4. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Net-zero Strategy

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:24 pm on 2 November 2021.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:24, 2 November 2021

Yes, diolch, Jenny. Just on the part L, we will be bringing forward part L regulation amendments in the new year. The whole point of them will be, of course, to bring private sector housing up to the standards that new social build housing enjoys, and I look forward to negotiating that set of regulations through the Senedd. I'm sure that everybody who has contributed to today's debate feels very strongly, as you do, about what those regulations should say and what private sector housing in Wales should look like. So, we will be doing that in the new year, I assure you. I've also had a similar conversation myself with Lord Deben.

On the PRS, that's a much more difficult problem because we have to negotiate making sure that people's housing is not removed from the PRS and lost to the PRS. It houses some of the most vulnerable families in Wales.

Much of the PRS that's in very poor condition is in the centre of cities—in Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Wrexham and so on—and it tends to be the larger houses that house multigenerational families. So, what we will want to be doing is putting a grants scheme in place that allows and encourages those landlords to give those properties over to the local council, if they're stockholding councils, or the local RSL in return for the local housing allowance and rent supply, so that the RSL can bring the house up to standard. Otherwise, we fear that if we put the obligation onto the private rented sector landlords themselves, they will simply remove themselves from the sector, so we will have an unintended consequence.

So, we will be working very carefully with the National Residential Landlords Association to understand what that might look like, and understand what those incentives look like, to make sure that we both bring the houses up to standard and retain them in the private rented sector, which is, after all, a very important sector for people who are at the most vulnerable end of the housing market.