7. Will the Minister make a statement on the Welsh Government's housing priorities for North Wales? OQ56779

Social housing remains mine and this Government’s priority for the whole of Wales. This reflects our commitment to deliver 20,000 new low-carbon homes for social rent this Government term. The North Wales region has been allocated £50.4 million from the social housing grant for 2021-22, to build much needed social homes.

Thank you, Minister, for your response. As you will be aware, your assessment of need for housing in north Wales states that there should be around 1,600 homes built every year in the region for the next 20 years. Currently, that development number is around 1,200 homes a year. So, there's quite a significant gap between what is needed and what's being built. As you'll also appreciate, private developers are often very successful in meeting the demands of local people and providing affordable housing. And, indeed, many of those private developers are small businesses making a big difference in their local economy. We have, though, in recent years seen a steady decrease in the number of dwellings being developed by those private developers. So, with that in mind, what action are you taking to encourage private developers to build more houses in north Wales?

Yes, thank you for that. It's actually a very important point, because we've got a number of issues in the small and medium enterprise house building market around cash flow, pipeline and so on. And again, Lee Waters and myself were very prominent in the construction forum in the last Senedd—I think you came with a different hat on a couple of times—to make sure that we put a pipeline in place for construction companies in general, and house builders were one of the lines of work that was coming off the construction project, to try to help with cash flow and a number of other issues. 

We have a number of other issues as well, including the self-build scheme, pre-planning approval schemes and so on that are designed to help the SME market with some of the issues around needing to hold big cash reserves while they get planning, and so on. And we're also encouraging registered social landlords to work with their local SMEs as directly contracted contractors to help them with cash flow issues as well. We're more than happy to help the market take the role we'd like them to have across the piece and, indeed, without them we cannot build the 20,000 low-carbon social homes, so we're very keen to ensure that our providers stay viable and solid and to work with them to ensure that they have the support and the pipeline of work they need. 

And finally question 8, Altaf Hussain.