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Thank you for those perspectives.

So it gets triggered at the UK level.

I move on to local authority debt. Professor Heald, I will get a sense from you first and then go to others if they want to come in. Do you think that the £1 billion increase in local authority debt between 2021-22 and 2022-23 gives rise to sustainability concerns? At what point does council borrowing become a problem? As you pointed out, councils have increased their level of borrowing in recent years.

You mentioned the council tax freeze, so I bring in Pam Gosal, who is interested in that area.

I bring in Fulton MacGregor, who also joins us online. He has a number of questions.

Who wants to come in on that one?

Are there any other views on the demands of local government workforce settlements?

We will take those questions on board and see what we can do. I note, though, the comments that were made earlier about the desire for decisions to be made at the most local level, and that is the direction of travel, in the good words of Donald Dewar. Perhaps an answer lies in there.

We move on to financial sustainability and different income-raising options, and I invite Willie Coffey to start us off.

I should perhaps make us a little bit aware of the time. We are a little over halfway through our questions. I think that we will be fine, but it would be great if we could keep our questions and answers a bit more succinct. I have to say, though, that we are having a very rich discussion.

I am going to bring in Collette Stevenson next, then Pam Gosal and Mark Griffin.

I believe that various organisations, such as the Electoral Reform Society, are working on citizens assemblies.

Thank you very much for that.

We have gone over time. I feel that it will be frustrating if we have this conversation next year. What has happened to the local government review that was in train but seems to have been lost in the weeds somewhere, and the “Democracy matters” process? Were they not about the third sector, local government and national Government trying to take the crowd with them? That was the process, but was it useful? Do we need to find the fire in that again or is it time to do something else? It feels as though we keep doing those reviews. As we have heard today, we keep writing different papers.