4. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Affordability, Second Homes and the Welsh Language

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:12 pm on 6 July 2021.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:12, 6 July 2021

Thank you very much for that series of questions and for the support that you indicated at the beginning. In terms of the Welsh language communities housing scheme, that's in the portfolio of my friend and colleague Jeremy Miles, who's sitting opposite me today. He proposes to bring forward a draft scheme for consultation very shortly, so I won't steal his thunder in taking up time on that right now.

In terms of the registration scheme, we are working, as I say, with Airbnb, as the biggest provider of these kinds of schemes. One of the things we'll be consulting on is what shape should the scheme have—that's hard to say, 'what shape should the scheme have'—and who should be responsible for administering it. One of the possibilities is to do it the way we do Rent Smart Wales, through a lead local authority that we fund, obviously, to do that. But, there are other available options and we'll be consulting on that, as well as the exact nature of the registration scheme, how you register and all of the rest of it, when we do that consultation. I'm very happy to take the views of Members of the Senedd as well through the cross-party working arrangements.

In terms of the value of the tourist pound, I couldn't agree more. My family has been going to Pembrokeshire for our holidays for 30 years. We go and we rent a cottage down there from a lady whom I've known for many years. We absolutely want to do that. We take great pains to be friendly and hospitable when we are there in our turn, and to spend our Swansea pound in Pembrokeshire, as we ought to when we're enjoying the countryside.

This isn't an exercise in making Wales an unwelcoming or inhospitable place—far from it. What we need to do is make sure that we have sustainable communities that can thrive with our tourist industry, because the tourist industry itself needs the people locally to be living there in order to be able to take the jobs and service the tourist industry itself. These are not things that are in conflict with one another; these are things that are in harmony with one another. We just need to make sure, as a Government, that we put the platforms in place to make sure that that is a harmonious whole, and not a disjointed whole, which I think we're seeing at the moment.