Session 4
John Lloyd Jones – Chairman, Countryside Council for Wales
I was interested to see that the title of this conference is ‘The National Parks’ Role in the new Wales’ because lots of people of course associate the National Parks with the old Wales and also the strap line of how you go about fulfilling your national and international obligations within the context of Welsh government obligations. I’m tempted to say ‘lets forget the last bit’ because all governments are only temporary problems aren’t they?
I am intrigued and inspired by this outlook because you’re looking much further than just conserving the past and in looking at your international obligations rather than your parochial duties. So let me start on the big picture stuff.
Some of you may well be aware that there’s been a long, bitter and acrimonious debate whether National Parks should contain people, this is a kind of world debate if you like, UNESCO debate. Category 2 wilderness parks – areas the debate lead by the Canadians, take a very purist view and they rather look down on Category 5 National Parks that contain people. Well of course we can’t take that attitude here, we are a population of round about 70 million people on a very small island, the whole concept of re-worlding is quite daft to say the least but we can take the opportunity to show how man and nature can co-exist. Indeed I’d go further than that, National Parks are the obvious test beds for this concept and it chimes with the One Wales document about addressing the need of deep rural areas. Sustainable development funds, it is an opportunity, probably it does need to be refreshed, it was very innovative in the beginning but the wonderful thing about it is that it tolerates failure and it gives you the opportunity to test things and you can learn just as much by failures as you can by successes. But there is a challenge here – how do you involve the smaller scale private sector within the sustainable development fund? And what role do the National Parks play in the biosphere concept. Biosphere is a UNESCO designation, you have Snowdonia – a Biosphere on your doorstep if not in the porch as it were because it’s based on the southern fringes of Snowdonia. It’s an interesting model. A core area designated as an European designation and a special area of conservation, a UK designation and a transitional zone which is flexible and seeks to take economical environmental advantage of the two inner areas. And the whole thing works through public and community involvement. It carries no legal binding status but considerable international kudos. The Dyfi biosphere is only the second in the UK after Branson Burrows in Devon. If you reject the whole concept of hierarchies within National Parks, if you reject the Category 2, it’s not better than Category 5, then where does that lead you with your relations with AONB’s? Gower is very similar to Pembrokeshire, Wye Valley is very close to the Brecon Beacons, Lleyn shares the same local authority boundary as Snowdonia and Anglesey the Clwydian Hills. They’re hardly a million miles away. Now if we’re working the Beecham agenda Making the Connections, what are your day to day relationships? You have considerably more resources – what help are you giving? After all you’re still part of the same family of protected landscapes and that’s a different situation to England because AONB’s in Wales are members of the family of protected areas. It does give an opportunity for innovation, to show how connections can be made.
Let’s move on to bigger challenges. One Wales tackling Climate Change.
We are likely to face, within the next few years, the biggest change in land use in our lifetime and maybe for the last three generations. That is not only happening soon but in some parts it’s happening now. In Pembrokeshire I suspect it’s started to happen already and there are three huge drivers. Climate Change – associated that with weather, increased flooding, droughts and the effect on world commodity prices. Australian agriculture has more or less closed down, it is not functioning at all at the moment. That has resulted in a huge increase in milk and cereals – that is not a blip. It isn’t just weather that we’re talking about that because in climate change you’ve got to take it in conjunction with two other things.
One is oil – how do you replace petro chemicals, the oil industry which after all is nothing more than bottled sunlight but has been bottled over millions of years, which we’ve more or less used, at least, there’s probably more been used more than there’s still left in the last couple of hundred years. We’ll need to replace it with plant carbon for energy needs. Wind farms and bio-mass are here, this debate is much bigger. Wind farms have had a disproportionate effect both on the levels of the debate and the levels of energy that they actually produce.
Biomass quite truly is very, very crude technology. All you’re doing is growing something to burn it. The real action may be ten years away but with the technical solutions, and it will come, how do you break down wood cellulose cells to realise bio-fuels and pharmaceuticals?
