Julie James: Yes, I couldn't agree more. It's quite possible for private house builders to build near zero-carbon homes. Year 2 of our innovative housing programme was opened up to private companies in order to demonstrate that they can do it, and they have indeed demonstrated that they can do it, and we have a large number of houses across Wales, supported by the IHP programme, demonstrating different...
Julie James: Yes, there are several good projects. I visited the step-down project only very recently and spoke to a gentleman living there who was extremely enthusiastic about all of the benefits of having gone into a much more sustainable house, including the community around him. So, it's important to remember that these are people's homes. It's not just about the fabric of the building; it's about the...
Julie James: Last month, I introduced the Local Government and Elections (Wales) Bill. This Bill includes provisions to remove the prohibition of most local authority employees standing for election in the authority in which they are employed.
Julie James: So, the Bill does two things. It removes from the restriction a whole group of local authority employees who don't have any part in the political process—so, school employees and so on. It keeps a salary cap for those employed in the centre of the local authority and obviously for those who are involved in the political process in advising committees and statutory office holders, and so on....
Julie James: We are speaking with all 11 councils that have a housing revenue account, including Carmarthenshire, about the support they require to boost local council house building at scale and pace. These are one-to-one meetings to help provide bespoke support to each individual authority, and discussions with Carmarthenshire have been very positive.
Julie James: Yes, in principle, absolutely. We've been working with Carmarthenshire and a number of other authorities to do just that. So, there is a range of schemes in place: acquisitions of new properties—so, as long as they're built to the right standards, the authority can acquire them. I want to pay tribute to Llinos in Ynys Môn, actually, who was the one who put the idea into my head quite a...
Julie James: So, 'Planning Policy Wales' has changed—this time last year, in fact—to emphasise placemaking and very much part of placemaking is the building of mixed communities—so, a mixed community with a load of mixed tenures in it. We want to encourage local people to stay in their local communities—very keen to explore different ways of getting mixed tenure arrangements in there: shared...
Julie James: I detect a theme today. The Welsh Government is committed to taking forward a comprehensive package of legislative reforms to improve the safety of homes in Wales. We have already made improvements to the current building safety system by bringing forward amendments to building regulations that will ban combustible cladding from high-rise residential buildings.
Julie James: The Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016, which this Senedd passed back then, once implemented, will require landlords to ensure their dwelling is fit for human habitation. It requires Welsh Ministers to make regulations on determining whether a building is fit for human habitation, and that includes a requirement for working carbon monoxide alarms, smoke alarms and electrical safety testing in...
Julie James: This Government is committed to tackling homelessness in all its forms. In response to the first report of the homelessness action group, our immediate focus is on reducing rough-sleeping across Wales this winter. We are working closely with the local authorities with the most acute needs, including Swansea.
Julie James: We are committed to ensuring that, as a responsible nation, Wales deals effectively with our non-recyclable waste in a way that ensures that it does not become a problem to our environment nor is exported elsewhere. Incineration of our residual waste is a transitionary step as we move away from non-recyclable materials.
Julie James: Our 'Child Poverty Progress Report 2019' published yesterday shows that the Welsh Government’s actions to create a strong economy and tackle worklessness, improve skills, tackle inequalities and increase household income are making a difference to mitigate the impact of poverty in the face of almost a decade of UK Government austerity and welfare cuts.
Julie James: Yes. The household projections, local housing market assessments and well-being plans are essential parts of the evidence base for local development plans. The scale of housing growth is a matter for local planning authorities to determine, reflecting the issues they have identified.
Julie James: Well, thank you for that. As Llyr Gruffydd knows, it's much more complicated than that. He's absolutely right in saying that Wrexham had its original LDP rejected as a result of the way that it had done its housing land allocations policy. While the council does have an extant unitary development plan in place, it has expired for the purposes of calculating the five-year housing land supply....
Julie James: Yes, and the answer to your question is to look at the complex set of instructions that local authorities must follow in setting the various things. So, we can look at the housing numbers projections, for example, and the LDP has got to take into account a number of things in coming to its housing land supply and doing that, as I've just said to Llyr. But we also have, for example—. We're...
Julie James: We've asked for more evidence as to the hardship that having the biggest uplift in any local government settlement that they've ever had would bring. And you can hear from the way I've answered your question that I'm a little sceptical about that. The purpose of a floor is obviously to prevent people from having to make enormous cuts in services that they would otherwise have had to make...
Julie James: I think it's a fair point, to be honest. It's early days in some ways for the integrated care fund, and we want to make sure that we are getting the kinds of ambitious projects coming forward. And to do that we do need a good set of cross-working across sectors to make sure that we hit all the right things that we want the integrated care fund to do. And that's quite complex, because, as Mark...
Julie James: It is a matter for the council, but I understand your concern. I don't know this—because you'll know that I haven't been in work for the last week or so, but I don't know whether the public services ombudsman has raised anything as a result of the reports with the Government. So, I will look at that. We would expect, if there's a pattern emerging that the ombudsman was concerned about, for...
Julie James: Yes. Because Help to Buy has helped people buy a house that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to buy by assisting them with a deposit scheme that they wouldn't have otherwise had access to. And we count affordable homes in that wider sense as homes that are available to people that they wouldn't have had access to them unless they'd had Government support. So, that's the short explanation.
Julie James: I don't disagree at all that the definition of 'affordable' is unhelpful and rather more flexible than we'd like in terms of what we're trying to do. And we've been very upfront about the numbers in terms of that, because I'm not disagreeing with the fundamental premise of what you're saying, which is, actually, we should build social housing or homes that actually are within people's range...
