Silence over loss of millions is a warning sign

There is no doubt that £166 million is a significant amount of money. It is not a giant proportion of the overall Scottish budget but it will buy you two absolutely state-of-the-art secondary schools. It is not the kind of money that should be forfeited without serious questions being asked.

Yet right now a court case is underway which may cost the Scottish public purse £166 million and this remains the only serious scrutiny of the cause of the collapse of the scheme which has left this potential liability. This raises worrying questions about the robustness of our system of democratic scrutiny.

This relates to the failed Deposit Return Scheme. It would appear that this failure implicates so many people in positions of power in Scotland that proper scrutiny is being prevented. Given the string of errors and potentially worse that took place, the lack of examination of these events should raise alarm bells. Outsourcing our democracy to the court system is becoming too normal in Scotland.

A quick recap; Scotland decided it was going to set up and pay for a scheme where people would pay a deposit when buying a plastic or glass bottle and then they would get that deposit back when they return the bottle. This is a scheme that works seamlessly in other countries, notably Germany.

When this commitment was made, the obvious operator for the scheme would be Zero Waste Scotland, a not-for-profit company funded mainly by the Scottish Government and local authorities. ZWS operates like a public body discharging elements of public policy. A not-dissimilar not-for-profit company runs the German scheme.

However, a new company is set up which is non-profit but offers pay structures which are much more in line with generous private sector salaries than public ones. The Chief Executive of Circularity Scotland was to be paid nearly twice as much as the First Minister.

This was also the effective privatisation of waste services in Scotland as this company would have taken over waste collection from local authorities. Given the track record of this kind of enterprise in the Scottish public sector, we could expect it to quickly develop close trading relationships with the foreign corporations which dominate Scottish public life.

It is hard not to feel that this was all an exercise carried out by a group of people to create yet another lucrative empire in Scotland which would generously reward yet another cohort of unelected officials who would then operate a system barely responsible to the public but able to distribute wealth to insiders – much like the scandal-prone Water Industry Commission for Scotland.

And it seems that the pursuit of this lucrative empire was undertaken with such undue haste that the legalities and practicalities of the scheme took a back seat in comparison to setting up the salary structures. In fact the organisation managed to rack up debts of £86 million prior to establishing that the scheme it was set up to administer was legal in the first place.

It wasn't, and while Common Weal does not in any way support or approve of the legal context in which it was deemed illegal (the UK power-grab which the Internal Market Act represents), that legal context always remained the legal context. When this was finally challenged by the UK Government fairly late in the process, it quickly became clear the system wasn't legally compliant.

Yet this wasn't something that the increasingly hapless Scottish National Investment Bank managed to uncover in due diligence before giving Circularity Scotland a £9 million loan from the public purse, more money Scotland will now never recover.

Again, this looks exactly what it would look like if a public sector ruling class had come to an agreement to create this entity as an employment vehicle for Scotland's public sector elites without bothering to establish the logistics first.

Much of the blame for this has been placed at the door of then-Minister Lorna Slater. That criticism is fair; this happened on her watch and she was the one who gave companies guarantees (according to evidence presented in court). She should have asked to see the legal assessment. But it is ludicrous to place all the blame at her feet.

This has induced enormous costs on businesses. The court case underway is a claim by waste management company Biffa to recover £166 million of costs. That may only be the start of the losses Scottish taxpayers will have to cover. This is a very major failure by the governing classes.

Yet to date there has been no public inquiry, no proper investigation by Audit Scotland, no investigation by a parliamentary committee. There is something fundamentally wrong when you can have a fail this big without any process of arriving at a reckoning having been initiated more than two years after the event.

This is precisely why Common Weal supports a second parliamentary chamber made up of a representative selection of random Scottish citizens, a Citizens' Assembly. The politicians have the backs of the officials and the officials have the backs of the politicians. Who exactly has the backs of the public in all this?