Questions now from the party leaders. The Plaid Cymru leader, Adam Price.

Diolch, Llywydd. Leader of the house, a month ago, you told us that a meaningful and binding vote on the 14-mile M4 relief road would be taken here this week. Yet, hiding behind the inspectors' report, which your Government received in September, you remain paralysed by division among your backbenchers, by the opposition of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales and by the First Minister's seeming inability or unwillingness to make this call. Doesn't this prevarication over the biggest investment decision your Government has ever had to make typify the gridlock at the heart of your Government? 

On the contrary, I think your question shows a complete lack of understanding of the seriousness of a quasi-judicial decision. Llywydd, I have outlined to this house the constitutional position on this matter several times. I'm more than happy to do it again. It is absolutely paramount that the legal advice received at the same time as the local inquiry is what any First Minister making that decision takes into account. That advice is not yet ready. It is important that the advice is prepared correctly. Speed is not of the essence; accuracy is of the essence. When that advice has been prepared, the First Minister will be able to take that preliminary decision on the traffic Orders and the acquisition of land Orders, and then, after that, we will be able to look at the affordability issues, and it will be at that point that a vote can take place in this place. This is not now going to happen under this particular administration, but I said only last week that I would be recommending to any successor of mine that that commitment should be honoured, and I've been assured by all three candidates that it will be.

Leader of the house, are you able to say now, if you feel comfortable, that the by-now £1.7 billion investment proposed for the relief road will largely benefit England? Let me quote you some statistics—they're contained in your own Government's wider economic impact assessment of the M4 corridor around Newport, published in 2016. It predicted that, by 2037, the relief road would have the biggest extra annual impact on GVA within Wales, as we might expect, in Newport and Monmouthshire—£12.3 million. However, for Somerset and south Gloucestershire, the impact was larger—£13.5 million. For Cardiff and the Vale it was only £1.3 million. Even for the Gwent Valleys it was only £1.3 million, and for the centre of the Valleys it was a paltry £0.8 million. Yet, for Bristol, it's £7 million—more than all of those put together. Are you proud that the biggest investment you will ever make, and for which Welsh taxpayers will be paying decades into the future for, by your own Government's admission, will benefit England more than Wales? 

As I said, this is not the point in time at which the Assembly should make any of its opinions known on those or any other issues. There is a process that needs to be gone through. There is a very strict statutory process for what can be taken into account in making the Orders. I've outlined it, I think, ad nauseam, it's fair to say, Llywydd. I can do it again, if you want me to. This is not the time to discuss the issues that the Member raises. I don't know how I can make that any clearer. 

The decision you're referring to is a planning decision. I was asking you simply whether you think it's right that we are saddling future generations in Wales not just with a huge massive negative legacy in terms of the environment, but whether we should actually be using our own money to give a competitive advantage to the nation next door. Now, leader of the house, can I suggest a rather neat and exceedingly cheap solution to the whole problem? That's simply to partially close the junction 26 High Cross interchange next to the Brynglas tunnels. This would mean closing the eastbound slip road and the westbound exit slip road. At one stroke, it's estimated this would reduce the traffic through the tunnels by as much as 40 per cent. At the same time, we could use some of the money saved to help Newport become a less car-dependent city. Do you agree that an up-to-date study into this idea, and, indeed, complementary changes to the road network south of Newport, and, crucially, investment in our public transport network would be a good way out of the M4 impasse in which you are clearly stuck?

So, again, I don't think we are at an impasse. We're at a particular point in a decision-making process that is extremely complex. The Member's pointing out some of the complexities. I have not seen the report of the local planning inspector. That report needs to be accompanied by the appropriate advice. That needs to be taken by the appropriate decision maker, and, at that point, I'm sure that Members will be able to put forward a number of points. He's raised some of them today. There are points from across the Chamber, I'm sure, that will come forward in the debate at the appropriate time. Now is not the appropriate time. 

Leader of the opposition—Paul Davies.

Diolch, Llywydd. Leader of the house, is Wales building enough homes?

