It takes mismanagement of epic proportions to turn a relatively simple recycling scheme for bottles and cans into a major governmental crisis. It takes Herculean hypocrisy to then blame it on Westminster. Scotland’s deposit return scheme (DRS), which plans to place a recoverable 20p on every single use container at the point of purchase, has been in a state of perpetual crisis for years, largely through the incompetence of the Green circular economy minister, Lorna Slater — well named because of her gyrations over the policy.
But now Humza Yousaf has decided to delay the introduction of the DRS until the UK scheme comes on stream around 2025. This means that Scotland is effectively scrapping its own scheme, even though it had the option of turning it into a pilot for the UK deposit return scheme. The Scottish government could now be liable for compensation claims from firms which had spent money of preparing for the scheme to be introduced this August.
The DRS is a mess entirely of the Scottish government’s own making and it is facile, not to say demeaning, to claim it is somehow the fault of Westminster.
This follow an exceptional set of events that should have been laid to rest in April — and Slater sacked — after Humza Yousaf became First Minister. He shelved the scheme, which was supposed to start in August, until next year in an effort to make it acceptable to the concerns of thousands of small businesses who’d refused to register by the March deadline. Slater had also lost the confidence of drinks producers and supermarkets north and south of the border.
But she staggered on until the UK government last week offered a face-saving solution: turn the Scottish DRS into a pilot for the UK scheme of the same name due to come in after 2025. The only condition was that Scotland should drop glass and confine the deposit return scheme to single use containers. This was always sensible. Glass is already recycled rather effectively by council kerbside schemes — and in a more environmental manner. What is the logic of requiring people instead to get into their cars to drive bottles to a recycling centre?
Indeed, what is the point of requiring UK companies to have separate labelling and deposit recovery protocols for Scotland alone? Surely the 20p on a can of coke bought in Scotland should be redeemable anywhere in the UK? The Scottish government was willy nilly creating a regulatory border in the UK. It was like Brexit for bottles and cans.
UK brands would disappear from Scottish shelves. Scottish brewers, like Innis and Gunn, said small producers might not be able to trade at all given the extra costs. Tesco said it might have to stop online deliveries to elderly and infirm people unable to get to recycling centres. Wine producers in France said they might stop selling altogether in Scotland.
But instead of accepting the inevitable, Lorna Slater threw her bottles out of her pram and in a series of near-hysterical statements said the DRS had been ‘sabotaged’. She claimed the UK government was ‘torpedoing Scotland’s parliament’ and taking a ‘scorched earth’ approach to devolution. Humza Yousaf unwisely backed her and also tried also to turn this episode into a constitutional crisis, saying that the UK government had ‘time and time again tried to undermine devolution’.
This was absurdity on top of mismanagement. The DRS is a mess entirely of the Scottish government’s own making and it is facile, not to say demeaning, to claim it is somehow the fault of Westminster. Devolution was supposed to be about finding Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, not creating them. The architect of devolution, Donald Dewar, would be turning in his grave at the crassness of turning the constitutional reform he piloted into a row about bottles.
The obvious solution is to merge the Scottish scheme with the UK one, as has been recommended all along by drinks producers, including C&C who make the Tennent’s brand and whom the Scottish government unwisely misrepresented as supporting a Scotland-only DRS. David Harris, the boss of Circularity Scotland, the company set up to administer the DRS, told BBC Scotland on Tuesday that the Scottish scheme ‘absolutely can’ go ahead without glass, that it would still be ‘one of the most ambitious start-ups’ of its kind and that cancelling Scotland’s scheme could damage the chances of a successful version working for the rest of the UK.
Yousaf has also been trying to claim that the SNP and only the SNP is ‘prepared to stand up and defend devolution’ while ‘Labour are sitting on their hands‘. But a Scottish nationalist FM makes an unlikely champion of devolution and Scottish voters are not so easily fooled. They can see this for what this is: a government out of its depth literally talking rubbish.
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