7. Will the First Minister make a statement on measures to improve the planning process for the provision of housing? OAQ(5)0197(FM)

Yes. Improvements to the planning system are being delivered through the Planning (Wales) Act 2015 and the wider positive planning improvement programme.

First Minister, rational land-use policy needs to identify land, provide good-quality pre-planning application advice, and then encourage speedy use so that we don’t have speculative land banks being built up. How will the legislation achieve these core aims?

Well, it will seek to ensure that—if we look, for example, at the local development plan process—that is done in suitable time. It will look at certain developments and remove them from local authorities in order for them to be considered more speedily, not in terms of less detail but in terms of them being considered in an appropriate timescale. Also, of course, it will ensure that, as far as developers and the public are concerned, there will be a better understanding of how the planning process works and at what point the planning process must be identified. But ultimately it’s a matter of ensuring not just that there is land available, but also that there are various different models available in terms of the type of tenure that people wish to get when they either buy or rent houses.

Local development plans, of course, are central to the process of housing provision, and these plans have been established on the basis of historical statistics as regards the level of population growth. Do you therefore agree that it is high time to develop a more effective way of gauging future demand, and also that we need more strategic collaboration between local authorities in housing provision?

There is an opportunity, of course, for local authorities to produce their own figures, if there is evidence for doing that. So, where they say that the figures are incorrect, it is possible for local authorities to say, ‘Well, we have our own figures and they are figures that are supported by evidence. Therefore, these are the figures that we want to use’. Then it’s a matter for the planning inspector as to how much weighting will be given to those figures. So, it is already possible for local authorities to use different figures if they are evidence-based.

Since the 1960s, Wales has seen many tens of thousands of new homes built that were never destined for local buyers. This has happened on a grand scale across Wales and, in particular, my home area of north-east Wales. The situation we find in rural north Wales, and particularly in parts of Flintshire, is that commuters from across the border buy up the houses as soon as they’re available, distorting the local housing markets. True, these commuters are earning their money in England and spending it in Wales, but at the same time they’re pricing locals out of housing. The situation is cleverly manipulated by planners, developers, estate agents and others in the housing trade as an argument to build yet more new housing, from which most locals are yet again excluded. Improved transport connections between north Wales—

Can you bring yourself to a question, please?

Okay. I’m coming to it now, Llywydd.

[Continues.]—and along the A55 corridor will only exacerbate the problem. Are you willing to introduce legislation to reserve a percentage of the housing stock for local buyers, and, if so, when do you propose to do so?

We already, of course, through the planning system, require developers to reserve a certain percentage of housing developments for affordable housing. One of the issues that we have to look at, I believe, is whether there is scope for intervening in the local market in the future in order to ensure that there is sufficient housing available, particularly in villages where, at the moment, there are no plans to build any houses. The reality is that the cross-border flow is there. It is in the economic interests of both the north-east of Wales and the north-west of England to work together for the prosperity of both those regions. It shows, of course, how popular Wales is as a country to live in when people want to live in Flintshire rather than in Cheshire.