Council Homes

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 3:00 pm on 4 March 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:00, 4 March 2020

We are very happy as a Government to work with any authority that's struggling to resource tendering out work for itself on its own land, for example. So, if you have specific instances you want to tell me about, I'd be very happy to take them up. But, as I say, this morning I met with the Home Builders Federation, alongside my colleague Lee Waters, to discuss exactly that: how could we ease the process of builders both bringing forward their own schemes in Wales, but also acting as 'contractors' to the local authority or, indeed, the local registered social landlord that are bringing forward housing developments. We're very keen to work with the sector to ensure that a large number of SMEs are able to get their foot in that door, because that gives them some cashflow certainty when they're doing developments of their own elsewhere, because we have a number of things in place—for example, project bank accounts and so on—that are capable of easing the cashflow crisis that many small and medium firms have when they're applying for planning, for example.

And the other thing I'd just like to mention is schemes like our new self-build programme, where the local authority is expected to bring the land forward with planning on it, as long as you build one of the patterns that's available. And we are expecting that—. Although the title is 'self-build', we are expecting the people who come forward to buy these plots to employ local builders to actually build the houses; we think it's going to be a very rare instance in which a person actually physically builds it. So, the local authority is assisting with the tendering process for those as well, with a view to bringing in those little SMEs to make sure that they get a foot in that door as well. But, if you have specific issues, I'd be more than happy to discuss them with you.