Hello and welcome to From Memo to Law. I am Eleanor Whitcombe, and for fourteen years I wrote the kind of documents we are going to open up on this show. Today we follow a single-use plastics ban, which sounds like the simplest policy in the world. You decide bags are bad, you ban bags. In practice it took three and a half years and nine drafts, and by the end the thing that passed was quite different from the thing that was proposed. I am joined by a former director who held the pen on four of those drafts, and she is going to explain what an options paper really is, why it never recommends anything, and what sixty days of consultation changed. No scoring, no sides, just the machinery. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.