The third element in all this is demographic change. Not only is there a world population now of 6 billion but that’s likely to increase to 9 billion by 2050. But crucially it’s not only the population increases but what happens to the emerging economies of India and China, where they’re starting to change their diets from rice and grain, to dairy and meat protein. Pressure on intensification of land use; milk going up from 16p a litre to 30p a litre and rising, cereals doubling from £80-£200 a ton. This is here now. Literally once commodity prices start rising at this level, what price agri-environment schemes now. But this, the scariest thing, just as these huge economic drivers are beginning to kick in, we are becoming more and more aware of the crucial importance to our very existence on what we call environmental goods and services. How the environment around us provides clean air, clean water and other natural benefits. It’s fairly easy to work out the economic benefits of natural pollinators like bees but how do you work out the economic benefits of concepts like tranquillity and spiritual well-being? But those very things of course are core values and the reasons for many of the existence of National Parks.
Well, what’s the relevance to at least 2 of your National Parks? You’re talking about all these things, actually Snowdonia & Brecon Beacons, you are probably sitting on the greatest concentration of carbon in Wales in your upland peat. I remember the carbon reduction targets of minus 3% per year for 2011, the blunt truth is you can replace every light bulb in Wales, double it, double it again and it will only have a fraction of the effect if you mis-manage peat through poor management and it starts to release plant carbons. That is the reality of what we’re talking about and it’s a real challenge for the Parks, all of us, how do we develop land management schemes that address these issues? The big advantages are that 3 Parks, you are our coherent entity, you can test bed these concepts. Yesterday I was speaking at the Rural Economy and Land Use conference in London. RELU. RELU is a concept, it’s putting sociologists, ecologists, economists and biologists all together to foster interdisciplinary work. What I’m doing there goodness only knows, but there we are.
It’s looking for innovative solutions and I’ll give you an example which is of relevance to the Park. I was speaking on part of this yesterday and it involves the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research. IGER has a research station in the Brecon Beacons National Park, just outside Sennybridge, and of course halting biodiversity loss by 2010 is another government target. Difficulty is about taking traditional animals to that type of land is that it’s at specific times of the year, it is incredibly labour intensive. Where do you get the family labour from to do it? Because you don’t want them all the time, but you do want them at specific times. At the moment of course we only have one generation, bye and large, living on a farm. How can we unlock the potential to the conversion of traditional buildings to permanent dwellings to house second and third generation families at the same time. At a stroke you’d provide free childcare if nothing else. But remembering the Farming for the Future document, where it says that one of the stated main aims was to maintain the greatest number of farming families on the land not of necessity actually earning their living from the land but being part of that farming structure. How can we unlock the potential to turn some of these traditional buildings into permanent dwellings? Now I can understand your reluctance and I can understand the reluctance of planning officers because once you’ve done that, you can’t absolutely control their future use. Some members will plead special circumstances. I know, I’ve been on the National Park for nine years you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. We all know that the Section 106 agreements aren’t as strong as they could be but just think it out. If you really could get really good Section 106 agreements that would really stick then you could say quite rightly that the best thing you could do to increase the biodiversity of upland areas is by having strong Section 106 planning agreements. Unless you have that quirky inter-disciplinary approach then you won’t come at innovative solutions like that but National Parks can make these connections. You’re delivering other duties and there are real challenges here. How can you make new buildings which are energy efficient with innovative designs that actually don’t compromise other standards of vernacular buildings.
How to foster local procurement - I’m interested to see the work that Brecon Beacons have been doing on Talybont and Usk and Crickhowell with local pub foods. The common line seems to be that all the pubs need to be called the Unicorn. How do you deliver on access, especially coastal access. It’s making these connections. But the more I think about it, all this work is more than just a single purpose local authority isn’t it? It’s more like an ASPB, no let’s not go there. But it is looking forward, some of the challenges I’ve already outlined, there are other challenges there already. We have a pretty taxing challenge as a habitats directive, to get those sites under good management. An awful lot of those sites are within National Parks. We have national nature reserves, we’re trying to put together a package of joint wardening. In some of these National Parks there’s a National Park warden, another from CCW, and even from the National Trust. But the only way we’re going to get joint working is that the wardens actually have a professional body that represents them and makes sure that everybody works to the same common standards.
Session 4 – Keynote Address
Jane Davidson AM, Minister for the Environment, Sustainability and Housing
I see events such as this as important in terms of helping you all share ideas and I’m sure you’ve been doing a lot of that over the last two days, and look forward to opportunities for both you to work much closer together and for us all to work much closer together for the good of Wales as a whole and I feel very honoured to be asked to provide the concluding address to your conference. I’m sure it’s been a successful, motivational and thought-provoking event and I hope also to certainly provoke some thoughts and some brief discussion after my contribution today.
