2. How is the Welsh Government meeting the need for social housing? OAQ53666

Thank you for the question. An increased supply of rented social housing is essential. We will meet our 20,000 affordable homes target, and the majority of these homes will be social housing for rent. I will go further and support councils to take advantage of the new conditions to build new council housing at scale and pace.

Minister, we both agree that we need much more social housing in Wales, but it isn't just the new homes that are important; it's the public services that surround the communities that we create, and austerity is posing severe problems for local authorities in doing that—so much so that many new facilities like playgrounds are only being built through section 106 agreements. This weekend, we've seen the flaws in such an approach with the news that a housing development in south London has excluded children from a social housing section of a development from the playground provided through construction of an impenetrable hedge. Amidst passing the buck of responsibility, the local authority has said that the much smaller space is fine because it meets the legal requirements of play areas. The developer said that social housing tenants don't pay maintenance so their children shouldn't use the larger playing area. How did we allow our political discourse around social housing to descend to such a pathetic level? Will you investigate whether something similar may be happening in Wales?

I completely share the Member's outrage at such behaviour. I'm confident that no such thing is happening in Wales, but I will redouble our efforts to make sure it doesn't. We recently changed 'Planning Policy Wales' to re-emphasise the need to create places, communities, sustainable communities, for the citizens of Wales, and that of course includes a sustainable set of housing and the facilities that go with it. So, we'll be looking to work with local authorities now that the UK Government's seen fit to come to its senses and take the cap off the housing revenue account. We'll be working with local authorities to investigate how they can use their new powers to their fullest extent to ensure that they build for sustainable communities of the future, in conjunction with our small and medium-sized enterprise builders, our registered social landlords and our place makers in general in our society.

Minister, I applaud you for talking about sustainable communities rather than just sustainable housing and affordable housing. I do agree with the point made by Leanne Wood, and she used a good example that we need to make sure that, yes, we do need new social housing, new affordable housing, but there needs to be sustainability around that. With that in mind, there is great pressure on local authorities in Wales, particularly rural authorities, to give permission to areas often outside of current local development plans, which aren't properly supported by either sustainable transport links or services. So, what are you doing in your ministerial position to make sure that, when applications are looked at by local authorities, they only go ahead if they do meet the criteria of the future generations legislation and provide that real sustainability, that real community spirit, which we need to be generating in villages and towns across Wales?

Yes. My predecessor in the planning portfolio, Lesley Griffiths, reissued 'Planning Policy Wales' towards the end of last year, and that's a complete rewrite of the document—it's not just an updating. That document goes out of its way to emphasise the importance of community building, placemaking, in the planning system and in any local authority's LDP. Local authorities should have an LDP in place that is robust, that sets out their housing need, and they ought to be able to hold fast to that inside their committees, so that if they have speculative development proposals made outside of the LDP, they're able to robustly withstand that. We don't have a full set of LDPs across the piece in Wales. We are encouraging local authorities to get their LDPs either in place where they don't have one, or reviewed and up-to-date where they have one in place but it isn't entirely up-to-date, precisely for the purpose that Nick Ramsay sets out, so that they can robustly defend decisions not to allow speculative development outside of the LDP process.