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In the planning system, NPF4 and the guidance lay down the framework in which planning decisions are made, and conditions are there to ensure that there is compliance when the development is taken forward. Enforcement would be up to local planning authorities. I am not aware of specifics on that. If you have more details, it would be helpful to hear them. Cara might wish to say more.

I am trying to work out how we would do that other than if people came forward and told us that it was happening.

Yes, and the team is in place to do that. In some cases, it is not a question of resource but of taking on board all the different aspects from different stakeholders and ensuring that we have the guidance to target the right issues and cover all the different aspects that need to be covered. If there is a resource issue, we will look at that, but that is not the primary issue with regard to the production of guidance.

We would be delighted for house builders to build 25,000 units a year. In recent years, an average of 29,000 units a year have gone through the planning system. That goes back to the point that I made earlier. There is planning permission for 164,000 units that have not been built out yet. Clearly, there is a range of reasons why they have not been built, and we are doing quite a bit of work to understand the specifics of that, but a target of 25,000 homes when we are giving planning permission for 29,000 homes each year points to the fact that a lack of planning permission is not the barrier to people building houses.

The numbers are there in the minimum all-tenure housing land requirement, which is based on the housing needs assessment. With an additional factor built on top of that, the number comes to just under 20,000 homes a year and some 197,000 over the 10-year period. That is an assessment of what the need is. Each local authority has a minimum number and some have significantly higher numbers in their local development plans—in some cases, 30 or 40 per cent higher, depending on the local situation—but none has numbers below the minimum. That is what the assessed need is, but if developers want to take forward more of the plots that have already been given planning permission, we are supportive of that.

Absolutely. There will be a mixture of stuff in there. There will be stuff about flooding and some of the issues that we have talked about, such as biodiversity and woodland and so forth—some of which we might be able to resolve and some of which are harder to resolve. That also leads into the work that we are doing on the review and audit of key agencies to see how they are approaching planning and what can be done to streamline those processes.

Any planning system must ensure that the balance is right and that, where development is taking place, all the different factors are considered. We have opened that up by discussing biodiversity and environmental aspects, and NPF4 covers many other aspects, such as infrastructure and the consideration of brownfield sites. All that is considered in the planning system. When there are specific issues—you mentioned policy 22 on flooding, which is one of the policies that are being considered—the issuing of guidance and letters from me and the chief planner to offer clarification to planning authorities, when required, is an important part of the process.

I go back to the point that policies must be designed in such a way that they are applicable across the country. Local planning authorities must take into account local considerations when they look at how they apply policies. That is precisely why there is no hierarchy, because different factors could be more or less important in different parts of the country, and local planning authorities need to make such decisions.

As I said, guidance is issued as necessary to support the process when there are concerns that local authorities are not interpreting the policies in the round. That will feed into the process, and we can give more guidance through planning letters and other mechanisms to offer clarification.

Mechanisms are already in place to support the use of vacant and derelict land, although that depends on the specifics of the site, and local authorities have a big part to play, because it depends on what they see as priorities. Funding streams are in place for that. We are also looking at whether there is scope to implement other measures that would encourage brownfield site use. Where there is scope to do so, we are open to considering such measures to deliver exactly what you outlined.

Quite a bit of work has been done on that. We want to design places that support everyone who uses them, across genders. If we get that right, it has a positive effect on everybody who uses the space.

As I said, quite a bit of work is happening on that with representatives from the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, including research fellow Dr May East. I have also been involved in events with young planners where the gender-sensitive approach to planning has been given significant prominence. Young planners are very interested in that, because they see that it adds value to the place-making aspect of what they do and part of the reason that they came into planning is to make places better.

It certainly got prominence in our discussions, and it was embedded through NPF4. We are taking the opportunity to work with others on that, and to articulate it where we can.

Conceptually, the plan is for the hub to be able to leverage resources to address and unblock specific issues. The hub contains a range of elements, and it is important to recognise that they are trying to solve different problems in different sectors.

On housing, as we talked about, we have to identify stalled sites where there are specific blockages. We then need to get the right people around the table to unblock those and move them forward. Before there was a hub, everyone would be talking from their own script about why they were doing what they were doing in their part of the process, but the hubs hook all that together. Having them has added value, as they bring everyone around the table to identify how, as a collective, they can help to unblock some of the stalled sites. The housing planning hub has been quite significant, and we will continue to roll that work out to more sites.

In hydrogen, in the areas where we are rolling out the hub, we want to get ahead of the curve and understand the issues that will be pertinent to that technology as it comes into play. That technology is new to everybody, and smaller local authorities will find it more difficult to access the technical information and expertise to do that. We therefore want to address some of the issues with it up front, so that we are not learning as those applications start to come through because we will have done a lot of the learning previously. We want to identify the specialist technical resource that can support those planning applications. We are doing similar work on renewable energy. The concept has been very well received, and the execution of it has landed well, so we will continue to develop it.

On the point about how that will be resourced, we are in a learning phase just now, and we are making a difference. As we go into the next parliamentary term, we will assess that in the round and talk to stakeholders so that we can understand whether we need more investment in specific activities that the hub is carrying out in order to make a material difference.