Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:30 pm on 16 September 2020.
I really welcome that; thank you, Minister. And I'm sure that we will certainly be very keen to work with you and to see what solutions can be found. So, thank you for your answer on that.
Now, to turn to some remarks that you made a while back—I think it was shortly after you came to the portfolio. You'd referred to new estates that had come through the planning system as potentially creating problems for the future. At the time, I know that we as a party had agreed with you, and that there are several examples of how this issue is still a problem: just down the road from where you are now in the Senedd, flats can't be sold by their owners because of a refusal by the people who built the buildings to fix issues with them; the fraud of leasehold homes that only now is being investigated by the Competition and Markets Authority; and the never-ending business sites across Wales, such as that in Coity in Bridgend, where the developer keeps getting permission to build more homes because the authority, as I understand it, is powerless to use their previous poor performance as a reason to refuse future permission.
Now, it would be one thing if the system were capable of delivering affordable homes, but the planning system ensures that, if an authority gets too big for its boots, the inspector can cut the amount of affordable homes to ensure that the guaranteed profits for large developers keep coming, and profits that we believe, in Plaid Cymru, should be subject to a windfall tax. So I'd ask, Minister, when the Government is going to clip the wings of the planning inspector and tell the planning inspector directly that it is Welsh Government policy to increase affordable homes—because I know that you do want to do so—and that they should not be rebuking local authorities who try to ensure that development is in the interests of the community and not the shareholders of the developers.