Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:24 pm on 13 November 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:24, 13 November 2019

No, I wouldn't agree with that at all. I stand by what I said. I said they were in danger of creating the slums of the future. If you have an estate of houses that has no infrastructure available to it, where people have to drive to work, where the houses are poorly built, and, frankly, we've seen examples of that from the big house builders across Wales, where not even the most routine of fire breaks have been present, where there's little green infrastructure, where the houses are too close together and there's no play space, this—. I know he agrees with me: this is not a good example of development.

On the other hand, there are many private sector developers across Wales, particularly in the SME end of the market, who build really lovely private sector homes in mixed developments with good green infrastructure and so on. I can give him a list of good SME builders of that sort. So, it's not the private sector in general. There have been issues with some of the bigger builders building far too fast in mono-tenure estates a long way from any infrastructure, built, I think, just to generate profits for that builder rather than building the communities that we need for the future.