Social Housing

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:24 pm on 27 March 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:24, 27 March 2019

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.