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I very much hope not, because of the needs of the broader public sector landscape. It is my role to ensure that we drive change and make things more efficient and effective, taking money from the back office and freeing it up for the front line, simplifying the landscape, making it clearer who is responsible for what and delivering better public services for the people of Scotland as a consequence.

The commissioner landscape is a small subset of that. As I said, it is not the Government’s role to interfere or to conduct a review of the commissioner landscape per se, but the Government can absolutely take a view on whether there should be new commissioners and how they would support the broader ecosystem.

The committees review and scrutinise the work of the commissioners and a range of other things, including, rightly, the work of Government. It is not up to Government to say how committees should scrutinise and carry out that work. If that SPCB-sponsored commissioner feels that the Parliament and its committees have not scrutinised his work effectively, that is a conversation to bring to the attention of the Parliament and the committees.

Yes.

As with everything else that happens in the legislative programme, if legislation creates a commissioner or some other piece of work that needs to happen, that is considered and scrutinised through the financial memorandum that is part of the parliamentary process, and then the whole Parliament takes a view on it. The Government clearly has a significant influence on that, depending on the issue. Then there is a budget process where the resource requirement in the relevant parts of the public sector landscape is assessed to understand what resources bodies will need to carry out the functions that are asked of them. That is an on-going process.

Well, clearly if a commissioner has not been set up, there is nothing to evaluate other than what the proposal is, what the financial memorandum is and what the expectation is.

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.

This policy is highlighted in NPF4. We might go on to talk about this in a bit more detail—I hope that I am doing the details of this justice—but the process for allocating housing land has changed under NPF4. Before, it was all about having to hit a number, which encouraged people to bring forward other land that was not in the plan, and that has changed to a process in which other land will be released if you are using the land that is already in the plan—if that makes sense.

That is quite an important distinction, and it should drive developers and others to make use of the land that is in the plan. Clearly, a lot of that will be brownfield land, based on local development plans. The recent court case has reinforced that policy, although as I have said, the window for the appeal process is still open and we will see what transpires.

When we join all of that up, we can see that we are in a much better place than we were. We have a firm direction of travel as well as local flexibility that allows for local circumstances to be taken into account.

Andy, do you have anything to add?

I will ask officials to comment on that specific issue, but it is important to recognise that NPF4 is clear that the local place plans do not need to be all-singing, all-dancing documents; they can just be a statement of what the local community thinks is important to include in its local place. That can be fed in at different stages in the process, so there is quite a bit of flexibility to make the process more accessible. However, I absolutely recognise that different communities will have different levels of volunteer expertise available to put plans together, and that support with that is required.

We do not have the data, so the key is to get it. As we get the housing land audit guidance in place and get data back from planning authorities, we will be able to see where the land is sitting and for how long it has been sitting. That will give us a better perspective, so that we can understand what is in the pipeline, how long it has been there and perhaps what the reasons are for that.