Second Homes

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 3:01 pm on 29 January 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:01, 29 January 2020

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.