Travelling here today, I always marvel at the spectacular beauty of this area. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in rain or shine but it is important that it is properly managed and made accessible to as wide a spectrum of the population as possible. As the chair said in his introduction, I do have a love of mountains – I’ve climbed most of the mountains in the Snowdonia National Park and I was delighted to crawl to the rim of Kilimanjaro this summer. I’ve visited all three National Parks in both the professional and the private capacity, in fact I started my walking career on the Pembrokeshire coastal paths a year after it opened when I was 15 and I fully appreciate what a fabulous resource they are to both people who live there and for the millions of people who visit and return to enjoy their special qualities.
Now, what I want to do in my contribution today is to focus on the role of the National Park Authorities in the delivery of the Welsh Assembly Government’s agenda as set out in the One Wales document. In our coalition government, we are absolutely determined to make sure that the commitments that we’ve set out in One Wales are achieved and therefore it’s very much a programme for action over the next four years. The main areas relevant to you are quite clearly your positive contribution that you make in terms of the promotion of tourism, in support of the drive to sustain living communities, the need to address the lack of good quality affordable housing in Wales where the National Park Authorities have a critical planning role to play, but I think a wider role than the planning role, in helping to achieve our ambition that all people in all communities in Wales can afford a decent home. The protection and enhancement of Wales’ rich and diverse environment for people now and for generations to come and key to all of this is the need to tackle climate change which I see as very much one of my main priorities and I come to you this morning having just addressed a very specific workshop on the management of flood and coastal erosion in the context of North Wales in Llandudno. The commitment of the Welsh Assembly Government to revising upwards the target of energy from renewables drawn from a range of sources following production of the new energy route map which will be coming out probably in the early part of the New Year. The creation of an all Wales coastal path, which both the Snowdonia National Park Authority and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority will have a very important part to play in and encouraging people from all backgrounds to enjoy the natural environment of Wales, to get out into the countryside.
Now climate change is one of the most important challenges facing the world, and tackling it is a key priority for this government. It’s extremely interesting for me, coming into this as a new Minister, when I first started hearing what the scientists were saying about climate change, it didn’t really surprise me but I suppose like many individuals I was too busy being Education Minister as it were to start thinking about how the impact of climate change might affect what we did in the Assembly Government might affect what we do as individuals or in the context of our communities. But I have to say that since I’ve taken on this role, and I’m reading a huge amount in terms of all aspects of the portfolio, the statistics, the evidence basis for climate change and of course we’ve just seen Al Gore and the Chair of the International Panel for Climate Change being awarded the Nobel Prize for their work. The evidence is so clear and so unremitting.
At the flood workshop this morning, I was talking about sea-level rises of a metre or so predicted within a hundred years and a very experienced person got up and said ‘But that’s the minimum’. These sea level rises could be a great deal more than that and if you just look and overlay the maps of Wales, sea level rises up half a metre are going to cause us huge problems and anything beyond that is going to cause major government headaches in terms of how we relate to our communities, which communities we can work with, how we are going to have to look at completely different flood mechanisms in terms of sacrificing some land in order to save our communities. We are going to have to have a very new approach to these issues and when you just look at the weather patterns that we’ve seen in the last few months, when you look at the floods that we had in England and I’m confidently told by our officials that much as I’d loved to have been able to say to you this morning and to say to others, that we were better prepared and that’s why we didn’t experience the floods – that wasn’t the case, we were not better prepared. If we had had the flood circumstances, if we had had that prolonged intense bursts of rainfall that they had in England, we would have had the same kinds of floods in Wales.
