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—or that you cannot introduce any legislation until you have done the co-design on all those. That is not a sensible process. The sensible process is to set out what our intentions are: we have these targets to meet; we are going to enable these kinds of powers; and then we will work on the detail of each of them. We will get reporting on food waste. We have had those conversations, but members have suggested that we do textiles or construction next, so that we can then go down that path knowing how those processes work.

There are examples in other countries of how the regulations might look and might be implemented, so we can give an idea today, and I have given several examples of the kind of things that we will bring forward with the bill. The point is that you need to have the framework in place to hang those details off. If you did the details first, you would end up with very cumbersome, specific primary legislation, which you would then have to do all over again for every new product that you wanted to add to that.

The bill will allow councils more enforcement powers and will bring us into line with what is available in England and Wales. Our councils are currently fairly limited in what they can do in relation to littering from vehicles, and the bill will increase that provision.

You are absolutely right that it can be difficult to identify littering from vehicles. We have a pilot programme going on. LitterCam camera technology is being used on the trunk road network to understand how we can identify people who are committing those sorts of offences. We can move that forward. We have some examples. Bradford Council installed closed-circuit television cameras at a cost of £16,000, and, over about three months, the council issued that same amount in penalties. Therefore, once councils have the powers, there can be advantages to them using cameras and so on to collect fines from offenders.

We know that there will be value for money because of the opportunities that will be unlocked. I will give some examples. We know that the contamination of our waste stream costs local authorities money, that litter on the streets costs them in collection charges and that businesses are producing perfectly good goods that go straight to landfill or for incineration—during a cost of living crisis, perfectly good food is being sent for incineration or to landfill instead of going into people’s mouths.

There are some really good statistics. For example, for every £1 that we invest in reducing food waste, we get £250-worth of benefit for our local communities, because we not only prevent that waste for the businesses involved but ensure that the product—perfectly good food that might have had a bad label put on it or something—gets into hungry mouths. There are benefits to reaching net zero and to making sure that goods and materials from our society actually get used, especially by people who need them. That is an immeasurable good, and I am so glad that we are able to bring forward such legislation.

We do not know what the code of practice plus will look like; it will be part of the co-design process. As I said earlier in the session—I am just trying to find it in my notes—it is roughly proportionate. Zero Waste Scotland estimates that to bring all local authorities in line with the existing code of practice would cost about £88.4 million. The recycling improvement fund is £70 million. They are proportionate estimates and then some money that is allocated from local authorities’ budgets. The capital investment is broadly in line with the existing code of practice but the upgraded code will need more. That is where we need to look at the benefits from what might come after the recycling improvement fund can be discussed, and at things like the extended producer responsibility for packaging, which represents another source of funding—all the pieces of what the code of practice plus looks like. We are really at the starting point with that, with what the opportunities are and with what the funding might look like.

We can absolutely look at that. When the provisions are being developed, we will look at which and how many products are being disposed of and what is being dealt with in what businesses. Absolutely, understanding what cost recovery might look like can be part of that conversation.

We will probably add to the provisions over time. We still need to develop the process and then get it started. Yes, I can see us probably initially estimating a low enforcement level as companies come into compliance, but as more items and businesses are added to the scheme in future years, one can imagine that enforcement might increase.

There is some interesting data on the reuse of items. In France, for example, restrictions have been imposed on clothing, cosmetics, hygiene products and electrical items. Amazon has a charity that deals with those sorts of items, and it has delivered more than 500,000 items, worth £10 million, to families in need. Although the idea is to work with businesses so that they comply, part of the aim of the provisions is to create an overall benefit to society from making sure that not only are we not wasting resources and the valuable materials that go into such products but, where the products are safe and in good working order, we can get them to people who really need them during a cost of living crisis and also create a wider benefit to society rather than let things go to waste. There is, therefore, a need to look at the big picture to understand that the provisions will ramp up over time.

The member is talking about costs for communications and development of the process. The costs in the financial memorandum are specifically for enforcement, but I am sure the member is correct that, in order to implement such a scheme successfully, money for communications will be needed up front, which will be determined by the scale of the scheme and the businesses involved.

There are many provisions in the bill. I assume that you are referring specifically to the code of practice for local authorities, or do you mean more generally?

Absolutely; there will need to be investment. I am looking now at the amount of money that we have given Glasgow in this area. It has had £21 million from the recycling improvement fund. The member is correct that there needs to be investment in infrastructure, especially, in order to enable the scheme. That is why we have the recycling improvement fund, and that is why we invested more than £1 billion through the strategic waste fund between 2008 and 2022.

There is an interesting point, though, around designing recycling systems to make things easier. I also live in tenement land, where we have big bins in the streets, and I know that one of the improvements from the recycling improvement fund in Edinburgh is the change in design of the bin lids to make it more obvious what type of material should go into the bin. Similarly, East Lothian Council has a scheme involving some very clever trucks that makes it easy for people to put in the right type of recyclate and more difficult to put in the wrong type. Those sorts of design improvements make a big difference to decontamination. Some of it involves fairly cutting-edge research about how people interact with recycling systems. Sometimes, it is not enough to give people information; you need to make it easy for them to do the right thing. If it is difficult for people to get the big black bin bag into the recycling bin, they will not do it; instead, they will recycle properly.

Particularly in the code of practice, I want to work towards having common good design. That means that, where councils across Scotland are getting good results, we can share the knowledge from those areas with other councils and work together to have the best type of recycling. It is not about just investment. That is one of the challenges that we have seen through the investment in the strategic waste fund. Although that was more than £1 billion, it did not bring us up to the kind of recycling rates that we hoped for, so more is needed. That is why some of the provisions in the bill around targets and the co-design process, which will allow for that information sharing, are also needed. This is not something that you can just throw money at; it needs that design element as well.

It is more about having a proportionate level of scrutiny. With any number of single-use items—cups, vapes, plastic bags—one can imagine that requiring primary legislation for each of those products would not only be burdensome on parliamentary time but mean that we would not be able to react as quickly. Primary legislation would take a great deal of time and mean that any potential pollution problem would last for the many years during which the primary legislation was going through its stages. Secondary legislation allows the Parliament to be nimble in reacting to new products that come on line and allows the level of scrutiny that committees and members of the Parliament deem to be appropriate.