Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:49 pm on 14 October 2020.
Yes, I think there are calls for all kinds of reactions to this. The UK Government—and we're co-operating with this—has put, of course, a New Homes Ombudsman in place as a result of some of the other issues that are not to do with high-rise buildings. A large number of our scale house builders got themselves into serious difficulties in some of the building practices that they had, and I think those are well known. And that's why the UK Government has put the New Homes Ombudsman in place in order to protect people against, frankly, scandals of that sort. And that's why, here in Wales, we're determined to put our planning system in place robustly so that people have a robust planning system to go through and then, on top of that, a robust building safety inspection regime to go with that, to make sure that we learn those lessons and make sure that we have a robust system. Now, unfortunately, because of the pandemic, our building safety regulations are now delayed. We are about to put out a White Paper on that and we are working very hard with the leasehold reform provisions that the Law Commission has looked at. They recently reported, and we're looking to see what can be done in conjunction with some UK legislation, if at all possible, just due to the lack of time we've now got in Senedd provisions to be able to do this.
It's one of the real sorrows about the pandemic, alongside all of the other things that we know of, that we've lost the chance to put some of those building safety reforms in place. But there is, I think, consensus across the Chamber, so whoever forms the next Government will have a ready plan to go, and I'm sure that, very early in the new term, whoever the Government is will be able to implement those reforms. I don't think they're in any way controversial, and I'm sure we'll be able to that very rapidly.