5. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: Re-imagining social house building in Wales — A modern methods of construction strategy for Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:39 pm on 25 February 2020.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 4:39, 25 February 2020

I agree with pretty much everything that's been said, so I just want to focus on some further aspects. I just want to focus on the word 'beauty' in your statement, because I think that's a really important ambition. Why do we want to build ugly buildings? There's a huge cost to ugly buildings that we shouldn't be allowing.

I recently visited Ewenny Court in Ely, which in the First Minister's constituency, to see the nine one-and two-bedroom homes that anybody would be proud to be living in, because they meet the beauty criteria as well as the placemaking criteria. In the Public Accounts Committee inquiry that we're doing into planning, I've come across the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission's report that was produced about a month ago, which has three asks: ask for beauty, refuse ugliness, and promote stewardship. That echoes the Minister's ambitions for placemaking. In that report, they quote a senior building expert who says:

'Some housebuilders…believe they can build any old crap and still sell'.

And I am sure that is the case. I just wondered what we can do to outlaw rubbish that costs huge amounts of money to rectify, and to ensure that we not only have the same high-quality standards for private housing as we have for social housing, as well as ensuring that planning authorities have the guts and the ability to refuse poor proposals, which are a cost to society. If we put up rubbish buildings, we've then got to tear them down or redo them.

So, I wondered if you could incorporate that into your review of the building regulations, as well as in your instructions to planning authorities, to simply refuse building proposals that aren't good enough and are not fully integrated into the placemaking ambitions that we have through this statement.