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I would need to check the meeting date, but it is in the diary. What guidance on the bill will be available for stakeholders and members of the public?
On quite a narrow but very important point, in essence you could not plan the schedule of work sufficiently early because you did not know the dates. Although you knew the drop-dead date for completion, you could not start on the activities until you had things from the UK Government.
Delaying a report until the best-before or use-by date allows the product to go through the market to the consumer, whereas an earlier report would have prevented it from reaching the consumer.
I endeavoured to emphasise that we face not only constrained resources in the future as a consequence of the recession, but the build-up of commitments that have not yet been fully funded.
The type of discussion that has been held to date, such as that which took place between Malcolm Reed and the committee at your away day in the summer recess, is indicative of the Government's determination to ensure that our officials are fully engaged in the committee's work.
As Philip Hogg said, we have built only about half of the Scottish Government target of 30,000 affordable homes, which was set prior to the recession. The industry collapsed to the extent that it was building only 10,000 or 11,000 homes.
We do not think that that is reasonable, especially in a recession. There are fine judgments to be made about whether public bodies use their scarce resources to spend money on voluntarily registering large tracts of Scotland.