AFFORDABLE HOMES

Wales needs to have substantially more affordable housing otherwise an entire generation will miss out on the reasonable expectation of having a decent home.  Plaid Cymru believes that the supply of more affordable housing should be met through a combination of bringing empty properties back into use, and new developments of mixed housing in the social and private sectors. However, we also want local needs and environmental sustainability to be taken into account.

The Party of Wale will create a National Housing Company which will borrow against rents to build a new generation of public rental housing in Wales limited in number only by demand. We will also support Local Authorities wishing to build new Council Housing.

Local Authorities will be expected to agree targets for supplying affordable housing, including new social housing, with the Welsh Government, but will be given the flexibility to decide how they would achieve this based upon the needs of their area. Local Authorities will be able to develop joint plans with neighbouring local authorities, or work through housing associations or the National Housing Company, if they believed this was the best way to meet the needs of their areas.

A Plaid Cymru government will fund the development of new homes in small-scale housing developments in rural Wales on ‘exception sites’, whose land plots, not covered by general planning permission, will be capped at an affordable price designed to benefit those in local housing need with family and work ties to the area, and whose sale will be conditional on these houses continuing in local ownership in perpetuity.

Plaid Cymru has consistently opposed the Right to Buy scheme and we will take action to ensure the social housing stock remains intact in order to meet the demand for homes. We need to introduce a more rigorous system in the allocation of social housing to give priority to those in local housing need. And to support the release of public land as self-build plots for affordable homes, to buy and to lease, and allow housing associations to build their own high-quality prefabricated homes as the Accord Housing Association successfully does in Walsall.

Historically our communities have been ill-served by the planning system, by our local authorities (via the flawed system of Unitary Development Plans) and more recently by the Labour in Wales Welsh Government in Cardiff. With increasing pressure from over development community cohesion is under threat, along with increased demand on overstretched local amenities, our NHS and our green spaces.

Perhaps before constructing large numbers of new houses which fail to tackle local housing needs we should take a long hard look at the number of empty properties – something that remains largely unaddressed in many of our communities. We need a planning system that takes account of local housing needs, the environment (and seeks to create protected green belt land around and within our large and small urban communities) and also looks sustainability at the whole of Wales – and we will only get it with a Plaid Cymru government in Cardiff Bay.

SIZE MATTERS

It is an inescapable fact that Wales is a small relatively rugged country, now this is not a problem it is a virtue, a positive and should work to our advantage in so many ways. Our local government structure should also reflect this ensuring that services are delivered as locally as possible – it clearly does not do this. As a small country what might work better, judging by the experience of other small countries e.g. Norway Slovenia, etc) would be to focus primarily on having efficient small district level councils rather than the creation (or recreation) of ever larger artificial local government structures.

If we accept that the highly politicised 1992 reorganisation has not worked, then making the local government units bigger (again) won’t help things much. A real opportunity to take out an entire tier of local government has been missed. On a very basic level we need to actually work out exactly what we want local government to actually do and what services we want or don’t want it to provide. Once that has been done then we can move on to address the fundamental problem of local democracy and local accountability for decisions made.

Simply tweaking a local government structure, that is nineteenth century at heart, just won't do. Our existing local government structure is badly funded and barely democratic combing a dreadfully low turnout with the local peculiarities of the first past the post electoral system and a real remoteness from local people. If when the dust settles we end up with 5, 8, 10 or 12 new local authorities the only certainty is that a real opportunity will have been missed to reshape local government in a meaningful way and to make it democratically accountable to local people.

Take Housing, or more specifically Housing development, this has always and probably will remain for the foreseeable future at least a contentious issue. At heart of the problem lies the fundamentally flawed local government LDP (Local Development Plan) many of whom focus on maximizing the amount of housing that can be constructed, regardless of actual local demand for housing.   In the South East and the North East, planning for housing is influenced by cross border pressures (and demands) from the Merseyside conurbation and greater Bristol.

House prices in the southeast and the north east of Wales are also affected by higher house prices across the border, which in close conjunction with perceived lower house prices this side of the border increase pressure for development. Over-development is now a key issue (in south east this is very true along the Gwent levels and in and around the Wrecsam in the north east). Local authorities seek to cash in by maximizing the amount of housing constructed, well beyond the ability of local infrastructure to cope with increased demands and devouring our green spaces.

