Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:25 pm on 19 June 2019.
I entirely agree with the Member's analysis of that. We do have a significant problem in some of the 106 agreements that have been negotiated between developers and councils throughout Wales. And one of the difficulties that has arisen as a result of that is the issue around the adoption of roads, the standard they have to be brought up to, the beneficial use of the estate in question prior to the adoption of the road and so on. So, we're attacking that on a number of fronts.
The most straightforward of that is that, alongside the leasehold reform group, we also have a task and finish group who are tasked with a review of unadopted roads. It's actually a joint task force between myself and the Minister for Economy and Transport, and they're due to give us their recommendations very shortly. We've specifically asked them to look at the introduction of a code of practice for estate and property management agents to enhance the professional and ethical standards that they operate to.
Simultaneously, Members will be aware that, yesterday, I did an oral statement on some of the suggestions that we're having for more regional working with local authorities. One of the areas that that was addressing was in economic development and land use. One of the specific drivers for that is to get the very valuable and unfortunately increasingly rare skill of being able to negotiate those agreements properly, so that the people who have those skills are available to all of Wales, rather than to those lucky local authorities who have managed to retain them. It's quite clearly an issue that we need to bottom.
So, we're looking at coming at it from both ends, if you like, but I think we're also looking at renewed guidance to local authorities, in terms of what they should be looking for when they're looking at a situation where a new development has largely been completed, but the roads are not at adoptable standards.
So, just to recap, we've got the leasehold reform group coming back, we've got the task and finish group coming back on unadopted roads, the UK Government's announcements are very interesting in terms of legislating to ensure that freeholders who pay charges for the maintenance of communal areas have access to the same rights as leaseholders in terms of the way that that's regulated. And we're very interested in looking at that as well.