8. What discussions has the Minister had with Carmarthenshire County Council about boosting council house building in the county? OAQ54833

We are speaking with all 11 councils that have a housing revenue account, including Carmarthenshire, about the support they require to boost local council house building at scale and pace. These are one-to-one meetings to help provide bespoke support to each individual authority, and discussions with Carmarthenshire have been very positive.

I'm very grateful to the Minister for her answer, and I'm sure she will join me in congratulating Carmarthenshire, with its ambitious plans to build 900 council houses over the next 10 years, which will almost bring them up to target, and I know that the Minister's discussions with them will help them to perhaps get that extra 100 houses in. But they are also currently bringing over 180 long-term vacant properties back into use, which is another way in which we can work to provide affordable housing. Can the Minister tell us whether the Welsh Government will be able to commit more funding to speed up the programme of bringing more long-term empty homes into use for local people?

I fully appreciate that the Minister will no doubt tell me that she can't commit to anything while she doesn't know what her budget is, but I wonder if she can commit in principle to investing in what can be a very effective way of bringing affordable housing particularly to small communities, where perhaps you don't want more big building, but you've got empty properties.

Yes, in principle, absolutely. We've been working with Carmarthenshire and a number of other authorities to do just that. So, there is a range of schemes in place: acquisitions of new properties—so, as long as they're built to the right standards, the authority can acquire them. I want to pay tribute to Llinos in Ynys Môn, actually, who was the one who put the idea into my head quite a long time ago now, because she talked about buying a property in, I think, Beaumaris, where there's a great lack of social housing. One came up on the market, and they knew that they had people who wanted a social house there and they bought it. So, it does show that it can be done with an innovative council leader, and I very much want to pay tribute to her for having put that idea into my head in the first place.

So, we're very keen that local authorities look at all avenues of doing that—so, purchasing existing properties, purchasing new builds, bringing vacant properties up to standard and back into use. We've got two schemes for that, one with my colleague Lee Waters—he's not in the Chamber at the moment—where we're giving a loan/grant mixture to people who have sub-standard housing that can't be occupied at the moment—perhaps they've inherited it or whatever—to bring it up to standard. There are rules around how long you then have to live in it. We're also encouraging them to give those houses over for social rent to the local authority for five years. I outlined that scheme just recently in the Chamber. And what I want to say is that any other ideas—so, any other ideas to up the social housing stock, we're more than happy to look at and I very much hope we'll be able to support with budget and actually expertise, compulsory purchase orders and all the rest of it.

Like Helen Mary, I welcome the drive to build more affordable homes in Carmarthenshire, but I just wanted to discuss with you the issue of distribution. Because I looked at the map of where they've built homes in the last few years and where they're intending to build many of these homes, and I wonder if you could give us an outline on what guidance you give to county councils to ensure that we end up with properly mixed communities, because we have a lot of smaller towns and villages where there are quite a lot of new homes, but there are disproportionately very, very few local authority homes or affordable homes being built. And so you end up with a community that's very skewed and has got a lot of people coming into it without having that real mix of people that you need in order to make sustainable communities going forward.

So, 'Planning Policy Wales' has changed—this time last year, in fact—to emphasise placemaking and very much part of placemaking is the building of mixed communities—so, a mixed community with a load of mixed tenures in it. We want to encourage local people to stay in their local communities—very keen to explore different ways of getting mixed tenure arrangements in there: shared equity, rent-to-own, co-op models and so on. So, we're very happy to work with local authorities to bring a whole range of those things in.

And also—I'm trying to not make this political, but I will say that we have had a bit of a blow, because, in October, the UK Treasury increased the Public Works Loan Board base rate from 1.8 per cent to 2.8 per cent and that's making it much more difficult for the authorities to borrow and then service the borrowing that we had planned for them. So, if you've got any influence at all, if you could get them to revise that, because that came out of the blue and it's really impacted some of our councils' ability to plan their build programme into the future. So, I very much don't welcome that. But, as I said to Helen Mary just now, we're supporting all 11 councils in Wales with retained housing stock to develop new social homes at scale and pace in the right place—the right home in the right place for the right people at the right time.

Finally, question 9—Darren Millar.