4. What assessment has the Minister made of the impact of a high percentage of second homes on housing need within communities? OAQ55005

I recognise that price and availability of homes for local people in parts of Wales are being impacted by second-home ownership. To understand this impact in their areas, local authorities are required to conduct local housing market assessments and apply strategies to meet the requirements of their communities.

There are broader issues than just the impact within the taxation system. But we do need a resolution to that, and the WLGA agrees with us that changing section 66 of the Local Government Finance Act 1992 is the way forward. So, it's not just on these benches that are talking about this; the WLGA, representing all Welsh councils, has also said that we need to amend that legislation as a matter of urgency. But you're not going to go down that route; I don't quite understand why.

But there are broader issues, of course, aren't there? Of the homes sold in Gwynedd recently, 40 per cent of them were sold as second homes. Now, that is a huge figure, and that kind of social and economic change leaves our communities much, much worse off for most of the year.

So, what general work has your Government done in order to take all of these issues into account? For example, is it now time for us to make it a requirement for anyone who wishes to convert a home into a second home—particularly in these areas where there are very high numbers of second homes—that they would need planning consent before they could make that change?

There are other changes to the planning system that could be considered. Other areas—Cornwall and the Lake District have tackled this.

We do need a question now, so that we can conclude this question.

I feel passionately about this, as you know, but the question is: what other changes, apart from the taxation changes, could your Government consider implementing in order to resolve this problem?

Siân Gwenllian, I hope, knows that I'm also very sympathetic to the problem, and I do absolutely recognise that that exists. We have had a look at things like trying to control it through the planning system, but when somebody is conducting the sale of a private house to a private individual or to a company, it would be very difficult at that point to say that that sale couldn't continue once the identity of the owner was known and they had declared it was a second home.

There are also all kinds of other issues that might seem trivial but are really problematic in a legal system. So, I buy the house as my main house, and then I get married to somebody who lives in London and I only come back at weekends, so have I suddenly converted it into a second home and breached the planning rule? There are lots of difficult problems. That doesn't make me not sympathetic to the problem; I think there are a number of things we can do. 

We know that rural areas have particularly high challenges with this, and very beautiful parts of the country have specific problems. Gwynedd, you're absolutely right in identifying. Gwynedd is 9.9 per cent, fourth in the list of authorities with second homes in Britain. So, you're absolutely right that it's a huge problem for us. But I think we need to attack it in a number of ways.

We have a rural strategic group that consists of rural housing enablers—housing associations, local authorities, Community Housing Cymru and the WLGA—that meets quarterly. We've got a good forum to encourage and test ideas for what can be done. We're encouraging things like the use of the council tax premiums. I'm happy to look at whether we should increase that yet again if house prices—. A house in my village has just sold for £2.8 million to a couple from London who I don't think plan to live there permanently. My children will never live in a village that has houses selling for that; I have a lot of sympathy with where you're coming from. 

So, I think what we need to do is identify land, particularly in rural, Welsh-speaking communities, where the children of the villages want to live, and identify houses that we can build that are either for social rent with a local element attached to that, or for mixed equity—so shared equity arrangements with local housing associations or with the local council—or other arrangements such as self-build with residents' requirements as a result of the grant, and various other things that we can do to encourage the building of the right kind of houses, so that local people, young people in particular, can be encouraged to stay in our communities. 

So, I have a lot of sympathy with that, but I don't think the planning system is the right way to do it. What we have to do is find a tool that works. So, I'm very happy to invite you along to one of the sessions with the rural housing enabler arrangements, and we're very happy to look at any other good ideas from across the Chamber, Llywydd, as I know a large number of people have these problems in their constituencies and regions, to look to see what we can do that would work and not involve us in endless legal disputes around the point of sale for various houses across Wales.

Minister, I remember Dafydd Wigley raising this issue in the first Assembly and talking about where they do have controlled housing markets, like the Channel Islands—that bastion of socialism in the English channel. The thing is, we do have a culture more widely in Britain of free market and second-home ownership, which I respect, but a lot of those people are also tempted sometimes to buy in Spain, in Italy, in France, where there's profound rural depopulation and villages lie empty, often. And it's a slightly different situation, to put it mildly, that we are facing, and we need a range of strategies: higher council tax where there is high housing need but second homes are being purchased; empty home strategies; and modest but necessary building up of villages. Now, it's one thing to have a pretty, pretty village, but it's not very pretty for the local young people if they cannot afford to live there and raise families. So, appropriate development, just like our ancestors have done for generations, should be required.

I completely agree with you. We're not opposing that in any way. It is just about making sure that we get the right houses in the right places for the right people. But we must also guard against unintended consequences. I don't know if you are aware, but St Ives recently had the experience where they restricted the building of homes for out-of-town buyers and that resulted in no houses being built at all because it simply wasn't feasible. So, you have unintended consequences of that. That's not what they wanted, but that's what they got. So, what we're very keen to do is to find the right levers to do that, to allow the village envelope to increase slightly with the right kind of houses and all the rest of it.

I just emphasise as well that, of course, because of our set of planning rules, the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Welsh language planning Act all interacting, the Welsh language is a very big part of this as well. So, we do want to preserve our Welsh-speaking communities and make sure that they aren't currently inundated with large numbers of people who wouldn't be able to learn the language in an appropriate timescale for the local school and so on. So, large numbers of considerations are expected to be applied by local planning authorities in Wales when they are looking at this. I'm very happy to work with groups of AMs and with our rural enabler people and so on to look at any ideas at all that can encourage the building of the right kind of houses in the right kind of places.

As David Melding rightly says, we don't have the kinds of problems they have in Spain and Portugal in some areas, but in little bits of Wales, like Gwynedd and some of the Pembrokeshire coast, we really do have a problem that is accelerating.