Deposit return scheme needs UK-wide consistency, says SIBA
Four sets of rules on one island is a tax on being small, and the rest of Europe is about to meet the same problem country by country.
Our take
A deposit return scheme is a rounding error for a brewery filling a million cans a week and a genuine problem for one filling two thousand. The cost of working out what the rules are does not scale with volume, and neither does the cost of getting them wrong.
That is why this is worth reading from outside the UK. The ask is not to scrap the scheme, it is to stop running four versions of it. One nation counting glass while its neighbours do not means a brewery selling across a border keeps two systems for the same bottle, and pays twice for the privilege.
Packaging rules are landing across Europe on national timetables, which means this argument is going to be had again in half a dozen languages. The breweries that get hurt are never the ones with a compliance department. If a scheme is coming where you brew, the useful thing to find out today is whether anyone is at the table on your behalf, because the rules are being written whether small brewers turn up or not.
The reporting is Beer Today’s. The opinion above is ours, and we have not reproduced their article. Read it where it was published →