Seòmar agus comataidhean

To answer Mr Ruskell’s point, my principle would apply to any Government. It is based on the principle that if we set things in legislation and someone breaches the law, there should be a punishment. I am glad that Mr Ruskell seems to accept that point. Therefore I seem to have the support of both Mr Ruskell and Ms Dunbar—although we will wait and see. I am absolutely delighted. l will end on a high.

Very good.

My amendment does just that: it says that, if the Government misses the targets—targets that are set in law—it breaks its own law. If you break the law, something must happen, and what I am saying is that that something should be a fine and that any such fine—which, to answer Ms Dunbar’s point, would come from the Government—should go to councils, which are having to do a lot of the heavy lifting here.

My amendment does not go into that level of detail, but I would be delighted if Ms Dunbar were prepared to accept the principle that there should be a fine. Is she is prepared to accept that if a Government—or, indeed, anyone, or any public body—breaks the law, which is what I am talking about, there should be some form of punishment? Otherwise, why would we have such a law? If someone breaks the law, something needs to happen.

That was a really good intervention. You have raised some good points. I am reflecting on things, and I encourage members to reflect on the arguments that are made in committee. I am reflecting in live time, and I am considering amendment 72.

I want to make it easy for people to get information and to report fly-tipping—the unlawful disposal of waste. I am not sure that it is very easy to report that at the moment. If the minister’s view is that a national app is not the answer, something else should be put in place.

Will the minister take an intervention from me?

Does Maurice Golden agree that, as we have that disparity in performance between different councils, it would be useful to ask councils why they are doing well or not doing so well to find out the reasons behind that?

Amendment 5 is one of the one-year ones, so I will not press it.

That is, indeed, the position.

I thought that that might be the case.

I will address the rest of the amendments. There is currently no deadline in section 6 for setting circular economy targets—it is open ended. That suggests to me that the minister who was previously at the helm of the bill wanted as long as possible to set those targets, which, to me, does not sound like the kind of environmentally friendly stance that the minister should be taking. If we are to save the planet, we need to be far more ambitious. I argued that last week but, for reasons that remain a mystery to me, neither the committee nor the minister saw it that way.

In principle, we should give the Government of the day, whoever that is, deadlines to work to. If we do not, there is no incentive for it to get on with anything. My amendments in this group would have given the committee a choice of deadline—either one year or two years. I will now move only those amendments that would set a two-year deadline, because that is the timetable that the minister and the committee backed last week.

Amendment 6 would give the Government a two-year deadline to set circular economy targets. That seems reasonable to me.

Amendment 8, again, puts the Government on watch. It is a sunset clause, which relates to section 6 and also to section 7, which is about monitoring and reporting on targets. Amendment 8 says that if the Government has not made regulations under sections 6 and 7 within two years, the sections expire. That should focus the minds of any minister, whoever that is.

Amendment 20 sets alternative timing for regulations being brought in under section 8, which is on

“Restrictions on the disposal of unsold consumer goods”.

Amendments 22, 31 and 33 are further sunset clauses, for the same reasons as before.

I turn to amendment 34. The bill introduces new section 87A to the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009. It gives ministers a power to introduce a charge for the supply of a single-use item. I have many concerns about introducing a power to require charges for single-use items, which I will outline later. Amendment 34 would require section 87A to come into force the day after the Circular Economy (Scotland) Bill receives royal assent.

I turn to amendments 41, 43 and 45. Section 10 relates to the “Householder’s duty of care” with respect to the household waste that is produced on their property. Although we can all agree that it is important that an occupier of a property makes the best effort to ensure that their waste is transferred properly, the committee’s report highlighted that householders are “largely unaware” of their current duty of care and noted that the pressures that are faced by councils in enforcing that duty would need to be addressed.

I have concerns about how workable the enforcement of section 10 would be. Proposing bin fines if people have the wrong items in their bin is not practical. Responsible people could put out their bins only for someone else to come along and put something else in them. They would then be hit by a fine. There would be even bigger problems for people who live in flats with communal bins. Who would get fined if those bins had the wrong items in them? That was addressed in the stage 1 debate but was not properly answered. I am therefore not comfortable with section 10. However, if the Government is committed to retaining it, it needs to act on the regulations. If, through a fear of public backlash, the Government were to let such regulations drift, perhaps that would say something about the nature of the proposals.

My amendments urge the Government to get on with the regulations under section 10(9), about substituting the fixed-penalty amount of £200 and section 10(16), which is about adding another category of persons to the definition of “authorised officer”. My amendments propose a timetable for setting the regulations and they give the Government a deadline by which to do so; otherwise, the power to legislate for fixed-penalty notices for offences under section 10 would expire.

Amendment 72 is in my name. We all want to ensure that recycling is done correctly, but, as the committee has identified, householders require the right information to do that. The stage 1 report noted that

“targeted communications could raise ... awareness of”

a householder’s

“duty of care”

and

“the risks of engaging with illegal waste operators”.

Some stakeholders suggested that such communication should come from councils, but Consumer Scotland questioned the effectiveness of that approach. It said:

“We often hear from local authorities that they provide information on how to take part in recycling or reuse schemes, but when we speak to our consumers, that is not always the message that comes back from them, so there is probably a need to simplify things and ensure that the core message is getting across.”—[Official Report, Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, 7 November 2023; c 43.]

If we want to drive behaviour change in that area, how about a mobile app that provides everyone with easy-to-access information about how to dispose of household waste and how to report incidents of unlawful disposal of waste? Instead of placing the burden on councils—which will already be tasked with enforcing many aspects of the bill, as we have discussed—why do Scottish ministers not step in with a one-size-fits-all solution that could be easily rolled out across the whole of Scotland? That suggestion might sound very odd coming from me. It feels a bit odd coming from me.

I might regard amendment 72 as a probing amendment, which I am not in favour of generally, but I am interested in what the minister has to say. I think that it would be relatively easy to set up an app. We have other national apps—ScotRail has a very good app, and there are Government apps.