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We have absolutely been in touch with COSLA throughout the whole process. I am really pleased that the UK Government has brought forward these regulations, and I hope that the committee will agree that they really represent a step change in the management of waste; instead of its being a burden on the taxpayer and on the public purse, there will be a vehicle for the manufacturers of products to pay for the management of their packaging waste. I think that it will mean a number of things, and I think that COSLA is supportive of it.

What effectively will it mean? It is expected that £1.2 billion a year will come to local authorities UK wide, and with the consequentials, that will translate into £120 million a year for Scotland. That is what is anticipated; it might be more or it might be less, but that is what it is anticipated will come to local authorities from the scheme administrator as a result of its handling of waste packaging.

What that will mean, initially, is that authorities can invest that money in improving their recycling processes without—and this is crucial—putting the burden of dealing with the waste on council tax payers or on the funding that they get from Government. Initially, there will be two streams of funding, because authorities will have to put in place a certain amount of adaptation with regard to the waste management that we ask them to do. Effectively, though, the money that will come to them as a result of EPR is going to help them to significantly improve their waste management.

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.

Initially, there were obviously a lot of questions around what it might mean for them and a discussion about what influence they would have in the design of the EPR. The administrator put together a steering group, because it was important that businesses had an influence on how the EPR would be designed—obviously, this is a UK instrument that is coming to us to agree on. It allowed members of that steering group to perform an advisory role.

Indicative producer base fees were released in August and gave businesses indicative accounts of what they can expect to pay per tonne under the EPR. Those have been dealt with at the four-nations level, because the business community has been involved in the design of the EPR from the get-go.

It might be important to say that I am genuinely looking forward to seeing how businesses and producers of goods and packaging adapt to that. I think that what we will see as a result is an improvement in our packaging, as they will not want to pay a lot of money for the soft packet plastics and so on. I am excited to see how that will develop. I think that we will see a revolution and innovation in the way that packaging for our goods is manufactured and designed, because businesses and producers will want to take the waste plastics away as much as possible. I hope that the fact that this is getting moved across all four nations means that they will see a market for better packaging—not only are there market opportunities for those producers, but they are also looking at how to bring down waste at source.

I will make it as short as possible, convener.

The committee will recall that, during the passage of the Circular Economy (Scotland) Bill, amendments were lodged by the Government to ensure that various pieces of legislation that would apply to Scotland’s other public bodies would also apply to Zero Waste Scotland. The transition follows a decision that was made by the Office for National Statistics for Zero Waste Scotland to be classified as a public sector organisation, as it is primarily directed and funded by Scottish ministers. Work is well under way to ensure an orderly transition, and—subject to how the committee votes today—we fully expect the change of status to take effect from 1 October. Zero Waste Scotland will be subject to the same provisions on public finance and accountability as other public bodies in Scotland, and it is important that the organisation has a designated accountable officer as part of routine good governance.

Zero Waste Scotland will not be part of the Scottish Administration under the Scotland Act 1998. That means that, for the purposes of the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Act 2000, the permanent secretary, as principal accounting officer, cannot appoint an accountable officer for Zero Waste Scotland. However, article 2 of the draft order requires that Zero Waste Scotland be audited by the Auditor General for Scotland, which consequently engages the relevant provision of part 2 of the 2000 act.

Where a body’s accounts are subject to audit by the Auditor General, the permanent secretary will then be given power to designate an accountable officer for Zero Waste Scotland under section 15(3) of the 2000 act.

I hope that that gives a summary of what we are doing; I will close there.

I welcome the support for the regulations’ intentions and for the approach that I am taking on any flexibility that we might need, should other nations not be ready. I do not know about that for sure, but the point is taken, and it is certainly my view, too.

Concerns about flavouring and packaging, which Douglas Lumsden raised, will be addressed in UK legislation—the Tobacco and Vapes Bill. He is absolutely right about the people who have marketed them. Let us face it—there has been a marketing attempt to attract younger people, and they might try the same thing with the more reusable vapes, although I would suggest that they are harder to hide from parents. Those points are being taken on board at UK level as well, and we support that.

