4. Statement by the Leader of the House: Superfast Cymru

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:40 pm on 30 January 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:40, 30 January 2018

The Member makes an extremely important point. I've had a range of conversations already, both with the Cabinet Secretary for public services and with my colleague the Minister for Housing and Regeneration about what we can do. Certainly, a large number of house builders in Wales routinely put up less than 30 properties, but there is a range of things that can already be done: it can be included in a section 106 agreement when the council adopts the roads, for example. It's much easier to put the infrastructure in in the first place than it is to retrofit it.

We've done some stuff. I did some work on this with the late Carl Sargeant, actually, about building regulations and what can be done inside a house to facilitate some of this. One of the ironies of this is that our new insulation standards and so on mean that we create, effectively, a Faraday cage quite frequently, and so signal doesn't pass through it. So, if you're using a mobile phone inside your house, you'll be very frustrated unless it's been wired in a particular way. So, there are some big things around building regulations to make sure that we actually enforce some of the standards. That work is ongoing.

Also, my colleague Lesley Griffiths has a piece of work with planning colleagues—there's a piece of research, which we're due to receive any minute now, about mobile, and some of that also includes what we're doing for broadband infrastructure in some of our more rural communities to make sure that new-build houses are connected. But I'll also make the point I made before: if it affects the house prices that small builders can get for them, then they will take notice of that because it affects their bottom line. So, if, when you buy your new-build house in wherever, you find that's going to cost you £10,000 as part of our ultrafast connectivity scheme to connect your small business that you plan to run from your garage, then you're going to be very cross. So, I enjoin people to ask that question first and then price the house accordingly.