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It is exactly that. You point to the fact that, if the regulations are passed, the ban will not be in force until 1 April. There has in fact been more notice, because the retail industry has known about, and seen, the regulations, which went out for consultation. We have had live consultations with retailers as part of the process. In addition, the proposal was in the programme for government last year, and it has been a topic of conversation in the Parliament for quite some time, with many MSPs lobbying for a ban on these products for very good reasons.

There is the official notice period: if Parliament agrees to pass the regulations, retailers have six months to run down their stock. There will always be an impact associated with not allowing retailers to sell a profitable item—there is no getting away from that. In the past four years, these items have exploded on to the scene. Initially, I think there was a single digit percentage of people using them, but that has gone up to about 50 per cent of people. They have become extremely popular.

If we look at the demographic of people who use them, we see that—as the convener said—many are younger people. I am quite shocked to hear that people can get a vape with their ice cream—that takes me back to the 1980s, when the rogue ice cream guy would sell you a single cigarette and a match when you went out to get an ice cream. I think we all recognise that that kind of thing used to happen—I did not realise that it was happening with vapes, but I am steeped in that experience.

The flavours associated with vapes mean that they are attractive to younger people. Of course, I am not saying that retailers are selling them to young people; young people are just doing the same as has been going on since time immemorial. Kids outside the shop get hold of a guy who is going in for his messages and say, “Can you buy me one of these?”, or older siblings or friends, or whoever, are buying them. That is just the way that teenagers operate—we know that.

With regard to the business case—yes, retailers will no longer be able to sell that profitable item, but they have notice in order to run down their stocks. They can decide whether they want to start selling the reusable products instead, alongside the refills for those; there is another stream of income in servicing the demand that might come from people who used to buy single-use vapes, legally, as their preferred model. There will be a market there, and it is for retailers to make that business decision.

I will give you a bit of background. We contacted every vape retailer in Scotland. We identified those through the register of tobacco and nicotine vapour products retailers. Seven thousand retailers in Scotland are registered. We contacted them all and invited them to provide feedback on the draft regulations, as part of the development of the business and regulatory impact assessment. We conducted the Scottish firms impact test—the SIFT—and we interviewed 11 businesses that came forward. With them, we worked through some of the potential impacts on them. The themes that were identified included funding for enforcement and the potential for illicit sales—going underground. A variety of businesses responded.

Of course, that is not the end of the consultation. Once the regulations are approved—as I hope they will be—by the Parliament, we will get in touch with every single one of the 7,000 members on that register, to alert them to the fact, if they have not already seen it, that the regulations have been passed.

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.