Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 18 October 2017.

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Photo of Mr Simon Thomas Mr Simon Thomas Plaid Cymru 1:39, 18 October 2017

I think they have engaged because they were concerned, to be honest, that you were suggesting so many changes in such a short time frame. This is not to criticise some of the individual ideas in some of these consultations; it’s the way that your Government is now approaching consultation—a constant stream of new initiatives and no sign of actually delivering on previous ones. So, let’s look at one that you have now just published last week. You finally published the new technical advice note 20, which is planning and the Welsh language. That took a year and a half. So, I do wonder how long 56 consultations with 15,000 responses is going to take. But we did get the TAN 20 last week. In the TAN 20, you say that you want a local-development-plan-led system, and TAN 20 in turn says that the best way of assessing the potential cumulative effects of development on the Welsh language across the local development plan area is to consider the use of the Welsh language during the preparation of the LDP itself. So, you want an LDP-led system and you say that the best way to consider the Welsh language and the effect on the Welsh language is during the preparation of the LDP. In which case, why is it that consideration of the Welsh language is not a mandatory part of preparing and reviewing the whole LDP and simply just one of the different assessments?