Chamber and committees

That is helpful—so it is not necessarily useful for us to compare with the rest of the UK, because of the different legislation.

I have a final general question. Could we have predicted that the housing emergency was coming? Chris Birt was just talking about the need for affordable housing and such things. Could we have predicted it? I can see that Ken Gibb is getting some thoughts together.

Great—thank you very much for that. I will bring in Fulton MacGregor again.

Fulton, are you there?

How about in Moray?

Great; thanks very much. I believe that Fulton MacGregor has some questions specifically for North Lanarkshire Council.

Does anybody else want to come in on whether we could have predicted the housing emergency?

That is certainly something for us to reflect on.

I will come back to the vision for Scotland’s housing. We have agreed that we are in a housing emergency, so how will we know when we are out of the emergency? What would that look like?

That was a helpful list of things that we might see in the future. Does anyone have anything to add to that?

The next item on our agenda is to take evidence from Ivan McKee, who is the Minister for Public Finance, on four Scottish statutory instruments. The Minister is joined by Scottish Government officials Kristen Anderson, who is head of development planning; Ruairidh Anderson, who is the senior policy manager; and William Carlin, who is the senior policy manager. I welcome the minister and his officials to the meeting and invite the minister to make a short opening statement.

I return to my first question; I want to dig in there a bit more. Why do we need to bring in flexibility? What kind of situation are you imagining where an LDP would need to be amended?