Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:51 pm on 15 May 2019.
So, it's a complex picture. I mean, he's right to say that sustainability has to be one of the issues. What we don't want to have—and I take the point he's making entirely—but what we don't want is to build houses, put people in them and then find, actually, they're suffering from serious fuel poverty or other things because their transport costs are so high, and so on. So, it's a rounded picture that needs to be taken, and, as I said in response to Llyr, one of the things we need to look at is the variety of housing that's being enabled in rural communities, because it's not always just private housing that's required.
I live, as he will know, in a small village on Gower in my friend Rebecca Evans's constituency. That used to have a small amount of social housing, which was mostly occupied by the children of the people living in the village, but it's all been sold. So, we need more of that so that the children who grew up in those villages can access housing that they can readily utilise to stay in their communities. So, it's a mixed picture. So, I think we do need to look at some of the rules and regulations around this, but there are good reasons for the sustainability arguments, not just to stop the housebuilding, but to prevent the people in them falling into unintended areas of fuel poverty, for example, and other issues.