5. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: The Welsh Government response to the Independent Affordable Housing Supply Review

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:44 pm on 9 July 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:44, 9 July 2019

Thank you very much. On that last one, what we're looking to do—in my statement very recently on local government regional working, I did outline that we are putting in a new vehicle for regional working for local government in that Bill, and that's something called a statutory joint committee. The word 'statutory' doesn't mean mandatory; it just means that the committee has a legal entity in its own right—it can employ its staff directly and so on. It's a perfect vehicle for this kind of economic development and land use because it allows us to pool the scarce human resources that are really the crux of this problem. As local authorities have faced austerity over the last nine years, they’ve lost a lot of the discretionary skills that used to exist in the local authority around the negotiation of 106 agreements, the compulsory purchase order skills, the land management skills—they’ve necessarily lost those as they’ve concentrated on the big statutory duties. And so what this will do is enable them to be employed regionally and also to hold the land regionally so that we don’t have the boundary issues. We’re looking at ways that we can put Welsh Government land into that via some kind of land division. We need to look at the legals for that, because everybody who puts their land in will want to have some say in how the development is done. But that’s the whole purpose of that regional arrangement—in order to make sure that we have democratic control over what is, effectively, a regional land arrangement, to employ the scarce human resources. It’s that scarce human resources bit that’s the real crux of it.

It also allows us then to speak regionally about, for example, grant support, different ways of allocating different kinds of grant support, depending on what the development is and so on. And we're very keen that local authorities move away from just selling their land to developers in order to bring forward housing to actually keeping an ownership in that land and getting part of the land-value uplift that you get from the development of the land, so the public service retains the value of the land, that uplift. So, it’s very much around retaining those kinds of value uplifts for the future in a mixed development of that sort.

You're absolutely right, Dawn, that the whole issue around the foundational economy is fundamental here. So, we are looking to use SMEs where at all possible. We will be looking to see whether some local authorities will do that with direct labour as well, where that’s the only way of doing it. And we will be looking to utilise project bank accounts, which are a feature of Welsh procurement, in order to make sure that we smooth out cashflow for small builders who might otherwise not be able to come forward. But I’m very keen on making sure that we do a whole series of measures around ensuring that small builders can come forward—even if they can’t do a whole site, whether they can do small parts of that site—to make sure that we retain the skills in the economy that we so desperately need.