2. What discussions has the Minister had with the Minister for Housing and Local Government in relation to how the Welsh Government can help fund plans to reduce the number of empty houses in North Wales? OAQ55227

I have regular discussions with the Minister for Housing and Local Government, covering a range of matters within her portfolio, including those relating to empty houses. This includes investment in our property loans programme, targeted regeneration investment through our empty property thematic fund, and our town centre loan fund.

But the truth is that we have around 3,000 empty homes in north Wales, and some of them have been vacant for a decade and more. This is a huge waste of resources, isn't it? Because we are crying out for affordable homes, but we have thousands of empty homes in north Wales, and then we're seeing houses built on greenfield sites and on flood plains in north Wales. So, certainly, it remains a problem. We know that the turning houses into homes programme had an ambition of bringing 5,000 empty houses into use, but I think only 98 were returned to the housing sector in the year 2018-19. So, can you tell us what consideration you're giving to other incentives, which may be more effective, that could be used to encourage the owners of empty houses to tackle this problem?

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Ann Jones) took the Chair.

Welsh Government's property loans programme has available a mix of capital grant and repayable loan financing worth over £42 million, available through local authorities to owner-occupiers to improve properties and to bring those empty properties back into use. Of this, £11 million has been allocated to the six authorities across north Wales to help those owner-occupiers and landlords bring sub-standard homes back into use. To date, over 350 loans have been issued, and nearly 300 empty properties have been brought back into use across north Wales as a result of that funding alone. But I agree that we need to be looking to explore what more we can do. And of course, we've introduced the transforming towns empty property fund of £3.2 million, and that's supporting a project operating across an area within Gwynedd and Anglesey; that seeks, again, to bring those empty properties back into use.

By the end of December 2020, we will have produced a finalised national action plan for tackling empty properties, setting out our national and local objectives, and that's a piece of work that I have discussions on with my colleague the Minister for Housing and Local Government. More widely, we're looking at what we can do to support local authorities through better use of compulsory purchase orders, because some of those properties that could provide excellent homes and excellent properties for other purposes are ones that are a real blight on communities at the moment. So, we're making sure that every local authority has the skills and the confidence it needs to tackle empty properties in Wales. We're doing that by introducing an industry expert in the field of property management, who is delivering a series of training events to every single local authority in Wales.

Minister, like Llyr, I was looking at the data for 2018-19, and it is quite disappointing. It's a challenging area—empty homes in the private sector and asking local authorities to use their various financial mechanisms to get some of these homes back in use—but there's a variation in performance. The Isle of Anglesey brought 12 per cent of their private properties that were not in use back into use; 1.6 per cent in Conwy; 8.6 per cent in Denbighshire; and 5.6 per cent in Wrexham. So there's quite a variety there, and I do hope that the best practice is improved further and then adopted by the other authorities. 

Yes, there is a variation in success in terms of bringing those empty homes back into use. Hopefully, the work on the CPOs, which I've just outlined, will prove useful to local authorities that have thus far struggled in this area, because we know that some local authorities have felt that they don't have either the capacity or the confidence to engage in that particular area of work.

Council tax premiums are also a useful tool in terms of tackling empty homes and, again, they've been used to different effect and to different levels across Wales. We do know that premiums will be charged on almost 6,700 long term empty dwellings in Wales in the next financial year, and the number of long term empty dwellings has fallen by over 1,000 since the premiums were introduced. So, it certainly is having an impact.