Small and Medium-sized House Building Enterprises

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:21 pm on 23 January 2019.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:21, 23 January 2019

Yes, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't be able to do that. I don't think we can do it at the moment, and, frankly, I haven't asked the question at that level of detail, but I will—I'm very happy to do so. But yes, we absolutely will have a record of where we've lent the money and on what sites, and clearly what we're looking to do here is two things simultaneously: we're looking to stimulate the SME sector in Wales, because at the moment we've got a switch around from 15 years ago, so we've got very large house builders doing most of the house building and not so many SMEs, and we'd very much like to see home-grown SMEs stepping into that space. We'd like to assist with that, and we know that the big problems that they face are around cash flow and with expertise. So, we're looking to put various forms of support in place, as I said. There's the property development fund, which is a facility loan from the development bank, for example, that would allow people to overcome their cash flow problems in circumstances they wouldn't otherwise be able to. We have the stalled sites fund, which has a range of other expertise around it to try and sort out some of the planning and infrastructure problems around that. I actually had a meeting only this morning with officials supporting the Infrastructure Commission for Wales around some of the things the commission might do around planning for infrastructure around Wales—all with a view to bringing forward more sites, to making them viable, and to making sure that our SME builders take advantage of it and, as I said in response to Mark Reckless, trying to be as innovative as possible in that space. So it's not a one-size-fits-all approach at all, it's just trying to fit the finance and the scheme around whoever comes forward to take advantage of it, with a view to getting as wide a range of people as possible to do either a self-build or a build of four or five houses that would be possible in a local community where the big house builders are just not interested.