1. Will the Minister make a statement on the Self-Build Wales programme? OAQ53243

Yes. I am very pleased that, last week, the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd announced £40 million for Self Build Wales. Developed in collaboration with partners across the sector, I am confident this innovative scheme, the first of its kind, will be a huge success when it launches properly later this year.

I welcome the Minister to her post. I'm pleased to be able to start by congratulating Welsh Government on what strikes me as a really positive and on the face of it quite generous terms to this initiative. I just wonder, the press release said that loans would be 'repayment free' until the new home was complete and mortgaged, it then says:

'approved applicants can reserve a plot by providing a 25% deposit on the plot cost. The Welsh Government through the Development Bank of Wales will provide the rest of the funding.'

Does that mean that they only pay 25 per cent of the land cost and then all of the construction cost can be borrowed from the development bank? When you say 'repayment free', does that also mean interest free, or will there be interest that then has to be paid back after it's finished?

The scheme is quite complex, and we are initially starting off on publicly owned land. So, there'll be a conversation to be had about the value of that land and how it's valued for the scheme. What we're doing is we're basically looking to smooth out the process for people who wouldn't have the resource to do that, so we're looking to have plots that are ready to build on so that they'd be offered to a self-builder with a lot of the usual planning considerations and all the rest of it ironed out.

We're looking to have the scheme offer, just to start off with—I have ambitions to be able to take it further than this, but just to start off with—some template houses. So, people can customise them, but broadly we will be able to get the planning consents in place and so on. So, it's not just the loan finance that we're talking about, it's actually providing people with a plot that's ready to go. A lot of that cost will have been taken out of the project in the first place.

There are some conversations to be had around the specifics depending on the circumstances of the individual in question, how much equity they bring in the first place, what that triggers by way of loan finance and so on, which will need to be ironed out, and will be very individual, depending on the plot, its value, the value that the person brings to it, whether they're going to self-build it in the actual sense of putting the bricks up themselves or whether they will need to fund a developer, and so on. So, lots of nuance. We're very excited about it, but it will depend on where the plot is, and so on. I'm very sorry to give you a lawyer's answer, but 'it depends' is the overarching answer to that. But to be reassuring, all of the things that you enumerated are the things we're looking to see, but they will be very individual, depending on the circumstances of the plot and the person coming forward.