Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Education and Welsh Language – in the Senedd at 2:28 pm on 6 October 2021.
I was surprised to hear your fellow Minister saying earlier that the Government doesn't think that this is a huge problem, because I'm aware of 10 farms in the Tywi valley area alone that have been purchased by commercial operators, and we heard the Farmers' Union of Wales saying that they see reports, on a weekly basis, of this happening. So, this is the agricultural version of the wider second-homes crisis, because local farming families don't have the financial capacity to compete with these external companies. And what we're seeing is a shift towards a pattern of land ownership that is more similar to what we saw in the previous century. The potential in terms of depopulation is similar to what we saw in Scotland with the highland clearances in the eighteenth century. And, in my case, these are Welsh-speaking farms, and this is true of the majority of farms throughout Wales because of the nature of the industry. We're losing land, we're losing a language. So, can we have an impact assessment by the linguistic planning department to see the impact that this could have on language transmission within our Welsh-speaking communities?