5. Will the First Minister make a statement on progress towards the Welsh Government’s house-building targets? OQ57447

The programme for government sets out our commitment to building 20,000 new low-carbon homes for social rent in this Senedd term. A record £250 million was allocated to the social housing grant in this financial year, doubling the budget of 2020-21. The first statistical release demonstrating progress towards this target is expected to be published in October of this year.

Diolch. Thank you, First Minister. Your Government's plan to build 20,000 affordable homes is an ambitious target. However, the building of homes in my constituency is at a standstill due to pollution targets. I'm not disputing the need to address pollution in our rivers, but the answer simply cannot be to stop all house building. At least 10,000 homes, of which 1,700 are affordable and social, are all stuck in limbo and cannot be progressed due to Natural Resources Wales guidance on phosphorous. It's starting to have an impact on jobs and the housing market, because people working in the construction industry have no long-term job security, and local young people are being forced out of the housing market by skyrocketing rents and the lack of social homes. First Minister, this is an extremely urgent matter, but the current oversight group looking at phosphates I believe is meeting far too infrequently and I'm led to believe they're struggling with the scale of the issue. First Minister, will you look to set up a cross-party politically led task and finish group, supported by the Welsh Government, so that some urgency can be injected into this matter, to find a solution to the problem and to meet your Government's housing targets? Diolch, Llywydd. 

I understand the urgency of the issue. It's why the Welsh Government will pay for the training of local authorities on the habitats regulation assessment process, including a specific component on phosphorous matters. But, the urgency is on two fronts: there is an urgency about the need for social housing, and we're very focused on that as a Government, because 20,000 low-carbon social homes is ambitious, and we want to be able to get on with it. But the other urgency is in dealing with the phosphate problem, which is absolutely real, and building houses without tackling the phosphate problem is not an answer for the long term.

The Member, surely more than most Members in the Senedd, will be aware of the very significant problems in the River Wye in his own constituency, problems highlighted last week in the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee's report—a Conservative-chaired committee, a committee with a Conservative majority on it. Its case study of the phosphate impact on the River Wye is absolutely compelling. The phosphate impact on the River Wye is primarily caused by agricultural pollution, but by no means exclusively. It is also caused by human waste, by road run-off, by industrial activity. Building houses in a way that adds to the problems, rather than helping with the urgent need to mitigate them, is not a solution that this Government will be able to support. So, I'm agreeing with the Member about the urgency. The urgency is on the housing side, but it is on the environmental side as well, and you can't solve one at the expense of the other.