Seòmar agus comataidhean

There are a couple of points about that. That is the budget that the Government is spending on the work that it is taking forward; it is not the budget for planners and planning resource in local authorities. As I said, we had that conversation, and that is not ring-fenced.

There is a focus on the digital delivery plan, which that budget contributes to. The work there is to take forward the new payment service as a first stage, and then further digital work on the back of that. There is a plan for what gets rolled out as part of that service.

We also have the national planning improvement champion in place. It is quite a tight team, but it is very focused on bringing other partners together. It is not a big organisation. It is very much about engaging with stakeholders and identifying opportunities for improvement, which I think is the most effective way to improve planning. The point is that there are clear steps in place to deliver on digital and on the improvement work across the whole system.

You are right to raise that. I do not have data on that with me today. I can certainly commit to go and look at that more thoroughly to understand exactly what the challenges are and how addressable they are. I am pretty sure that that will be in the scope of the work that the national improvement champion for planning is taking forward to understand that whole system. You are right; we need to get the whole thing joined up and everyone working together.

There are clearly requirements or targets in terms of how long it should take for things to go through the process and for various bodies to come back on their piece of that. I would commit to do more work on drilling down a bit more into that and understanding where the bottlenecks are.

Do my officials want to say anything about that?

It certainly is—I would not doubt your figures, Mr Coffey. I appreciate your raising that point for the committee’s attention. I do not know whether my officials are across the detail on those figures.

That is an important part of it—that work is included. Communities have the opportunity to put forward their local plans for their local area, for those to be fed into planning consideration through the local development plans at planning authority level or even just to allow local people to express what they think their local area should look like, and for that be considered in the planning process. That is a key part of NPF4, both through engagement for monitoring and evaluation and through the broader work on how communities input into local plans.

I engaged with that organisation when I was on the back benches, so I am familiar with what it does. Planning Democracy has done some thorough work on specific projects, and I know that officials have met or will meet it, as a stakeholder, to talk about some of the issues. That plays into the broader NPF4 policy on the importance of biodiversity and tackling climate change as a central approach to planning. Perhaps Andy Kinnaird will provide a bit more detail on that.

Thank you very much, convener, and good morning, committee.

It is good to be back, if on the other side of the table. I welcome the opportunity to give evidence to the committee on national planning framework 4, and I look forward to discussing it with you.

As you know, I have only very recently taken on responsibility for planning. However, as Minister for Public Finance, I understand the significant contribution that planning can make to the key priorities of the new First Minister, and I am very much looking forward to my new role. Planning can be challenging, but that is also what makes it so interesting and so important to us all.

National planning framework 4 is now the cornerstone of our new planning system. It sets out a clear and ambitious future for all stakeholders to work collectively to deliver. It gives clear support for good-quality development in the right locations when that is needed. It is more than a high-level vision; the plan is backed up by national planning policies and national developments. We are committed to making NPF4 work in practice. It is not just a plan or an aspiration but a firm commitment to delivering positive change.

NPF4 has been in place for a little over a year, and it is helpful that the committee is now taking stock of where we have got to. A lot has happened over the past year. In the autumn, we published the second iteration of a delivery programme for NPF4, which includes a wide range of actions that we have already delivered and continue to take forward as the Government and in partnership with others.

This is the first national planning framework to have statutory development plan status. That makes it very influential in the planning process, but it is designed to work with local development plans, which ensure that local circumstances are taken into account.

Planning authorities are now beginning to prepare new local development plans, which will be instrumental in taking forward NPF4 in different parts of the country in a way that responds to their unique challenges and opportunities.

Planning authorities and developers have been working hard to take NPF4 forward, and it is good to hear that communities are also very interested in it. However, implementation will take time, and we are working together to understand how the policies should be applied in practice. The planning profession recognises the scale of the challenges and opportunities that are in front of us.

Throughout the past year, we have worked closely with stakeholders to identify areas in which there has been debate about how the policies should be applied in practice. That includes policies on housing, rural housing and flooding.

Climate change and biodiversity have been an important focus for guidance and good practice. There will always be different and, often, opposing views on development proposals as well as planning policies. Policies might appear to pull in different directions, but planning is all about taking into account all relevant considerations and weighing them up to make sound decisions.

A number of those giving evidence have indicated that it is still early days for NPF4. There is no doubt that it has been a significant change to the operation of the planning system in Scotland, and, of course, development timescales mean that it takes considerable time to see the impact of planning policies on the ground. However, it is clear that change is happening, and those changes will help to ensure that our long-term spatial vision is realised.

This committee played an important role in shaping NPF4—you put a lot of work into it, and your approach was open, positive and inclusive—and, of course, the Parliament as a whole was responsible for approving it.

Over the past year, NPF4 has helped to promote a more positive approach to planning, with planners proactively planning our places rather than just acting as reactive regulators. I hope that that positivity and can-do attitude will continue over the coming year, as we put in place further tools and work together to deliver economic growth and support a just transition to net zero.

I will bring in Andy Kinnaird in a minute, but I will first make a couple of points. In policy 16(f), there are exceptions that allow unallocated land to be brought into the process for local proposals, or depending on the size—I think that it is fewer than 50 units in the case of social housing. There is also a provision, which gets to the heart of the case that we have been talking about, for land to be brought into use when the existing land that is allocated has been developed. There are ways of working through this that will prevent a bottleneck in the provision of land.

Andy Kinnaird might want to give a bit more detail.

Will you explain what concerns you mean?

Those are very fair questions. One of the overarching principles of NPF4 is the requirement to deliver those homes, so it is very focused on that, as you would expect it to be. There are a number of other factors involved in that. We have talked about the different policies on climate change and biodiversity, the infrastructure-first approach and 20-minute neighbourhoods, which are all part of the mix, but it is central to NPF4 that we have a planning system in place that is able to support the delivery of those houses to deal with the situation as it stands across the country.

Although we all agree that the solution to that will involve building more houses across all tenures where they are needed across the country, the local plans are critically important. They will ensure that local communities in planning authority areas have an input on where those houses should be built, which is a key consideration. The framework is absolutely focused on taking that forward.

However, it is clear that planning is only part of the solution, because a number of factors, including commercial aspects and skills, impact on housing provision. I know that the Minister for Housing is very focused on progressing the work in that area, and I am working with him on what needs to be done to help to address some of those challenges.