: Minister, I remember
Dafydd Wigley raising this issue in the first Assembly and talking
about where they do have controlled housing markets, like the
Channel Islands—that bastion of socialism in the English channel.
The thing is, we do have a culture more widely in Britain of free
market and second-home ownership, which I respect, but a lot of
those people are also tempted sometimes to buy in Spain, in Italy,
in France, where there's profound rural depopulation and villages
lie empty, often. And it's a slightly different situation, to put
it mildly, that we are facing, and we need a range of strategies:
higher council tax where there is high housing need but second
homes are being purchased; empty home strategies; and modest but
necessary building up of villages. Now, it's one thing to have a
pretty, pretty village, but it's not very pretty for the local
young people if they cannot afford to live there and raise
families. So, appropriate development, just like our ancestors have
done for generations, should be required.
(Minister for Housing
and Local Government): I completely agree with you.
We're not opposing that in any way. It is just about making sure
that we get the right houses in the right places for the right
people. But we must also guard against unintended consequences. I
don't know if you are aware, but St Ives recently had the
experience where they restricted the building of homes for
out-of-town buyers and that resulted in no houses being built at
all because it simply wasn't feasible. So, you have unintended
consequences of that. That's not what they wanted, but that's
what they got. So, what we're very keen to do is to find the
right levers to do that, to allow the village envelope to
increase slightly with the right kind of houses and all the rest
of it.
I just emphasise as well that, of course, because of our set of
planning rules, the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act
2015 and the Welsh language planning Act all interacting, the
Welsh language is a very big part of this as well. So, we do want
to preserve our Welsh-speaking communities and make sure that
they aren't currently inundated with large numbers of people who
wouldn't be able to learn the language in an appropriate
timescale for the local school and so on. So, large numbers of
considerations are expected to be applied by local planning
authorities in Wales when they are looking at this. I'm very
happy to work with groups of AMs and with our rural enabler
people and so on to look at any ideas at all that can encourage
the building of the right kind of houses in the right kind of
places.
As David Melding rightly says, we don't have the kinds of
problems they have in Spain and Portugal in some areas, but in
little bits of Wales, like Gwynedd and some of the
Pembrokeshire Coast, we really do have a problem
that is accelerating.
