Maybe it’s just the fact that, after what feels like a 30-week winter, spring is finally putting in an appearance and lifting the general mood, but are we seeing green shoots emerging across our charred economic landscape?

It’s by no means the Botanic Gardens yet, but there are tentative signs that the worst of the last few years might be over.

Last week’s RBS purchasing managers’ index points to a second successive monthly rise in business activity in Scotland. At the same time, the EY ITEM Club spring forecast predicts the UK will avoid recession with the economy growing by 0.2% this year – quite an upgrade on the 0.7% contraction predicted in its winter forecast in January.

READ MORE: Ian McConnell: Sorry tale for Scotland as yet another major company faces takeover

Then there was the news that unemployment in Scotland fell to a record low of 3% between December and February. And official figures now show a record 2.4 million workers on Scottish payrolls – up 50,000 on February 2020.

It also seems that small business confidence has turned a corner and is back on the up, possibly buoyed by hopes that we’ve seen off the worst of the inflationary spike.

READ MORE: Ian McConnell: UK has good claim to ‘sick man of Europe’ title

Of course, this is all relative. Some of these figures merely represent improvements on a thoroughly unimpressive position. And, behind every headline stat, there’s a longer, more complicated story.

But progress is progress. The challenge now, though, is to build on this, press on and drive growth. If overall trading conditions are a bit more stable, now is the time to free up businesses to take full advantage and get trading, hiring and investing.

READ MORE: New routes and more flights from Scottish airport, with 'biggest-ever' programme

We took a step towards that in the Scottish Parliament last week, where we may have witnessed a watershed moment in the way the Scottish Government interacts with business. Granted, it might not have been the biggest political drama of the last seven days, but the First Minister’s statement on his government’s priorities contained a lot that deserves our attention.

Most notably, after months of sustained campaigning from the Federation of Small Businesses and other industry bodies, Mr Yousaf announced a postponement of the much-maligned deposit return scheme (DRS).

Furthermore, he sent the equally controversial anti-alcohol advertising and promotion plans, which I think many now accept should never have seen light of day, “back to the drawing board”.

In doing so, the First Minister signalled there will be a renewed focus on meaningful engagement with business to guard against similar episodes in the future.

This will be most encouraging for Scotland’s small business community, who, absolutely correctly, the First Minister recognised as the “backbone of the economy”. As I’ve said before, if the DRS cloud has a silver lining, it’s that it should serve as a warning of the real-world consequences of not thinking through the practicalities of policies. It’s appropriate, then, that the first test of this new approach to business engagement will be the review and reform of DRS.

This review needs to address some of the fundamental questions that have been raised about the scheme for the last five years and that are yet to be satisfactorily answered.

For smaller producers and sellers, these remain the cost, space and time the scheme will demand. Equally, the unintended consequences of any mitigations also need a thorough airing. There may be questions around how this scheme might interact with the forthcoming rules that will cover the rest of the UK. I’d also imagine that those representing other groups would want to make representations about how the poorest, those least likely to have cars, those furthest from return points and others will be affected.

In other words, we need to use the hard-won breathing space between now and the scheme’s new planned launch date of March 2024 to undertake a wholesale analysis of how it is designed, and how it will actually work in practice. Where there are issues, they must be openly acknowledged and it will be incumbent on both business and government to put forward suggestions for smoothing them out.

If this approach works for DRS, it’s a model we can apply to new regulations and the implementation of policy right across the board. And that would truly be a game-changer.

Maybe we have turned a corner after all.

Colin Borland is director of devolved nations for the Federation of Small Businesses