Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2024
In the previous debate, the Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy, Màiri McAllan, referenced climate activists in Malawi and appeared to suggest that Scottish Conservatives had criticised them in some way. I have spoken to my colleagues, and we can find no basis for that. Based on what the cabinet secretary has said, we are very supportive of those climate activists. I wanted to ensure that that is on the record.
Moving to this debate, I thank the clerks and all those who provided support for the bill. As I have made clear previously, the Scottish Conservatives support the general principles of the bill. A circular economy is a simple concept: keep materials in use for as long as possible to extract the maximum value from them. In fact, it is so simple that people could be forgiven for thinking that we surely must be doing that anyway. However, Scotland’s economy is just 1.3 per cent circular, according to “Circularity Gap Report Scotland”. The hope was that the Circular Economy (Scotland) Bill could shift the needle, so that we would catch up with the rest of the United Kingdom, which is 7.5 per cent circular. As I have pointed out before, the bill as introduced was little more than a glorified waste and litter bill. Those are important issues, of course, but that version of the bill hardly represented the ambition that we need to build a sustainable economy and for it to thrive.
Members will remember my promise at stage 1 to work constructively to strengthen the bill. I kept my end of the bargain, as did Scottish Conservative colleagues, in lodging dozens of amendments at stage 2 on everything from reuse to procurement to human rights. However, the sincere efforts from Opposition parties were met with a wall of opposition from the Scottish National Party at both stage 2 and stage 3.
For example, yesterday the SNP opposed ensuring that a code of practice for local authority waste collection would be produced by March 2026, even though that is the date by which the SNP claims that it will be ready. On top of that, the SNP opposes providing local authorities with sufficient resources to carry out the actions required of them—and, for good measure, the SNP also voted against its own recycling targets, which is confusing, given that it claims that it still intends to meet them.
Such opposition is especially disappointing, given how bad recycling has become under the SNP. Even after over a decade of trying, it has still not managed to deliver its 2013 household recycling target, so new thinking is clearly needed. However, the new approach of the Scottish Government is exactly the same as the strategy that has been deployed for the past 20 years. At least that is circular.
As I explained in my opening comments, recycling is not the primary goal of waste management—hence the Scottish Conservative amendments to ensure that support to prepare for reuse is included, and even prioritised, when it comes to household waste, unsold goods and local authority reuse schemes. Again, the SNP acted to block progress, this time opposing the vital inclusion of reuse and repair in the bill.
On a more positive note, the bill will, for the first time, require the production of a circular economy strategy that is regularly reviewed. Alongside the strategy, we of course need tangible goals to reach for and to measure progress against, but the SNP’s original plan was for targets to be optional. That is just not good enough, and it creates a terrible market signal for businesses and investors that the Scottish Government is not serious about building a circular economy. That is why the Scottish Conservatives lodged amendments to ensure that circular economy targets were included. If we expect the private sector to get involved at all, the public sector should also be contributing. However, yet again, the SNP opposed that, and voted against a requirement for public bodies to produce circular economy plans.