Dundee’s housing emergency was debated on Monday night at the City Council’s Neighbourhood Services Committee. There were no demonstrations or outbursts in the Chamber, just a polite man from Shelter Scotland telling us we could do so much better.

The Administration Group dropped its opposition to declaring a housing emergency, but also drew back from adopting the Shelter Scotland/Coalition plan in full, instead referring the emergency to the Housing Best Value Group which includes representatives of tenants and trades unions amongst others.

Why do we have a housing emergency? During the debate, we heard that the Right to Buy had removed thousands of council houses from social renting; that private rents are too high and the cost of living crisis is to blame, and all these things are true. We just don’t have enough affordable houses.

People are living differently. We now have 4,000 more households in Dundee than we had in 2000. 41% of households are single people. And the population is rising.

But we should also consider the effect of our own, council, policies, over the last 25 years or so. Since 2000, the Labour and SNP administrations demolished 6,500 council houses. As far as I can tell from conflicting figures, we only replaced 3,500 of them. Some of those houses needed demolished, but we overdid it, declaring perfectly viable homes “surplus to requirements”.

There are actions we can take now, and I hope the Housing Best Value Group will have a chance to discuss them. For example, 44% of the housing offers we make are refused. This leads to wasted time for officers and houses lying empty for longer. Some other landlords use a “choice-based lettings system” where people look at a list and pick the houses they want. Then they are offered on the basis of need. It’s a big change but it would make sense.

Some of the 41% of single people I mentioned are living in three-bedroom social rented homes, where they brought up their families. We give them under occupancy points, but perhaps we could do more.

Is there any good reason not to put single people underoccupying a big house right to the top of the housing queue, in the areas of their choice, so we can release that house for a homeless family?

Another thought. New legislation makes it easier to manage joint tenancies, in that each tenant will find it easier to leave if they need to move for any reason. Maybe we need to take on the difficult challenge of managing socially rented shared tenancies to enable some of those single households to live with others. That could have benefits in reducing social isolation, too.

Finally, well done to the Shelter Scotland-sponsored Coalition of local people and organisations who made us acknowledge the scale of the problems we face. Now please put pressure on Westminster and Holyroood, because without substantial sums of their money, we will never be able to build the houses we need.