4. What assessment has the Minister made of the impact of the One Planet development policy? OQ55693

Thank you for the question. One Planet developments are exemplar forms of sustainable and low-impact development that are strictly controlled in terms of the evidence needing to be supplied before they receive planning permission. Monitoring of the policy shows that, between April 2013 and March 2019, 20 One Planet development applications were approved and seven were refused.

Is the Minister aware that certain aspects of this policy have caused some ill feeling in rural areas, and would she be willing to consider calls from a council such as Carmarthenshire County Council to review the policy? Specifically, does the Minister believe that it's fair that applicants for rural enterprise dwellings have to prove validity that the developments are sustainable on the basis of evidence over the past three years, whilst the requirements under the One Planet developments are to submit forecasts to demonstrate that the developments can be sustainable at the end of the five-year period?

Well, no, I think that's a slight mischaracterisation of where the policy is. The number of One Planet developments approved each year is very small compared with other forms of housing. So, between 2013 and 2019-20, only 20 One Planet developments have been approved, compared with 251 rural enterprise dwellings over the same period. Last year, only 10 One Planet developments were approved. In Carmarthenshire itself, 13 rural enterprise dwellings were approved while five One Planet developments were approved and six were refused. We get an annual monitoring report to the planning authority to evidence compliance with the management plan by identifying activities carried out during the previous 12 months. At the moment, we haven't asked for that data due to ongoing COVID-19 pandemic relaxations of the rules, but we are going to request the data in April 2021 for a two-year period, and just to emphasise that failure to meet the terms of the management plan could result in enforcement proceedings in respect of breaches of conditions, subject to which the planning permission was granted. So, I'm afraid, no, I don't have any current plans to update the overarching policy of guidance on One Planet developments.

Minister, I suspect you know the impact of these applications on the view of farming families in Gower, as one has been turned down very recently not so very far away from you. Locals are not best pleased that they have to jump through various hoops in order to keep their young people living in the area, where some of these One Planet development applications do tend to come from people living outside the area. If you're talking about sustainable communities, rather than these experiments, we really do have to think about ways of keeping young people in their localities rather than them feeling obliged to move out of them. You're right that there are no current plans to update the overarching policy of guidance on this. Considering that that is, at least, coming up to being 10 years old now, I want to know why, as it predates the well-being of future generations Act by at least three years.

So, it's very much part of 'Planning Policy Wales', however, which has only very recently been reviewed, and, as I said in response to Adam Price, One Planet development planning applications are determined in accordance with the approved or adopted development plan for the area, unless there are material considerations that indicate otherwise. And, as you've just said, they're routinely turned down where they don't conform. The planning system isn't there to prevent people from making planning applications; local authorities are responsible for determining those planning applications in accordance with the rules. And I'm not sure whether Suzy Davies was implying that only people from outside an area can make a One Planet development application, but, of course, that's not so; anyone can make one if they want to bring one forward. So, I'm not quite sure what the implication of that was.

Obviously, we have a large number of other planning policies in place, including policies that allow individual houses to be built where there's a need for an agricultural family to be able to expand its dwelling. So, typically, where a farmer wants to retire and a son or daughter of that farmer wants to take over, we have applications for dwellings on the farmhouse to enable us to accommodate that, and the policy is perfectly capable of looking at that. So, I'm not entirely certain why One Planet developments attract the kind of criticism that Suzy Davies has just outlined, but there are, of course, a large number of other ways of making sure that our young people stay in our rural communities and our communities in general, and one of those, of course, is this Government's plan to build a range of social and shared equity housing across Wales at some scale and pace.