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Do you think that those glitches are around the need for guidance on the intention? It seems that our local authority has moved away from that and is potentially thwarting rural revitalisation.

Great, thank you. I will bring Pam Gosal back in.

I am curious about how the existing national outcomes, and potentially new ones, relate to NPF4. Minister, I had conversations with your predecessor on the gender-sensitive planning work that is being done in Scotland. Are you across that work? It seems to me that it could help us with the new national outcomes and feed through all those aspects.

Are you seeing the connections to the national outcomes through that work?

Thanks very much for that. I have a couple of questions, which I will package together. As we all understand, it is early days for NPF4, but it would be interesting to hear any particular highlights from the 14 months since we adopted it that you would like to outline to the committee. You mentioned a few things in your opening statement, but will you pick out some aspects that would be good for us to be aware of? Also, what is the Scottish Government planning to do over the next 12 months to support the delivery of NPF4 policy priorities? Those opening questions will set the scene for the session.

I notice that a consultation on masterplan consent areas is happening at the moment. Perhaps this is a bit too detailed for you, but how will that work with NPF4? Obviously, you will get a result from and some feedback on the consultation process, but how will that work with or support NPF4 delivery?

Gordon MacDonald has a supplementary question.

Before I bring in Mark Griffin, I have a couple of questions on those two areas. In terms of the resourcing of local authorities, obviously there is the local authority planning department, but there are also the statutory consultees, who seem to be quite underresourced. Again, talking to planning departments, it seems that it can be quite a long time before a statutory consultee will get back to them. That is maybe going beyond the planning department—you would be starting to talk about NatureScot or SEPA—but I think that we need to recognise that planning is part of a bigger ecosystem and that lots of different bodies feed into it. How do we support the process there? I know that there are some thoughts around streamlining some of the processes, but how do we help the statutory bodies to contribute more swiftly?

We have talked about new entrants and bringing more people in to planning, as well as training people who are already in the system, but a concern has come up in our evidence sessions about retaining people in the public sector, because it can be a much more attractive offer to work for a private company. What can we do about that?

Brilliant.

Willie Coffey has a supplementary question on the budget.