4. What efforts is the Welsh Government making to ensure young people in rural areas are not priced out of their local housing markets? OQ55877

Diolch, Adam. We've made a record investment of £2 billion in affordable housing during this Senedd term. The investment is having a significant impact on the delivery of housing that meets the real needs of Welsh communities, and we are on track to deliver our ambitious 20,000 affordable homes target this term.

Without doubt, and to build upon the responses to the previous question, a huge increase in second homes does undermine any other work that the Government is doing in terms of ensuring that young people in rural areas can access the housing market. What was a problem already, and had been for decades, has now become a huge crisis. And I understand what the Minister says in terms of the numerous technical, legal and administrative difficulties that make this situation difficult and complex, and I welcome the discussion and the analysis that's taken place, but we do need to move quickly now and we need to act. That's the nature of politics—to provide solutions, to take action. That's what we heard from you earlier in terms of homelessness more generally, so can we see the same kind of action now in terms of this crisis in rural Wales? One specific aspect is to provide powers to local authorities to place a cap on the housing stock in a community that can be used as second homes. Can you confirm that you at least support that in principle, and that that should be part of the consensus that you referred to earlier?

Thanks, Adam. I absolutely do share the concern; we absolutely do want our young people to be able to stay in the communities that they grew up in and they wish to contribute to. You'll have heard me say many times in this Chamber that I also live in a village where my children will never live in the village unless something is done about it. Not that I think we should make Government policy based on personal circumstances of Ministers, but just to display that I have a lot of empathy with where you're coming from.

However, we've got to be sure that there are not unintended consequences for some of that. So, we've been looking with interest at the example of capping numbers, for example, in other areas, and they have had some very serious downsides, especially if you go into a recession. So, we have had local people stuck in negative equity and other things as a result of such caps. I'm very actively looking at it, just to be clear, but we just want to be sure that there aren't any unintended consequences. Mike Hedges has just referred to the fact that houses in multiple occupation are very common in university cities; we know that. We have tried, for example, to put density policies in place in those cities, and then prevent other houses from turning. What happens then is that those houses are advertised at twice their normal rate for sale on the market, they aren't able to be sold and then there is a reapplication to the authority to change them into a HMO. So, we need to make sure we haven't got any loopholes and all kinds of workarounds and all the rest of it—or if you buy it through a company or your dad buys it for you—any amount of things that we would need to work through to make sure that the policy would actually work. But I have a lot of sympathy with finding ways to do this. 

One of the other things I'm really actively looking at is whether we can scale up our community land trust arrangements, where local people can come together and own housing in that community in a co-operative way. And what that does is it prevents the onward sale of one of the houses to another person outside of the cap and so on. It effectively gives you a golden share so that you can prevent that happening, and it prevents the circumstance in which somebody genuinely buys the house and then meets and marries somebody from somewhere else and goes off and what you do about the fact that the house is suddenly unoccupied.

So, there is a whole series of unintended consequences we do need to work through, but we are doing that, and we've asked the data unit to come up with a lot more data at a more granular scale, so we can have a real look at what we're actually talking about. And in the meeting that Siân Gwenllian and a number of others also attended, for example, we started to look at the land transaction tax data, which I have got here. What that doesn't tell you is whether that house is already a second home, or whether it was built as holiday accommodation. It doesn't tell you anything. It just tells you what the transaction was. So, it's about whether we can get into a situation where we're getting that data, and we can actually make some informed decisions on the back of it without some of the unintended consequences that some of the policies have seen elsewhere in the world.

Minister, one of the planning improvements that was brought into the system in a previous Assembly was the implementation of TAN 6 for rural dwellings. Regrettably, my experience of TAN 6 is that it's now morphed into quite a sophisticated model. Rather than it being an easy model to develop rural properties for rural workers, there's a patchwork of delivery from planning authorities, and it does depend on the postcode that you live in. What assessment has the Welsh Government made of the effectiveness of TAN 6 in developing rural dwellings, so that young people can stay in rural communities, where their employment might be based in a rural enterprise?  

Thank you, Andrew. That's one of the things that we're looking at in terms of the data that we have. Again, it's one of the things where there is an agricultural requirement on a dwelling, for example, or a local connection requirement—what happens on the second and third sales. So, the short answer to your question is 'yes'; we are looking again to see whether that's actually having the effect it was intended to have, and what data is available to check whether it is effective, or whether we need to do something about it as part of a wider piece of work around this problem, which is, obviously, a very serious problem, and growing ever more serious as the pandemic bites and people realise that they can move out of the cities and into different and rather more beautiful places.