Of course. That comes back to the earlier point about what happens if something else enters the market that looks different or whatever. Obviously, we will be alive to anything that happens, in a four-nations approach, where that might be the case and might cause any dubiety. For the moment, I think that the single-use or disposable vape has a fairly obviously different appearance from the rechargeable type.

We want to take single-use vapes—or disposable vapes, as they are better known—out of the economy altogether. For a number of reasons, there is no ability to recycle them, even if they make it to recycling plants. The process is quite a manual one. Disposable vapes are not designed to be taken apart or to be recycled.

I have spoken about the volume involved. If local authorities had to recycle disposable vapes, it would cost them £200 million. There are a number of advantages to taking them out of the equation completely. First, they will not be littering our streets. As everyone here will have noticed over the past few years, once we spot one of them in the street, we spot 10 of them. When they go into a bin, they are going in with the general rubbish. As I mentioned, there is lithium in there, which is a very precious resource. We often mention that there is not enough lithium available for the larger batteries that we need for EVs. Cumulatively, vapes have a large amount of lithium in them, which is ending up in general waste.

The ban will have a health impact, too. We know that many of the uptakers of the single-use vapes are likely to be under age. They are getting hold of them somehow—that is what teenagers do. The vapes are very attractive. They often have flavours associated with them that are attractive to younger people. If we take them out of circulation, younger, underage people will be less likely to access vapes, because they will not be likely to buy a rechargeable and reusable one, for so many reasons. There are a number of advantages to the measure.

Fires have been associated with vapes. If they are not disposed of properly, they are likely to go into general waste and cause a fire in a bin lorry. There have been so many instances of that happening already. As I say, there are a huge amount of advantages to the ban. The draft instrument is a set of environmental regulations, but they reach more widely than that, including into health.

As things stand, we are all going forward as one, and we want to go forward as one. Obviously, a new Government is in place, and I need to make sure that everything is still in train, so I am writing this week just to get confirmation of where the other nations are and to let them know that we have laid our regulations and started the process.

Should I get an answer that says, “Actually, no, we are not ready to go on 1 April,” a couple of options are open to us. If the period is quite short, we could decide to change our regulations to come in at a date along with everyone else’s. If it is only a couple more months, I do not think that there is any harm in that. However, if it is a couple more years, that is a different question altogether, and we would need to think about how we might go forward, because that would be a couple of years of those items still being on the streets, still in our bins and still causing the problems that they have caused.

As things stand, I have not had confirmation that the implementation date has changed. I think that I signed off on a letter to the UK Government yesterday, to say that we are ready for 1 April and to ask whether others were ready and whether that was still the plan.

I am not sure that I am able to go into that level of detail, but the point is that the system involves the costs of dealing with the waste being met by the fund, not the other way around. It is not a case of “This is what we collect and this what you’ve got”; it is, effectively, a case of “This is how much it is going to cost us to deal with this packaging, therefore this is the money that is required.”

I want to say a couple of things before I directly answer your question. One of the issues that we brought to the table when we were talking about the regulations was the fact that a lot of our local authorities cover rural parts of Scotland and we do not want them to be disadvantaged in relation to urban local authorities. Therefore, we managed to get “must” changed to “may” in the regulations and that kind of thing, in order that that is taken into account in looking at the funding that is given as a result of the activities that are happening at a local level. Rurality is taken into account. Highland Council is in a completely different situation to Glasgow City Council with regard to how it manages its waste. That adaptation was made to ensure that the process did not disadvantage a lot of rural councils. I think that the Welsh Government was very sympathetic to that for similar reasons.

On your substantive point about the scrutiny of how the money is spent, allocations will be given to councils, so we will be able to scrutinise how that money is deployed at a council level. However, on the system administrator coming here to give evidence, it will be a UK-wide system administrator role, but I would say that it is probably good sense for them to engage with all four Parliaments to ensure that they are scrutinised as much as possible. Of course, the Scottish Government will want the data as it relates to our local authorities, and it will be essential that we have that.