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It is common for both local shops and the big shops to take returns, so that consumers can decide where they want to make returns.

I do not agree with the member’s representation that small businesses will be disproportionately impacted. The measures that we have put in place have been designed to support small producers in particular. I can go through them again. One of the measures that we have put in place to support small producers is proportionate producer fees, so that small producers will pay the same as large producers, proportionally, because the fee is charged per container. There are, similarly, cash flow measures specifically to help small producers.

When it comes to our small retailers, the fees that will be paid for operating manual return points are the highest in the world for small retailers: our small retailers who operate manual return points will be better off than their compatriots around the world. With our scheme, we are doing more for small businesses than other highly successful schemes around the world are doing. Therefore, I do not agree at all with the member’s representation of the scheme.

Absolutely. The scheme, as it will look on 16 August, will probably look quite different 18 months down the line. When these sorts of schemes launch, there is a first stage—what we call the cut-over period—that is always challenging. In this case, most of what you have in your house, most of the litter in the streets and so on will not at that point be scheme articles. If, after 16 August, you do your citizen’s duty by picking up a can at the side of the road and taking it to a return point, the can will be rejected. It will not be a scheme article because it was sold before the date.

During the cut-over period, some scheme articles will be in circulation; however, quite a lot of material that is not scheme articles will be in circulation, too, and it will take a number of weeks for scheme articles to become predominant. A big part of what we have to manage, therefore, is the ramp-up into the scheme. There are tried and tested ways of doing that, and there are learnings that we can take from other countries. It will be a challenging period, and our communications to consumers must be clear so that customers understand why the bottle that they bought on 17 August can be returned whereas the one that they bought on 15 August cannot.

That is definitely challenging for us to manage, because we all want people’s first experience of the scheme to be a positive one. We want them to have their bottle accepted, to get their 20p back and to spend that on their shopping or whatever they wish. The cut-over period will be absolutely critical.

Moreover, as those materials gradually ramp up, we will be able to see consumer behaviour. It goes back to the convener’s earlier point: does the consumer tend to bring things back to the big shops, or do they use a mix of small and large shops? How does it work? Biffa and Circularity Scotland will have to be very reactive and dynamic, and we will be working with them on processes and mechanisms that will allow them to deal with any small business that says, “Oh my goodness—my bins are full! Biffa, come and get them,” and to be able to update things so that people can say, “Do you know what? I thought that we were going to get 10,000 items a week back, but we’re getting only 3,000. We need to adjust our schedule.”

There will have to be a period of adjustment and optimisation as the scheme settles in, and, as a result, I would expect what you have suggested to be the case. I expect that communities will tell us, “We have no return point that’s convenient for us. How can we get things collected?” We will have to be dynamic in addressing those sorts of issues. It is my intention, therefore, to facilitate some sort of reaction force so that people and businesses know whom to call when their bins are overflowing or they cannot return things and so that there is a process by which people can find out how to get their 20p back.

The scheme will ramp up and adapt to things over the first year. In fact, the recycling targets that we have set will come into effect after a year—or perhaps two years; I will see whether that needs to be corrected—in recognition of the fact that we will not have 90 per cent recycling on day 1. As the scheme beds in, we will work towards that 90 per cent recycling target.

We already know that 95 per cent of materials, by volume, are signed up to the scheme. The way to counteract any risk is to bring all producers online so that they can continue to sell in Scotland. All the measures that we are using to support producers to sign up to the scheme, including cash-flow measures, labelling measures and any further measures that we agree with them, are meant to do exactly that—to allow that variety of producers to continue to sell in Scotland.

The labelling measure is of particular interest when it comes to the importation of wines. It was a specific ask from our wine importers, because you can imagine the difficulty if they were importing only 500 bottles of wine from a winery in France. They would not want to have to put a Scottish label on that number of bottles, which is quite reasonable. That is exactly the kind of situation for which the labelling measure was designed. Our estimate is that about 15,000 products will use the sticky label solution.

