Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:43 pm on 1 May 2018.
I thank you for those questions and I'd certainly welcome the opportunity to come along to a meeting of the cross-party group and I look forward to agreeing a date with you in future.
I think that your passion for small and medium-sized enterprises and also the recognition that you have of the fact that they can play a greater role in house building in Wales is very welcome. You'll be pleased to learn that we have our Wales property development fund and that's a fund specifically for SMEs to have access to finance, because, often, a lot of money needs to be spent upfront on all of the various planning and so on that is necessary—so, lots of money to be spent upfront and they often can't access that from normal sources. So, Welsh Government is able to step in there and provide access to finance to get those small and medium-sized enterprises building again. I'm very pleased to have increased the funding, previously, that is available to that. I'm also intending to announce a significant scheme designed to support SMEs and increase home building shortly, and I look forward to making a further announcement on that. So, there's been a little bit of a teaser in the Chamber today.
In terms of Help to Buy, or in terms of the role of the big developers, I think one of the cards that we have is the fact that Help to Buy is such a boon to that particular part of the industry, and they very much, I think, rely on Help to Buy. So, I think that we can be asking more through Help to Buy, for example the work that we've done on asking for sprinklers to be installed in new homes. There was some resistance to that at first, but, actually, because we do have a strong working relationship now through our home builders engagement board, I do think there are opportunities to start looking to the next Help to Buy to see what we should be asking there in future, because this one will come to an end at the end of this Assembly, and it's important we start thinking about what do we do in future, and also having those discussions with the Government across the border to understand what their plan for Help to Buy is, so we can have an understanding of the finance available to us, but also, having discussions, really, in terms of the context of the challenges that are facing us around climate change and our keenness to move towards zero carbon and so on.
So, I think that there is opportunity to work closely and constructively with all of the large home builders, as we did when we had that agreement with them to not sell any new-build houses as leasehold, for example. I think there are opportunities for positive working, whilst also trying to ensure that we get the maximum for our money in terms of the investment that we make.