Residential Development Applications

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:52 pm on 23 January 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:52, 23 January 2019

Yes. A good local development plan should plan not only for its housing need, but for the infrastructure needs associated with the housing need. Clearly, that is a range of services, you know, from prosaic highway infrastructure, to digital connectivity, to access to GPs and schools, local bus services, sustainable transport, and so on. It’s a very complex picture. Each place should be planning to have its place properly served by its plan, and I do think councils should be very ambitious and innovative in setting out their requirements of developers through the various agreements they make through the planning process—section 106s, for one example, or the Highways Act agreements that they make, and so on—to maximise the benefit to the local population of particular developments and to ensure that they don’t concentrate everything in one area to the detriment of the other services. Indeed, that’s the purpose of the LDP—to go through an inquiry stage in which local people get to have their say in that way. And I’m very pleased that 'Planning Policy Wales' has focused on place making and has put that at the heart of our national planning policy, because I think that is in line with the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the way that we want to take Wales forward into the future.