Chamber and committees

Yes.

I can give a high-level view. There will be variation. Some local authorities collect glass through kerbside collections. In some areas, such as mine, people do not get a kerbside collection of glass but go to whatever drop-off point the authority has put in place. There is value associated with the material that is recovered, although there may be local authorities that do not do any recycling of glass. The economics point will be variable around Scotland.

On the material difference, I will hand over to Haydn Thomas, but it is important to say that it was our intention to have glass in the scheme. An aspect that was convincing for me was the amount of broken glass that we have in our town centres and on our streets and our beaches. If there was a value associated with taking a glass bottle back, we would be less likely to see broken glass. I felt that the safety element was a strong case for the original regulations, as well as the economic argument.

The most important thing for us is the recycling rates. It will be economical. I will hand over to Haydn Thomas to take you through that, but the biggest saving relates to the materials—the recovery of the plastics and aluminium that will be associated with the deposit and return scheme. That represents a larger saving for society and indeed for our local authorities given their clean-up operations. Will we see a situation in a few years’ time where politicians will go to beach cleans and not see drinks containers any more? There will be a material impact on the amount of litter and the amount of clean-up that local authorities are charged with doing.

The powers will enable regulations requiring developers—

This is a direct response to developers’ lack of accountability to communities. By law, developers will have to engage with communities and we will set out in secondary legislation the parameters of what we demand that engagement to look like. It is a direct response to the lack of accountability that, rightly, these community groups have been putting to us for many years.

I will just briefly respond to Sarah Boyack. I appreciate her point. It is important that the public understands the changes that are taking place with regard to our joint efforts in progressing a polluter-pays principle and reducing the amount of associated packaging. I think that that is something that really exercises people.

The beauty of EPR is that consumers will not have to do anything. It is the producers that will need to act, and we hope that they will reduce the amount of packaging. Local authorities will get money for dealing with the packaging as well.

This is one of those instruments in which we are not necessarily asking for any behavioural change from consumers, but they will, I hope, see a big impact with regard to what they buy for their households. We all go into schools in our constituencies. Young people, who are concerned about litter, climate change and our carbon footprint, regularly bring up with me the amount of packaging on products that they and their families buy in shops. I am hopeful that this instrument will lead to a real change in that over the years to come.

I will hand over to one of my officials, Haydn Thomas, in a minute, as he has been in the weeds of all this. Obviously, we have been having a great deal of discussion with stakeholders on all of this. When it comes to signing up to the principles of these regulations, we have been having a continuing dialogue with producers and, indeed, vendors.

One of the things that the smaller producers were very keen to see was that there was no mandatory take-back system. To my knowledge, there is no other scheme in operation that has such a system; in fact, I remember that, when the regulations for the original DRS were being taken through the Scottish Parliament, microbreweries and so on expressed concerns in that respect, as such a move would have put an overhead cost on them that they were not really able to meet. Because it is now voluntary, I think that we have bottomed out a lot of those concerns.

It is fair to say that the Scottish Grocers Federation, which I met last week to discuss the issue, still has some questions about what the scheme administrator will do about handling fees. We have made it absolutely clear that we want handling fees associated with DRS to be proportionate, and we have discussed the issue with and had that assurance from the UK Government. However, the Scottish Grocers Federation is asking for more assurances from the scheme administrator, which, once in place, will obviously be able to answer quite a lot of the concerns. Of course, its board members will represent a great many of the stakeholders involved.

I will hand over to Haydn Thomas, who will be able to detail the discussions that we have been having with stakeholders over the past year or so.

It might also be helpful to outline what is required of the scheme administrator with regard to consulting and working with affected stakeholders. The draft designation order requires the scheme administrator to consult representatives of producers, retailers and wholesalers, including small retailers, in making certain decisions. The scheme administrator, therefore, has the duty to consult to ensure that, as it rolls out the scheme, it takes all views into account and works with producers and vendors to make the scheme efficient and ensure that it does not have any unintended consequences for any of them.

We have been engaging with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities on this, and indeed did so ahead of signing up to the principles in, I think, April last year, just before the general election. Before we sign up to anything that would have an impact on waste recovery, we will consult with COSLA. We are doing so regularly, and, as I have said, we did so right up until the general principles were agreed and then beyond.

The scheme administrator would decide that.

The scheme administrator will bottom all that out. That is for it to decide.