Part of 4. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:15 pm on 24 June 2020.
Thank you, Mark. I'm not going to comment on the specific issue, because we know that it's the subject of a series of complaints, and so on. So, I'm not going to comment on that for obvious reasons. But, in terms of the more general remarks around protecting green space and so on, we're working with authorities across Wales, both to get their planning departments up and running and to ensure that we do a proper audit of skills across Wales. Many local authorities have been forced by austerity into stripping back what are termed, in inverted commas, non-essential services, although actually, of course, they turn out to be essential in the end. So we're very much looking to strengthen that on both a regional and local basis, and to assist from Welsh Government with officials who can help reskill, or help regionalise the shortages of skills in those areas.
You'll know that the most recent edition of 'Planning Policy Wales' emphasises place and communities as very much at the heart of it, and very much at the heart of that is the green infrastructure that you talk about—not just greenbelt, but green infrastructure right through our planning developments and our towns. So, I'm very happy that we've done that at that level. We're about to publish the national development framework. It's a little delayed because of the pandemic, so I hope that that will be published very soon, and then, we'll be working with local authorities to put together regional strategic plans to do just what you said, which is to protect—to make sure that we have the right planning in the right place, the right development in the right place, and to protect the countryside where that's what the local development plan and the regional plan indicate.