Chamber and committees

No. I think that we have covered it comprehensively.

I need a bit of clarification on your question. Enforcement officers will have the powers to go in and seize single-use vapes. What is the issue?

The new UK Government is now in place and I have written a letter asking for confirmation of the go-live date for the other three nations. I made the point that we do not want to diverge. There are very good reasons for us all going at once, including the obvious environmental reasons and some of the other issues that have been raised today.

I made the point that if there is a small gap we would still want to move at the same time as everyone else, but that a gap of years would be a completely different question. I am hopeful that such a gap will not happen. We have had a general election, there is a new Government and the Government machine has probably had to pause, which might have had an impact. I do not know about that because we have not had any confirmation.

We are ready to go. I have laid the instrument. We all agreed the date of 1 April 2025 and we need to get ready. If other Parliaments and Governments are not in that space and there is a time lag, we will look at our go-live date. Why would we go live two months before the rest of the UK? That would not make sense. However, if the measure comes off the table—I do not think that it will—or the gap is years long, that would be a completely different question. If I was told that there would be such a gap, I would try to convince them that it cannot be delayed for years.

Yes.

Yes.

Local authorities will receive the full net costs of managing packaging through EPR, taking account of efficient and effective service provision. That might mean that, over time, the money that councils decide to spend on the waste management envelope will get taken over by the funding coming from EPR. As a result, it will come down to councils’ decisions about how they manage their funding.

I am not going to look into the future and say what the finance secretary of a future Government might do about council settlements—indeed, I do not think that you would expect me to do so—but the idea is that there will be additional money coming from EPR and then, as a result of councils’ spending decisions, they might be in a position to release money that they would otherwise have spent on waste management to spend on other areas. What that will mean for future council settlements is not something that I am able to answer here and now, because obviously that will be up to a future finance cabinet secretary to decide.

However, that is the mechanism that will be put in place. Essentially, EPR is all about producers having responsibility for waste management—in this instance, of packaging, although other regulations that I hope we will be able to agree to might come forward from the UK Government, extending EPR to other types of waste.

We need to be alive to any kind of modifications that there could be to things that are on the market. As I have said, the four nations have worked together to put together a definition that, we think, will avoid that kind of situation. However, there are, of course, some very clever people out there who might see a gap in the market, so we need to be alive to that as the regulations are implemented.

In its consultation, the UK Government included a proposal to introduce a duty on all vapes. I am trying to think whether that was a pre-general election commitment or a post-general election commitment. We are awaiting the publication of the report and, obviously, we are working with counterparts across the UK on what the next steps might be. Therefore, the introduction of a duty on all vapes is not off the table.

We are concentrating on bringing in the regulations on single-use vapes, but we are doing so with an eye to what might happen, which will inform what the UK Government does with regard to the imposition of a duty on rechargeable and reusable vapes. If what you and the convener are suggesting might happen does happen and there is innovation such that, in effect, reusable vapes end up costing the same as disposable ones, with the result that people, rather than recharging them and reusing them, do not value or look after them, that will inform the conversations that we have on the potential imposition of a duty on reusable vape mechanisms in the future.

As I mentioned, there is now the ability to issue fixed-penalty notices, which has been done in concert with SCOTSS in relation to the powers that trading standards officers need. Giving them that extra power was one of the reasons why we brought this in when we did, through the Circular Economy (Scotland) Act 2024. Perhaps my officials have more detail on the on-going discussion with SCOTSS.

No. If we were to put in place a requirement for local authorities to collect and recycle these types of disposable vapes, that would be the cost of it. They are extremely expensive to recycle because, as I say, they are not designed to be taken apart easily. In effect, you would have a person breaking them open and separating them into their component parts. By taking them out of the waste equation altogether, we are getting rid of that difficulty. Even if we were to recycle them, and even if we were to go down the route of saying that they have to be recycled in a certain way, the cost would be huge. As I mentioned, only 1 per cent of the ones that are brought back or put into recycling are recycled properly anyway, given the difficulty of recycling them. Most of them go into general waste or are thrown down in streets, into hedgerows or out of cars.