Council House Building

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:48 pm on 11 December 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:48, 11 December 2019

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.