So, as you know, we have a large number of commitments on housing that the Government is extremely proud of. We've taken steps, for example, to prioritise social housing, support for the most vulnerable, and protecting our existing social stock. I, personally, am very proud that this is a Government that took steps to end the right to buy, ensuring we do not lose any more precious affordable housing in Wales. I come from a council estate in north Swansea that has largely turned from social housing into really very poor private sector housing. That is a step that I abhor, and which the Conservative Government foisted on Wales. I'm very proud we've been able to turn back that tide. 

Well, clearly, Wales is not building enough homes, leader of the house. Let me remind you that your Government has been responsible for housing policies since 2006, yet what you have done so far is completely inadequate. The new housing completion rate consistently falls short of the targets set by the Welsh Government with just 6,000 homes being built in the last 12 months: 19 per cent fewer than the year before, as opposed to the target of 8,700. Now, according to Professor Holman, a leading expert on housing who your Government commissioned to look into this issue, Wales needs an additional 12,000 new homes per year between 2011 and 2031 to avoid people living in unsatisfactory housing.

Now, in 2015, the Federation of Master Builders argued that Wales needs 14,000 more homes a year to keep up with demand. Whatever projection you take, it is quite clear that the Welsh Government is falling very, very far behind anything like an adequate rate of house building. As a matter of fact, the last time any Government met the real demand for new homes in Wales was in the mid-1990s by a Conservative Government. You've been responsible for housing policy for the last 12 years. Do you agree that you are failing to build enough suitable homes to house our nation now and in the future? 

Well, I couldn't disagree with him more. We've committed to deliver 20,000 affordable homes during this term of Government, and we're confident this will be delivered in partnership with the housing sector. That investment includes our support for Help to Buy, through which our £460 million investment has thus far helped over 17,800 applicants to access home ownership. We recognise the potential of the small and medium-sized enterprise sector to build more if they have access to the finance needed, and, therefore, the Development Bank of Wales provides £70 million for SMEs through our property development fund and stalled sites fund.

I will say to him this: if you think that the solution to building more homes is to have a bonfire of development control regulations across Wales, then I could not disagree with you more, and it's very obvious, if you look at the evidence, that your Tory colleagues on local planning authorities also agree with me and not you. 

Leader of the house, you're not just failing on home building; your anti-aspirational policy to scrap the right to buy has removed a vital rung from the property ladder for many families here in Wales. Even for first-time buyers, very few will actually benefit from your land transaction tax relief policy because the average house price in Wales now is higher than the £180,000 threshold. You have failed to bring into use Wales's 27,000 or more empty homes, 4,057 of which are social homes, and you are failing to unlock the potential of Wales's small and medium-sized construction firms, with just five companies in Wales building 80 per cent of our new homes. Now, yesterday, my colleague David Melding put forward an ambitious plan for home building here in Wales: to see 100,000 homes built over the next 10 years in Wales, to give the housing crisis the priority it needs by creating a Cabinet Secretary for housing and planning, and to scrap the land transaction tax for first-time buyers on properties up to £250,000. Leader of the house, will you now endorse these proposals and work with us to truly reignite house building and home ownership here in Wales?

I read with interest the proposals. They seem to me to—. The red tape that was mentioned therein is, of course, the precious protection for our green belts around our cities, and protection for our beautiful countryside. I do not think that scrapping planning and development control is the way forward. I do think, as I said, that maximising the number of homes that can be built through investment means access to decent finance, which your Government, at UK level, has singularly failed to be able to deliver through any of the means that it's tried.

I do also think that—. You didn't mention anything about social or affordable housing—no surprises there. I can tell you now that the large majority of people who have bought their own homes, certainly in the area that I come from—those homes are now in the hands of private rented landlords. That is not a route onto the housing ladder; that is a route down into poor-quality housing, which this Government has fought very hard to maintain throughout the sectors. I don't think you're on good grounds here, because a Government, at UK level, that failed to say that houses should be fit for human habitation is not a good look for any party.

