Chamber and committees

Thank you. I appreciate the sensitivity, and it is good to have that on the record.

In a similar vein, I welcome the survivors forum that has been established to engage with all the applicants in order to gather their feedback. Is there flexibility to ensure that that feedback can be considered quickly enough in order to enable real, practical improvements to be made to the process where that would be helpful?

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My vote has not registered. I would have voted no.

It is a privilege to lead tonight’s debate on circular fashion, and I thank Tony, Michael and Hayley from Advanced Clothing Solutions, who are in the public gallery, for inspiring it. I am also grateful to members on all sides of the chamber for supporting my motion and for staying late on this dark winter night instead of rushing home to get their slippers on.

Circular fashion is expanding rapidly, offering Scotland opportunities to further strengthen our environmental and social justice credentials and sitting neatly with our global leadership on net zero and climate justice. However, I start with the problem: we are addicted to fashion. Across the United Kingdom, we buy more clothes per person than any other country in Europe, and consumers now buy 60 per cent more garments than they did 15 years ago.

Fashion makes up 10 per cent of humanity’s carbon emissions, which is more than aviation and shipping combined. In the UK, a massive 80 per cent of textiles end up in landfill, with the average person throwing away 3.1 kilos of textiles each year; that is enough to fill a small suitcase.

The use of chemicals in clothes production raises serious health concerns for workers and consumers, and 35 per cent of microplastics in the world’s oceans come from synthetic textiles. At the same time, textile workers, who are primarily women in developing countries, are often paid derisory wages and forced to work long hours in appalling conditions in a way that shows complete disregard for human rights.

Closer to home, the uncomfortable truths that have been uncovered in the fashion industry in Leicester were right on our doorstep just a short time ago. The fact is that 98 per cent of fashion brands do not pay their workers a liveable wage, and yet, as a society, we still blindly consume the products of that labour. Things cannot go on as they are. We need to completely rethink our relationship with fashion and abandon the current take, make, waste model of production and consumption that relies on the exploitation of people and planet.

Circular fashion offers an alternative to that broken system, whereby our clothing and personal belongings come from a more considered model in which the production of an item and the end of its life are equally important. Circularity begins with responsible manufacturing, whereby clothing is built to last and can be maintained and reused right through to the end of its life, when it is then recycled.

Circular fashion is not new: in Scotland, we have been renting and reusing clothing for as long as I can remember. Hiring kilts and wedding attire is common, and those items are made with durability and reuse in mind. Personally, I have never quite managed to move on from the charity shopping of my student days—there is something exciting about those pre-loved vintage bargains that I just cannot resist. However, if we want to move circular fashion from niche to normal, we need to establish infrastructures that help brands to shift away from the destructive linear model of production that currently exists and bring consumers into the loop.

ACS Clothing, which I mentioned earlier, is based in Holytown, in my constituency. It is Europe’s largest circular and sustainable fashion fulfilment hub, which is something to be really proud of. Its online platform allows brands to dip their toe in circular fashion without huge outlays, and ACS back-end logistics take care of garment cleaning, rental, repair and resale in a socially just and carbon-neutral operation. ACS Clothing has received one of the highest B Corporation scores in the world, which demonstrates that circularity goes hand in hand with environmental and social performance.

In partnership with the University of the West of Scotland, the company has developed industry-leading oxygen compression technology that sanitises clothing, making it more clean and pristine than clothing from any shop shelf that can be found on the high street. Each manufacturing step, from developing environmentally innovative production processes to employing sustainable cleaning practices, carefully considers our planet. Amazingly, the technology can even clean personal protective equipment, making the unthinkable thinkable.

At ACS, respecting people goes hand in hand with respecting our planet. The company has been paying a real living wage for years, and it delivers modern and graduate apprenticeships and offers a range of placements in supportive employment opportunities, with wraparound care and a Scottish vocational qualifications centre on site.

The company’s diverse range of workers includes people with disabilities, refugees and those on placements through the Scottish Prison Service. Its business benefits people, and people benefit its business, rewarding it with loyalty, commitment and hard work.

Today, I am wearing a dress from Hirestreet—I am breathing in a bit—which is one of the many retailers that ACS Clothing enables in the rental market. It looks and feels new, and it arrived on my doorstep, so the process could not be easier. Reshaping the fashion industry and creating new possibilities is so important, but many fast-fashion retailers continue to ramp up production and employ greenwashing strategies to hide their supply chains from consumers. That will not change until we incentivise and regulate fashion brands and bring them with us on the journey to circularity. Until then, sustainable brands are mopping with the tap on. It is high time that we levelled the playing field to help sustainable fashion to compete against fast fashion, for the sake of our people and our planet.

For example, we already do not pay VAT on children’s clothes, because those are clearly not items to own for life, but what if we thought differently about all our clothing? From a policy perspective, the UK could follow Sweden’s lead, where VAT has been slashed to 0 per cent on repaired and reused items, offsetting the costs of transitioning to circular economy models and encouraging more businesses to enter the market.

Alongside incentives, we need tighter regulations and more transparency, including on labelling requirements for materials that are used, the environmental impact of production and the labour practices that are employed, in order to help consumers to make informed and ethical choices. We are falling behind the rest of the world by missing out on the new set of technical regulations that has recently been introduced in the European Union. That includes extended producer responsibility legislation, which means that the polluter takes responsibility for the products that they put on the market.

In the UK, producer responsibility schemes already apply to electrical goods, batteries, vehicles and packaging. In fashion, we could require brands and retailers to collect goods at the end of their life or outsource that process to someone else. That concept is exciting not only in terms of waste reduction, but because it creates a whole new manufacturing industry, which is currently still in its infancy. That in turn creates a massive opportunity for the Scottish economy. The demand for end-of-life recycling centres where items are broken back down into raw materials and brought back into the circular economy will only increase as we move away from the questionable practice of exporting and recycling to other continents.

However, although regulations can help to fund the necessary systems and infrastructure for collection and recirculation, more actions will be needed to avoid products being discarded in the first place. We should invest in education to bolster the connection between brands, communities and supply chains, and understand that we can, all together, meet the needs of local people and our environment.

Fashion is inherently about community and what we have in common, which is why we embrace the latest trends. Circular fashion harnesses that commonality: it champions the idea of sharing and reuse over ownership, and people and planet over profit. Circular fashion is our future—it has to be.

You have touched on this already this morning, cabinet secretary. Existing targets so often define our priorities and our focus is on what we are measuring. Are you reviewing current targets and considering alternative targets? Can you give a couple of examples of successes?

I warmly welcome today’s commitment to significantly increasing gigawatt outputs for onshore and offshore wind. Can the cabinet secretary confirm his continued commitment to maximising the potential of solar energy, and can he perhaps touch on some of the reasons why Scotland’s solar ambitions require further consultation at this time?

The member has mentioned democracy, mandates and the will of the people, and he has told us that the Scottish Government is out of touch. Does he really mean that the Scottish people are out of touch, because they are the ones who voted for a referendum?

What continuing discussions are we having with the UK Government about getting the support to children across the UK and encouraging it to follow Scotland’s lead?

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the Child Poverty Action Group report, “The Cost of a Child in Scotland in 2022—update”. (S6O-01724)

Sorry, Presiding Officer, I do not have anything here. There has been a bit of confusion with my papers. I apologise.

I am sorry. There has been a bit of confusion, as I did not have my question with me, but I have it now.