It is absolutely not the vision that our products will be restricted. We are working to continue to have a wide variety of products on the market.

That is an interesting question. When I was in Montreal speaking with people from other subnational Governments around the world, it was interesting to see how different the challenge in Scotland is from the challenge in large countries in South America or parts of Canada. For those places, to meet the 30 by 30 target, they can more or less draw a line on a map and say, “Right! That is our 30 per cent—we’re done. No people or only people who live traditional indigenous lifestyles live in this space.” That makes their job relatively easy.

We have a different challenge. All our managed landscapes in Scotland are inhabited, so we cannot and would not be able to remove or separate people from the land in that way. Our challenge is therefore interesting. We need to find a way of carrying out all our current economic activities, such as farming, fishing and activities in our towns and national parks, but within a framework that allows us to be nature positive, and allows nature regeneration. If we can do that, we will set a model for the whole world, because we will show how people and nature can live side by side and thrive.

That is why land reform and agricultural schemes, for example, all need to be looked at within a framework of restoring biodiversity, replacing what is lost and making sure that we create abundant biodiversity. It is an interesting challenge and one that is unique to Europe and to Scotland, where we have such highly managed landscapes, but it is an exciting one.

I hope that our national parks can play a particular role in all this. Because of their unique position in the Scottish landscape and because they contain commercial forestry and farming, they can provide places where we can pilot ideas about humans and nature living alongside one another. Other countries do not have those kinds of activities in their national parks. We have an interesting challenge ahead of us and it is quite unique, because it means that we can show the world how people and nature can live together.

Overall, there is clear alignment between the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework and our draft Scottish biodiversity strategy, including the 30 by 30 protections. Our analysis is that the strategy either already matches or exceeds the ambition in the global framework.

The Scottish biodiversity strategy has more ambition than the global biodiversity framework, because the completion date is 2030 for our targets and 2045 for delivery of the vision, compared with 2050 with the global framework.

The goals and targets in the global biodiversity framework are global goals and not all of them can be directly translated to a national context. It is the job of our biodiversity strategy and delivery plan to set out what we need to do in Scotland to contribute to meeting the global goals. We will publish the comparison between our goals and the global goals in the final document.

Liam Kerr is maybe looking at this using a different framework to the one that I am looking at it in. The actions that we are taking now are well-evidenced actions. We know, for example, that restoration of peatland has excellent results for biodiversity as well as for carbon sequestration.

All the actions that we are taking are evidenced, and things such as the nature restoration fund are going towards very practical actions, including restoring rivers, restoring wetlands and managing rhododendron in the rainforest. We know that the actions that we are taking are effective. What we need to do with the strategy is join it up and mainstream it across agriculture and all the different sectors. Of course, that takes time and requires stakeholder engagement so that we make sure that we get the pieces right and bring everybody along with us on the journey.

However, that does not mean that we have not got started or that we have delayed taking action, and it does not mean that we are not using evidence to support the actions that we are deciding to take.

There are quite a lot of challenges involved. Some of it is about helping people to understand what their options are, because there may be an attitude of, “This is how I’ve always managed my land. I don’t want to change.” That is fine, but it is also about saying, “Here’s what’s available to you if you want to manage your land differently.”

The head of the Association of Deer Management Groups told me that the way that things are set up means that he cannot have fewer than 12,000 sheep and can have no more than 1,400 deer. He said that that does not make sense to him and that it is not necessarily how he would like to manage his land but that the current system means that that is how he needs to manage his land. Part of it is about putting different tools in place so that land managers like him do not feel obliged to overstock with sheep, for example, but are able to have more of a mosaic even on their own land.

That project is a partnership between NatureScot and Hampden & Co, and the Scottish Government is not directly involved in it, so I do not have the information on when the details around that project might be published. That is an on-going partnership, so we can see how that works.

Absolutely.