5. Will the Minister make a statement on the availability of housing in local authorities across Wales? OAQ54062

Yes. The need for housing continues to outstrip the number of homes available. With borrowing constraints now removed by Westminster—at long last and after much lobbying by us—and record low interest rates, we are working with local authorities to build at scale and pace, for the first time in a generation, to make more homes available across Wales.

Thank you, Minister. As was mentioned here in the Senedd yesterday, we've seen housing developments approved despite them falling outside the settlement boundary of local development plans. A key consideration allowing these is the obvious need for new homes. However, whilst controversial applications are receiving consent, it is true that Wales has an empty property problem. All local authorities in Wales have an empty home strategy and an action plan. Yet, despite this—and I would add that I've been here eight years now, and right from my very first week as an Assembly Member, I was raising concerns about the number of empty properties in Wales that would turn into very good homes for people who are waiting desperately—currently there are around 27,000 private sector and 1,400 social sector empty properties in Wales. Therefore, will you explain what further support you will give to local authorities and other agencies—registered social landlords—to go about helping them to bring these empty properties back into purposeful homes for those who desperately need them?

There's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for anybody in the social housing sector to have a void issue. We provide them with more than sufficient grants to bring those voids back into beneficial use. So, again, if you have specific examples of social housing in that position, I'd be really glad to see it, because there's something going very wrong there. I can assure you that no RSL or LSVT should be in a position where they can't bring their voids back into beneficial use. 

In terms of the private sector, my colleague Lee Waters has been working very hard on a scheme to bring empty properties back into beneficial use by looking at loan schemes and a series of grant schemes so that we can find out why it's empty, find out who the owners are, and then find out what it would need to either buy it off them or bring it back into beneficial use. He's been working very hard on getting a number of pilot schemes running in that area. 

We also encourage local authorities to act properly in terms of their council tax to make sure that they are levying the right amounts of tax on empty homes. It depends why the home is empty and my colleague Rebecca Evans is working very hard on the vacant land tax implications of some of this work. We're very keen that local authorities use all the levers that they have in order to bring homes back into beneficial use. We also have a number of grant schemes. We have schemes designed to bring homes back into beneficial use that private owners can access, and we have schemes for landlords that they can access as well. And if the Member wants to write to me, I'd be more than happy to provide her with details of those schemes. 

I wonder what role the Minister sees modular housing playing in meeting the needs within local authority areas. I was delighted to be able to join her only recently in Maes Glas in Ynysawdre to look at the Valleys to Coast initiative with modular housing, very much on that theme of houses for life that can be adapted and changed as the years go by. Now, that's being developed by a Port Talbot company, Wernick, who are new to this residential market but have a long pedigree within modular construction. And I just wonder how much more we can do to deal with those issues of quality, homes for life and meeting those massive supply needs that we have with different local authority areas, and building local jobs, I have to say, in Port Talbot and locally with me.   

Yes, that was an excellent scheme and a very good visit, and I was very impressed, as I know Huw Irranca-Davies was, at the speed of construction, the niceness of the house—I can't think of another word, but it's just a really lovely home. But I was also very impressed by the ability to add on another unit if you had a growing family, and to actually pick the whole house up and put it down somewhere else if you needed to. It was a very interesting and, I thought, instructive visit, and he's absolutely right—what we are looking to do in Wales is, using Welsh materials with as low a carbon footprint as is humanly possible, build house to passive standard if at all possible, so the bills are £100 or less a year, using local labour in local factories.

And one of the lovely things about modular factories—I haven't visited that one, but I did visit one in Ynys Môn last week—is that no matter what the weather—and although Ynys Môn is very beautiful, the weather was a little inclement, I think it's fair to say; a bit horizontal rain last week—of course, in the factory it was warm and dry and the people could carry on their jobs, they were not having to work at height, and so on. They were constructing the house that would then have its final stage of construction actually on the site, exactly like the programme we saw. 

So, I actually believe that is the future for housing in Wales and, at the moment, we're about to go out to what's called the third iteration of the innovative housing programme, so that was the fruit of the first part of the programme. That will deliver 1,000 new homes across Wales in the next few years. It's got 45 schemes running, and we expect to learn a lot of lessons about the way that we can build at pace and scale using that kind of modular construction.