Leader of the UKIP group—Gareth Bennett.

Diolch, Llywydd. A few weeks ago, I tasked the First Minister with some questions on the issue of working from home. I think it's a valid issue for us to be talking about here in the Assembly, because there is the ever-increasing problem of congested roads, which, of course, is part of what Adam was talking about earlier. So, we do have to look at ways of getting traffic off the roads. Now, you have a personal input into this, leader of the house, in your role overseeing the digital broadband roll-out across Wales, although, of course, you're here in a different capacity today—I understand that. But, thinking about those things, are you optimistic that your digital broadband roll-out could lead to much greater numbers of people being able to work from home in the near future?

Yes, absolutely. We've got superfast broadband to over 733,000 premises across Wales—that's broadband at over 24 Mbps for around 60,000 of those and over 30 Mbps for the vast majority. The average speed in that roll-out is around 80.5 of fibre to cabinet and up in the three hundreds for fibre to the premises. Wales now has the largest penetration of fibre-to-the-premises properties anywhere in western Europe. We have a good strategy for getting to the remaining properties, including our excellent community strategies, one of which has just won a pan-European award for the community effort that they put in, backed by the Welsh Government's ultrafast voucher scheme. So, the simple answer to his question is: yes, I'm very pleased that the broadband roll-out is happening.

It needs to be accompanied with rather more than just the infrastructure, though, and we follow it with a business exploitation programme, which has been hugely successful in getting SMEs to exploit the connectivity that we've provided to them. A recent report by a well-known university of ours shows SMEs very startlingly the difference in their bottom line if they take full advantage of that new access and if they don't, and we have a business exploitation programme specifically to allow that. We've also been pushing, via the Fair Work Commission, a series of twenty-first century working practices based on outputs and not hours worked, and those will all contribute to people being able to work more frequently from home. 

There are a range of other measures that can be put in place to assist people to work from home. I think the Llywydd is going to be impatient with me if I start to enumerate them here, as it would take me about an hour.

That sounds encouraging. I may give you another opportunity. Now, obviously, the point you made was, of course, not just infrastructure, so I was glad to hear about your business exploitation programme. Thinking specifically about the issue of getting companies to encourage more flexible working, and particularly working from home, are there ways in which you believe the Welsh Government could be offering incentives, such as financial incentives, for instance, to companies in Wales to encourage more working from home? Could the Government set targets for this and offer incentives to companies to reach those targets?

Yes, we've explored all of those options for twenty-first century working as part of our economic action plan, underneath our 'Prosperity for All' overarching strategy. We're in close communication with a large number of our anchor and regionally important companies around different working practices. I have to say, I've seen some excellent examples of that around Wales, and we have some real flag wavers for that kind of practice. We also have a scheme for the Welsh Government of distributed offices and working from home. We've invested a considerable amount of money in modern IT kit to enable that, and I'm very pleased that in this we're a very serious role model.

Thank you for the details of that initiative. Now, another thing I know that you have been involved with in the past is travel plan co-ordinators, who were supposed to be working with employers across Wales to encourage sustainable travel, and they were supposed to be encouraging things like car sharing and video-conferencing as well as flexible working and working from home. I have struggled to find much information on these travel plan co-ordinators. There does seem to be a lack of information in the public domain on the success, or otherwise, of this scheme so far. So, could you do anything to enlighten us on this, either today or, failing that, perhaps on a date in the near future?

Yes, we're looking at regional co-ordinators across Wales to work with clusters of companies to make sure that we get the best economic impact for Welsh Government spending, and indeed for the spending that the companies themselves put in place, and that has a range of items associated with it, including, for example, for some tourist industries, sharing back-office functions, because it's clear that an HR function is very difficult to sustain in a lifestyle company. So, we've had extensive conversations around Wales with different clusters of companies about taking forward twenty-first century working practices. I'm happy to provide the Member with more—if he wants to write in and tell me exactly what he wants, I'm happy to provide him with more information, but there is a very large range of initiatives in place.