Seòmar agus comataidhean

The timescale is that the bill would have to be done and dusted by November?

That is useful.

The Scottish Government still likes to keep pace with European regulations, so I wanted to ask about one that I have been following for a while now, which is regulation EU 2023/1804 on the deployment of alternative fuels infrastructure. I am not expecting you to be all over the detail of that, but it is now in place and it does a number of things. You have already been asked about EV charging. By the end of December 2025, there should be one recharging pool at least every 60 kilometres, or 37 miles, on the main road network in the EU.

The regulation also does a number of other things—I am sure that you can look it up afterwards—such as in relation to hydrogen infrastructure for road vehicles, liquefied methane for road transport, electricity supply in ports, electricity for aircraft, railway infrastructure to include hydrogen and battery power, and easy payment for EV charging.

As I say, I am not expecting you to know all this. I do not expect you to have the regulation in front of you, but do you have the ambition to mirror that regulation here in Scotland?

It is a regulation.

I am with you, convener. I think that we can accept the principle, but it is not really good enough for the minister to come with an amendment that she does not know the cost of. First, she said that she did not know the cost of it, and then she said that it was zero cost. It is a bit confusing. Every bill has a financial memorandum, so you need to know the cost of things. I think that you need to know the cost of the amendment. That is pretty basic stuff when we come to legislating. I imagine that the committee will probably vote for the amendment if it comes to a vote, but process-wise, that is not the way it should be done.

If any other member had lodged an uncosted amendment, the minister would be criticising them—rightly so—for bringing forward uncosted amendments. She would probably have said, “I cannot support the amendment at this stage because we do not know the cost.” I will throw that back at the minister. She has come here with something that is uncosted, and then, when a piece of paper was passed to her by an official, she suddenly says that there is no cost. Which is it, and where is the evidence?

I, too, have been listening very carefully to what you have been saying, convener, and it must strike a chord with probably every single member here. I have already mentioned litter picking during the course of stage 2. I am sure that most of us will have picked litter, and I recall how, when I was doing so in a wooded area next to the East Kilbride expressway, which is a dual carriageway, I saw litter everywhere. It had to have been thrown from vehicles. Of course, some of it had not been—there were sofas deep in the woods, for example—but a lot of it must have been from vehicles and it was inaccessible to the council. You have said, convener, that somebody has got to come and clear the rubbish up; sometimes that somebody is just a volunteer, not the council, and sometimes the litter, particularly bottles, can be left for years, unless somebody comes along and picks it up.

I do not have a vote on this, but if I had, I would be strongly supporting the amendments for the reasons outlined.

It is a transport issue, but it is also an energy one—it involves the kind of energy that we use. I would like to see this provision apply across the UK, because if we are going to encourage people to use electric vehicles, we need more EV charging stations, which this regulation will make happen.

An example of where we are failing, which I think that the convener is well aware of, is the fact that, on the A9, we have not even designed in a service station, let alone an EV charging station. It seems to me that, if we want to mirror the EU, we need to be looking at exactly this kind of thing.

I wonder whether the report could set out what is being recycled now and what is not. Mr Golden and I are aware that certain products that people put in their recycling bins are not actually getting recycled. I wonder whether the report could go into that level of detail. If it did, it would be of great interest to the public and it would help us to address the gaps.

It is still morning, so good morning, cabinet secretary. Just to get it clear in my head, I go back to the very start, where we were talking about the climate change bill and the climate change plan. Currently, legally, you have to produce a climate change plan by November, but you want to delay that and introduce a climate change bill. Am I right in thinking that, in order for it to be legal for you not to have a climate change plan by November, you would need to have a climate change bill passed before that?

Perhaps you could write to the committee on the detail of the regulation. I will leave it there, convener.

Absolutely.

If I pop into a coffee shop to ask for an americano and maybe a sandwich, both are likely to come in containers that I might just throw away. Therefore, they would be single-use items. Of course, they might be compostable—and, if the committee accepts amendment 26, such provisions would not apply to them. However, they are likely to be covered by section 9. The question, then, is this: who pays the charge? Is it the producer of the containers that have been supplied to the coffee shop? They could be anywhere in the world. Is it the coffee shop itself? Is it me—the consumer? Again, businesses need to know and consumers, in particular, need to know if they are going to be hit with a sarnie-and-coffee tax.

The minister might well say that the matter is already covered in the bill, but let us look at the wording. The bill says:

“The regulations may in particular include provision about—

(a) the circumstances in which the requirement applies,”

and

“(b) the suppliers to whom the requirement applies”.

It says that it “may ... include provision”, but that also means that it may not. My view is that the regulations should include such provision, so my amendment 27 contains the word “must”, which provides a far stronger legal position.

I turn to amendment 29—I should say that we are still on section 9. Such charges could have a major impact on small businesses and microbusinesses. They will, if anything, be an administrative burden. Businesses are already up against it and the charges could be just the thing that tips some over the edge. Therefore, the amendment would allow for payment of grants and loans to help such businesses to deal with the impact. It does not say that that “must” happen; instead, it says that it “may”, which might suggest that I have gone a bit soft. To that extent, it would allow ministers to budget.

Of course, a better solution would be to get rid of section 9 altogether. It is too onerous, and we would be better off without it.

I am not the only one who has concerns about charges for single-use items. The committee’s report highlighted concerns from business and other stakeholders about the potential impact of these charges, and it recommended that this must

“go hand-in-hand with other measures to promote reusable alternatives as a social norm and a positive choice.”

The committee also recommended

“a strategic approach to the use of the powers in Section 9”,

and suggested that initial regulations on charges for single-use items should be subject to super-affirmative procedure. That is a very good idea indeed.

The minister told the committee that regulating single-use items required

“using the right tool for the right job.”—[Official Report, Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, 5 December 2023; c 37.]

I am not convinced that section 9 is the right tool, or that charging for the supply of single-use items is the right job. What about the unintended consequences of the charges for those who rely on single-use products? Local retailers and hospitality venues will have to pick up the additional administrative and logistical slack that that would create.

UK Hospitality Scotland told the committee—I am nearly at the end, convener—that

“Adding a cost to the price of purchasing single-use items will penalise Scottish businesses and consumers. For example”—

it said—

“it is envisaged that a charge of 20p could be applied to single-use cups. This may well result in lost business for high street premises as customers choose not to make a purchase and pay the extra. Given”—

it went on—that

“we are in a cost of living crisis anything that could dent consumer confidence and spend is unwelcome, further jeopardising business and jobs.”

Do we really want to jeopardise businesses by placing more burdens on them from additional charging? My other amendments have suggested some ways in which to make the regulations less burdensome, but it might well prove to be better just to scrap section 9 of the bill altogether, which is what amendment 35 would do.

I move amendment 24.