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Okay. It probably ties in with what colleagues said earlier about what will come down the road.

I will move on to something else. In the section in the financial memorandum on restrictions on the disposal of unsold consumer goods, paragraph 12 talks about the minimum cost being £30,000 a year but the cost being £200,000 a year under a more proactive regulatory regime. Most of us would quite like a proactive regime in a number of areas, and we have just discussed that. Why does the financial memorandum include the minimum figure of £30,000 instead of even going part of the way to being proactive?

I am totally supportive of what you are trying to do. It is absolutely great. Do you know the costs in France? Did France have to put in money itself? Does this need to be front-loaded? Would you need to put in quite a lot of money and resource at the beginning to change the thinking of Amazon and individuals, and the costs would then reduce over time? Would higher up-front costs be needed?

Quite a lot of ground has been covered already, so I will start off by touching on some of that. Minister, you seem to suggest that it would be financially advantageous for councils to enforce the rules on recycling and encourage or educate people to get better at recycling and that that would cover their costs in some way. However, the reality on the ground is that that is not happening, certainly in parts of Glasgow. I live in the greater Easterhouse area, and I see a mixture of issues. Some people do not know what they should put in the bins. They put plastic bags in the blue bins, which, I understand, should not happen. In tenements, we have only a green bin and a blue bin, so they put plastic, cans and paper in the blue bin, and the green bin is for everything else—garden waste and food waste. Glass also goes in the green bin, because most people do not have a car to take it to a recycling centre. In all my experience, I have never seen a leaflet about how to recycle better or had someone come to the door to try to educate me or encourage me to do so. I know that that is happening elsewhere: we heard that West Lothian Council is doing that, with people going round the doors. Maybe it happens in Glasgow when I am here, but I have certainly not seen it happening—maybe they do it on Tuesdays.

Glasgow City Council is very tight for money, so if it thought that it could make money out of encouraging people to recycle better, it would do so. Clearly, it is going to cost that council a lot more money to get the recycling rates up. Do you at least accept that it is not cost neutral?

As people know, I am a committee substitute, so I am not quite as familiar with some of the issues as colleagues are. Coming in from the outside, my feeling was that the idea of a just transition fund should be quite clear cut and in a space that nothing else is in. However, I have heard this morning about things such as planting trees or getting an electric vehicle in order to get money quickly and spend it. I would have thought that both of those things could have happened elsewhere and that a just transition fund was not needed to make them happen. Maybe I am being slightly cynical, but is it simply about more money for things that we are already trying to do, or is there a specific space for that fund?

Perhaps the process could be led by the three local authorities.

Although you are not actually elected, are you?

I will leave it at that, convener.

We have covered quite a lot of ground, and some of the issues that I planned to mention have been touched on already. Much of our focus has been on how communities can feed in to the process. Local authorities’ written input has been about how the councils—three, in this case—rather than central Government could perhaps be more in control of the whole fund. Earlier it was suggested that central Government rules are making it very difficult to put such an approach into practice. Should the whole fund have been more under the control of local authorities, or should it now be?

One aspect that has been specifically referred to is the one-year window: we must have a consultation, make decisions and spend the money all within a year. Of course, to some extent, local authorities also have that problem. I know that they are always complaining that they want multiyear funding. If local authorities were running matters with this fund for 10 years, would you be better able to deal with that and give community groups more of a spread of time? Mr Bews, please answer that if you want to.

I think that Aberdeenshire Council raised the idea that the just transition fund should be aligned with other economic plans, such as the regional economic strategy. I realise that that council is not here today, so maybe you can comment on that. We have heard a bit about duplication, but are those things currently aligned or could they be better aligned? Is that a problem or is it not a problem?