Chamber and committees

The provision around littering from vehicles is a good example of tackling the type of culture that you are talking about. Research by, I think, Churchill Insurance shows that one in seven people admit to having littered from a vehicle. That is clearly a very high proportion of people. One of our challenges at the moment is that it is difficult to enforce provisions on littering from a vehicle, because the current legislation requires that you go after the vehicle owner. The bill proposes that we change that legislation to allow enforcement to be much more broad and effective. The intention is that that would act as a deterrent, because we know that, if people can be caught and get fined even a relatively small amount, it has a deterrent effect. All those things together, including better design and more effective enforcement, will help to move that dial along.

Yes, I will start, then hand over to colleagues for the details. With all enforcement provisions, there is always a discretionary element whereby the local authority can decide how much enforcement is appropriate for it. For example, in the household requirement space, we were looking at the contamination of recyclate. The bill provides local authorities with new tools, which they asked for, and new fixed-penalty notices to enable them to help people to comply with that so that recycling does not become contaminated. That is not only a source of revenue but a choice that they can make a business case for. If they are losing money because they have to sort contaminated recyclate or pay for it to go to incineration, they might choose to raise their enforcement costs. A lot of this gives the local authority discretion to choose how it wishes to do it. I will hand over to colleagues for the detail.

The costs are also subject to additional provisions being added over many years. For example, we discussed single-use vapes and how quickly that new product has grown in only the past couple of years. If those sorts of products were developed in the future, we would need to react to them. The bill would put in place the enabling powers to allow us to react to those kinds of products coming up in the future, but, of course, we cannot anticipate what they might be.

Correct.

As this is an enabling bill, it puts us in the position of being able to start that process.

That is a really good question, because a lot of the overall principle of moving to a circular economy is about the polluter-pays model. As previously discussed, a lot of the materials produced by companies have to be cleaned up at the expense of local authorities; that has to be handled, whether they send the materials to incineration or landfill or pick them off the street as litter. As we move to a polluter-pays model—for example, with extended producer responsibility, which is a UK-wide thing—businesses will need to pay into the extended producer responsibility model, so that we have the funding for local authorities to deal with it.

Applications to the recycling improvement fund are made by local authorities. A local authority develops an initiative—a proposal—that comes to the recycling improvement fund board, which established the fund. The board works with the local authority to establish whether the proposal will achieve the outcomes that we need—nationally, we need to hit our net zero targets—how feasible it is, the timescale and so on. Then, the board advises me on whether it feels that the application should be awarded.

The challenge with Glasgow is that, because it is our largest city, the impact of recycling in Scotland is largely affected by what we do there. Basically, if we get recycling in Glasgow right, we impact on our national targets, so it is really important that we get it right in Glasgow. We had discussions around the proportion of the recycling improvement fund going to Glasgow, because I wanted to understand exactly why it was worth doing; it is because it has that impact at national level. To meet our net zero targets, we have to make sure that money is being spent most effectively to reduce our emissions and increase our recycling, and that was the right place for the money to go to achieve that result.

I do not have a particular vision for that. It is for the SNIB to decide what it invests in.

This morning, I counted 11 different provisions in the bill. Many of those provisions will require co-design. I think that the member imagines that, if we were to do co-design on single-use cups and other products that we do not even know about yet in different industries in respect of reporting, we would then have primary legislation on each of those provisions—

I absolutely understand that businesses and local authorities need certainty. That is why we have committed to the co-design process. I cannot second-guess what the outcome of that process will be, but the policies will be developed over many months following the co-design process, after which they would have the opportunity to come through Parliament, whether that is through a Scottish statutory instrument affirmative procedure or negative procedure, so that they can be scrutinised. All the details for each specific policy introduced would be worked through and developed with councils, businesses and, indeed, householders so that there would be clarity for each policy as it comes through. We will definitely work with the councils to deliver those outcomes. This is not something that will be imposed centrally.

On enforcement costs, as we go through the financial memorandum in detail, we can look at which provisions allow councils to increase their fixed-penalty notices, for example, so that they are given more opportunities to balance their costs. However, all the enforcement costs for local authorities are at their discretion. Each will look at how much it wishes to spend on enforcement versus the benefits that it might receive from the enforcement. For example, the household requirements for waste are about contamination of the recycling stream. The powers in the bill are for the councils to use should they decide to do so. There is no requirement for councils to enforce in any particular way, but they may decide that their recyclate is becoming so contaminated that they are losing money because they are having to pay for it to be incinerated or to go to landfill, or they cannot sell it for its full value. In such cases, the amount of money that they are losing would make firmer enforcement more worth while, but that would be entirely a calculation for local authorities to make.