The LDP and the UDP (Unitary Development Plan) have reached the point where, much like the structure of our local government, they are no longer fit for purpose. The National  Assembly has pretty much been reasonably comfortable with the current local government and planning set up and has failed to exercise any meaningful overview or to be honest (save for between 2007 and 2011) actually realistically plan the development of our country. The proposed reform of local government is on a fundamental level little more of a tweak rather than much needed root and branch reform.

On a local, regional and a national level we have serious issues with planning and the provision of services, something which fundamentally affects almost every aspect of public service provision. Whether we are talking about our NHS, our education system, our emergency services, our public transport or infrastructure projects we need to develop a detailed and comprehensive planning system that takes into account local needs, local demands, our national interests and on a basic level our geography. Simply trying to make the flawed Anglo-Saxon model, whether in education, the NHS or in other areas apply to a fundamentally small country is clearly not working.

At the heart of the proposed local government reform, is a fundamental failure to bring in Single transferable Vote (STV) as is used in Northern Ireland and Scotland, to make every vote count and our local authorities democratically accountable. People don’t vote for a variety of reason, a lack of political choice, a lack of any real alternatives and perceived enshrined one party dominance (a problem that affects significant portions of local government in our country).

Now while history tends not to repeat itself, simular circumstances often arise and the same mistakes can be made. This times around despite devolution things may not be that different,  the reform of local government in 1992 was highly politicised, pushed through by a Westminster based Conservative government, for its own reasons. This  time around the failure to reform our local government may have more to do with efforts to enshrine or preserve Labour dominance in the new structures than anything else – oh how things change... 

WORKING FOR WALES?

Planning permission can be a touchy subject, especially when a development (whether for commercial, housing or energy development) is controversial or the final decision is made against the wishes of local people by a fairly distant and indifferent authority. It's pretty obvious that we lack a coherent national strategic development plan for Wales judging by the half-baked way local unitary development plans have been put together over the years, doing some pretty serious damage to our environment in the process.

News that the developers are set to appeal against a decision by Torfaen council to reject controversial plans for 1,200 homes in Sebastopol, should come as no surprise to most dispassionate observers. The original application was made by a consortium of developers (including Asbri Panning Ltd, Barratt Homes and the Welsh Development Agency) for the housing to be built on farm and woodland near Cwmbran Drive.

Torfaen County Council (wisely in my opinion) rejected the application on a number of different grounds including highways, transport, access and circulation and threat to surrounding green wedges of land. The development consortium has decided to skip negotiations with Torfaen County Council and go straight to an appeal against the planning decision. Back in July, Torfaen County Councillors refused the planning application, but, have until next week to formalise the exact wording of the reasons for refusal of planning consent.

You do have to ask yourself why the Welsh Development Agency, now an arm of the Welsh Government is working against the best interests of the people of Torfaen and seeking to develop the few surviving green wedges between Cwmbran and Pontypool. For the record, our county only has one notional green belt, and that lies between Cardiff and Newport, Scotland has 7 and Northern Ireland has 30 - each has its own policy guidance.

The idea of Green belt worked and worked well, as of 2007, Green belt covered something like 13% of England (around one-and-a-half million hectares) which despite the best efforts of previous Conservative and New Labour Governments it is still relatively well protected both by normal planning controls and against "inappropriate development" within its boundaries. It's worth noting that 'Green belt' is a useful planning tool, which was introduced for London in 1938 but then ended up being rolled out to England as a whole by a government circular in 1955.

We have seen in the south east, especially along the coastal belt and in and around Torfaen, over the last twenty years a spectacular growth in the amount of housing. The fact that a significant percentage of which was never aimed to fulfil pressing local housing needs may be of note, along with the fact that Newport City Council (and no doubt others) have encouraged a growth in housing to fill predicted anticipated gaps in demand for housing in and around a large city across the bridge.

As a result the infrastructure along the coastal belt between Chepstow, Caldicot, Rogiet and Magor is struggling to cope with existing developments and this is well before the projected expansion of housing on and around the former Llanwern site. The north of Newport has now been linked effectively to the south Cwmbran - something that has brought little material benefit or improved quality of life to either urban area.

We often seem to fail to note that once the Green belt or Green wedge is gone it's gone forever, we cannot restore it. The Con Dems in England (in Westminster) are seeking to free up green belt and agricultural land for housing (and other) development. There is a real need for a Welsh equivalent to Green belt, to fringe our urban areas, to help focus out of town and fringe of town developments, not to mention helping to protect rural green spaces between and within some of our urban areas for current and future generations.