Chamber and committees

I understand that in broad terms, but we are talking about a bill that is about regulating how those products are packaged and the information that is presented to consumers or purchasers, because quite often, those sorts of products will be commercial. In an earlier answer, you stated a concern about divergence on that point from EU requirements, and we can see that we would not want to have fundamentally different packaging with different measures that gets in the way of selling products into those markets. If that is true for European markets, is that not also true for wider UK markets?

Are the points that you raised on the concerns about divergence from the EU not equally applicable to divergence from UK standards? Is that not where the balance that the UK Government and the Scottish Government are seeking to address lies? Is there not a common thread between your concerns about EU divergence and perhaps some of the UK Government’s concerns about internal market divergence?

Thank you, that is really useful clarification. Is there a missed opportunity here to fine tune some of the powerful levers, as you described them, that we already have? To give context to that, I was involved in an attempted community asset transfer that failed, largely because the public body that the community was seeking to transfer from did not disclose until the last moment that there was more than one title involved. That is, they were not candid and they certainly did not facilitate or make it easy for the community. It strikes me that if with greater degrees of candour and facilitation from public bodies to do that sort of thing, the bill could have been an opportunity to tweak, polish, amend and improve what is already there. Is that a fair observation?

On a similar note, I will sidestep some of the points around aggregation, because I know that Lorna Slater would like to raise those. Instead, I will zero in on the things that are Scottish Government dependencies and drill into a little bit more detail there.

Policies on waste projects and the requirement to increase plastic collection, separation and aggregation clearly fall within the purview of the Circular Economy (Scotland) Act 2024. I would like to understand that situation in a little more detail. What level of resource is looking at those issues? When do you expect that work to conclude? What do you expect the outcomes to be? Will they involve regulations being made under the 2024 act? Will further primary legislation be required? When might we expect clarity about those outcomes and what the Scottish Government needs to do?

Clearly, if you are going to do work in those areas, you need a secure supply chain. However, no investor is going to come in if they do not know whether they are going to get the feedstocks to do the stuff that they want to do.

Would there not need to be such changes, though? One of the things that occurs to me on that, especially with regard to separation and aggregation, is that, during the passage of the 2024 act, there was a lot of discussion about whether we were taking the right route compared with Wales, for example, where there is standardised collection, which increases the level of collection and potentially allows you to do other things. It strikes me that, if every local authority is doing its own thing, that makes it harder to achieve what you want to achieve. Presumably, an investor will want a very particular kind of plastic, so you cannot just throw a plastic bag in with a plastic bottle—I am making this up, but I am guessing that that is the sort of thing that is important. Making sure that a facility gets absolutely the right kind of feedstock is going to be critically important, and there will probably need to be a degree of standardisation in order to deliver that. Surely that requires regulation. Did we miss an opportunity in that regard during the passage of the 2024 act?

I am wondering whether you would be able to quantify that. I am not asking for the information right now—you may want to provide it in writing. I want to know what the current commitment is to explore funding as well as the number of full-time equivalent jobs, and what has happened in the past with the FTE commitment in relation to the projects that you have set out, as well as the quantum of funding. It would be useful to have that information as context for the committee.

Some of the things that I want to ask about have been touched on, but I would like to go into a bit more detail. A broad range of things needs to be done in relation to the project willow opportunities, some of which are complicated and some of which are quite prosaic—some of it boils down to rubbish. With plastics collection, you need to make sure that the materials are disaggregated. With something as complicated as biorefining, it is important to make sure that you have secure feedstocks.

Some of that will come down to things that the Scottish Government will need to do in relation to regulating and co-ordinating. I therefore ask the cabinet secretary to summarise what the Scottish Government needs to do and to set out what work is currently under way. In relation to project willow, it is clear that feasibility studies in all the areas need to be concluded by 2026 if we are to stay on track. Will the cabinet secretary outline her understanding of the Scottish Government dependencies, the work that needs to be done and the work that is under way so that we get to the point at which those feasibility studies can be concluded?

We seem to have some interference on the audio.

What additional powers, abilities or capacities will the legislation give you that you do not currently have, and what will you have to do that you do not currently do, not including reports that you will have to produce or meetings that you will have to go to? What outcomes will you have to deliver that you do not currently deliver?

You are saying that you are already carrying out the work and you probably already have the plans, but you might just have to retitle them. Is that what you are saying?

Forgive me, but I am asking the current minister.