that I have there is that, in this case, the common framework failed to do its job. We engaged from 2021 with the UK Government on the deposit return scheme legislation. We went through every step of that common framework. The common frameworks are the mechanisms by which the UK and the devolved Governments work together to come to agreement. Our officials had worked together. I met my UK Government DEFRA counterparts monthly, and we had worked through the framework all the way through. We had done everything that we needed to do. We understood that we would secure the full exclusion from the 2020 act because we had done everything that we needed to do in order to secure it.

We did not get the exclusion that we expected to get as a result of the common framework process, nor did we get the partial and temporary exclusion that we did get in a timely manner. That came very late in the day, at the end of May, but we had been working with UK Government on the scheme for years.

If UK Government ministers are not following the process of the common framework or agreeing to abide by the common framework, and can, in fact, change their mind at the 11th hour on a whim, we have a challenge. The other point is that the UK Government has not provided any evidence for the change. The UK Government did not do impact assessments on the change and, as far as I am aware, it has not even written out to say why it made this change. If the UK Government can proceed in that way, the common frameworks are clearly not working.

I am almost certain that the UK Government would not take it well if I stepped away from the common frameworks process and changed my mind at the last minute about something that had previously been agreed. I feel that that would go down badly.

No, thank you, convener.

Motion agreed to.

As we said at the time, it is possible to operate a deposit return scheme in Scotland with cans and plastic bottles, but it seems absurd not to include glass, because the environmental and business case supports its inclusion. It would have been possible to run a scheme without glass, but it would not have been as good. However, as we said at the time, any deposit return scheme is better than none.

Glass was not the only reason why we had to halt our scheme. There were two further issues. They relate to the other conditions that were laid out in the partial and temporary exclusion to the 2020 act, which were about labelling and the deposit level. As you know, businesses require certainty to be able to deliver something this complicated. If we were not even able to say what the deposit level or the labelling requirements would be—from working with businesses, especially small businesses, on Scotland’s DRS, we know that it requires up to a year, and in some cases longer, to change labelling—they simply would not have been able to deliver a deposit return scheme. Businesses could not deliver the DRS without knowing those things, and we could not know those things because the UK Government has not made a decision on them and has not passed regulations setting out what it intends to do. That meant that we were left with no option.

However, the convener is correct that it is possible to run deposit return schemes without glass.