A Hollow Frame

Craig DalzellImagine you’re applying for planning permission to build a house. Normally, the process would involve drawing up fairly detailed plans about what the house would look like. No plan goes perfectly to plan though and some changes are inevitable as the building process occurs but if the final building does deviate substantially from the initial plan there can be consequences up to and including being ordered to tear the whole thing down and start again. What you can’t do is gain permission to build “a house” without answering the basic questions like “What size is it?”, “How many bedrooms will it have?” or “Will it be made entirely of asbestos?”.Over the past few months Common Weal have been incredibly busy replying to just a few of the public consultations that the Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament have been publishing. I’ve written before about the sheer volume of them, how much effort goes into each response and how little they often achieve despite the rare moments of serious influence or the fact that if folk don’t respond to them then vested interests end up dominating the responses and thus what the Government can point to as justification for their plans.My colleagues have been doing an amazing job with some of our recent responses but there was something in one of them this week that caught my eye when Nicola brought me her response to the consultation on the Circular Economy Route Map to check over before she submitted it which has revealed a significant and growing problem in how the Scottish Government has been crafting legislation.The Circular Economy Bill, of which this Route Map is a part, is what is known as a “Framework Bill”. It won’t actually change all that much in Scotland if it is passed. It sets some strategic direction and intent in future government policy – for example, a future policy on waste disposal may have to comply with CE principles laid down by the Bill but it doesn’t directly write policies on waste disposal into legislation. We’ve seen similar Bills built this way such as the National Care Service Bill. In that case, things were worse in that the “future legislation” intended weren’t full Bills themselves but what’s known as Secondary Legislation or even just powers granted outright to Ministers. The former is subject to much less in the way of Parliamentary scrutiny than Primary Legislation is and a Ministerial power is subject to almost none at all. The consequence is that a badly written or badly intended Framework Bill can lead to or can be used to bypass scrutiny and democratic accountability. Multiple Parliamentary Committees have called the Government out for this, including on the Circular Economy Bill.The next piece in our puzzle this week came at the end of the consultation Nicola was working on. All consultations on government legislation have to ask a standard set of questions on equalities to ensure that the legislation won’t cause adverse impact on various groups such as those with Protected Characteristics, folk experiencing socio-economic disadvantage, or folk who live in the Islands.I was surprised to read the section in the Government’s guidance document that said that the Circular Economy Route Map would not have adverse impact on those groups. Having studied this area of policy for more than half a decade now (including contributing to a comprehensive book on the subject) I could immediately think of several ways that a badly implemented Circular Economy could adversely impact the various groups mentioned.Take island communities, for example. The Scottish Government’s idea of a Circular Economy isn’t all that much more than “increase recycling rates” but this still implies a lot of product waste material being produced, transported and recycled. The logistics of island life mean that every crate of packaging material that is transported to and from an island takes up volume that could have been used for something else. Factor in also the long international routes that our waste often ends up taking before being recycled or being “recycled” and you have a system that involves a huge amount of time and effort being spent just to move around rubbish. A true Circular Economy would force producers to redesign their packaging (and, indeed, their products) to minimise the amount of waste produced throughout its lifecycle, to maximise the useful lifespan of the products (or their components if they can be recovered and reused in something else) and to ensure that as much waste as possible can be biodegraded either in a home composter or in a community bioreactor. In a true Circular Economy, islanders wouldn’t export any waste. In a badly designed one, they’d export even more waste than they currently do.

(The Product Lifecycle Route Map of a true Circular Economy as described in our Common Home Plan)

Or take the impact of a Circular Economy on disadvantaged communities. Let’s say we start encouraging “zero-waste” shopping. This is a genuinely good idea, but in a badly designed Circular Economy, we might see these shops only roll out to richer areas first, or significant price premiums for the “novelty” might make them inaccessible for poorer people, or the lack of good public transport makes it practically impossible for those who go to these shops to take their produce home unless they have a car – which poorer people are less likely to have.So how could the Government justify arguing that the Bill wouldn’t have an impact on issues of equalities? It took me re-reading the statement again to catch the subtlety I had missed. The full statement on socio-economic disadvantage says that the “Route Map itself does not currently impact those experiencing socio-economic disadvantage, and will only do so once the specific measures proposed within are implemented”.In other words, we’re being consulted on the impact of a policy that the Government thinks will only actually have an impact later, once it starts building out from the Framework. As said earlier, if those additions are done via secondary legislation then that means less democratic scrutiny and even now it’s harder for us to determine if the Route Map will even take us down a route that we want to go because we’re literally being told that we’re not allowed to see that bit of the map yet.Imagine you’re applying for planning permission for a house. The local Planning Officer asks how many bedrooms you want the house to have because they need to know how many people intend to live in the house so they can see what impact it’ll have on the community. You respond saying that the plan itself is just for the scaffolding frame won’t lead to anyone living in the community, that’ll only happen after the specific house is built and people move in. Do you think you’ll get permission for your house to be built?The issues around the transition to a Circular Economy are complex and interleaving (hands up if any of you had considered before I mentioned it that reducing plastic waste in supermarkets might require additional bus routes?) and they deserve to be properly scrutinised and planned. The choices we make or don’t make now will lock us in to certain futures that might not be easy to change later. The Scottish Government needs to publish more than barebones frameworks for this kind of thing so that they can meet their target for media headlines. We all want and deserve a true Circular Economy. But to get one we need proper collaboration and actual policy-making – true co-design of the kind that we should have seen in the National Care Service Bill – and some actual proposals from the Government that we can scrutinise and improve.