Now we’re trying to be better prepared, that’s the Welsh Assembly Governments commitment to this issue and I do not accept the argument promoted by some that because we’re a small country and our influence on this is going to be very small, that we can afford to wait and allow others to take the lead. I think that’s seriously not the case. We have to show we are determine to rise to this challenge and that’s why the One Wales government of course, have given ourselves hard targets in addition to what’s going to come through under the Climate Change Bill from the United Kingdom Government, announced in the Queen’s Speech this week. We’re looking at targets of 3% reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from 2011, annual 3% reductions year on year in the work that we do. We are establishing a climate change commission for Wales, it will meet for the first time on December 10th. We are looking for your expertise and others in supporting the work of that commission. We have given ourselves a commitment to develop targets on the carbon neutrality of public buildings, support for indigenous woodlands which can act as a carbon sink. We can’t tackle climate change on our own because many of the levers for action lie outside our control but the engagement and active participation of the rest of the public sector of business, the voluntary sector, non-governmental organisations, communities and individuals will be vital if we want to achieve a real impact which is why we’re looking at supporting communities, which is why we’re looking at creating four young climate change champions and that competition is open to the end of this week for 11-18 year olds to put themselves forward to help take forward this message to their peers. It’s why we want all schools in Wales to become eco-schools. Now you can play a critically important part by keeping climate change on the agenda. After this meeting I’ll be discussing, with the smaller group, how climate change is on the agenda, on the basis of paper from the three National Parks. But we really have to up our game on this issue.
Now, in addition, and as set out in the National Park policy statement which I understand that you’ve already been discussing at this conference, I look to you quite specifically to look at the potential implications of climate change for your areas, to play the appropriate role in drawing up risk management plans for your areas and to contribute more generally to the climate change adaptation plan for Wales. And following the seminar on this issue held in Newcastle earlier this year at which a range of possible practicable actions by National Parks were discussed, I would like the National Park Authorities to draw up action plans setting out what you plan to do this. I recognise the Parks’ Authorities resources are limited but climate change is an issue we can all address and I know you’re all working on it, but we really must take this forward and we quite deliberately, in my appointment put together elements in relation to environment, energy, planning, water, waste, housing into one portfolio and that is absolutely deliberate with giving me the corporate responsibility for climate change and the corporate responsibility for sustainable development because closely allied to the climate change agenda is the need to secure an appropriate mix of energy provision for Wales whilst minimizing the impact on the environment.
We’re very clear about wanting to strengthen renewable energy production and achieve a greater focus on energy efficiency and conservation. The WWF ‘One Planet Wales’ campaign demonstrates very clearly that if we carry on with business as usual in terms of our seeking additional energy resource, year on year, that actually we’ll require a 30% increase in that energy resource just to meet business as usual. Well that’s just not going to be there. It’s just not going to be there from the traditional energy providers and we have to make sure that as far as possible, in energy security terms, that we are able to ensure that Wales can rely on renewable energy sources and when we publish the energy route map you will be seeing our ambitions about ensuring that Wales can rely on a wide range of energy renewable resources in terms of making ourselves self-reliant.
Now the One Wales document also commits the Assembly Government therefore to revising upwards the targets for energy from renewables drawn from the range of resources following the publication of that new energy route map. Now we’ll be planning to consult on the energy route map fairly shortly and until this is published and until we have the outcome of that consultation, and until on the back of that we have an energy strategy, we cannot begin because we’ll need to have a clear energy strategy in place to support that. I’m very keen for National Park Authorities to explore the potential to develop other types of renewable energy in the National Parks. Quite simply I see that with the nature of National Parks, I hope you’ll be leading the way and demonstrating how you can rely as early as possible on renewable energy resources.
Another of my key priorities, as you will all know, is the development of the Access agenda and I want to see greater participation in cycling and walking activities and I want to see whether we really can extend that to all backgrounds in Wales. I know you all do a tremendous amount of work trying to reach ‘the hard to reach’ in terms of encouraging to come out into the very scary countryside that the rest of us all love so much but key to this agenda is how we can not only remove barriers but remove some perceived barriers and focus on increasing opportunities for people, whatever their background or physical ability, to enjoy the countryside and feel self faith and welcomed in doing so.
A key element of this is our One Wales objective of the All Wales Coastal Path because we know from Pembrokeshire, there are significant benefits for coastal communities from the coastal path there and there will be significant benefits from coastal communities all around Wales. I understand that the coastal path on Anglesey is already delivering significant benefits and we want to see those benefits extended to the whole of Wales and our aim is to have the coastal path open in 2012 to coincide with the London Olympics. Actually we want to do it first but we’ll see how we go but the Assembly’s draft budget for 2007-08 therefore provides additional resources to help take that forward and I also want to explore how new legislation might compliment the existing access improvement programme. Unfortunately, some people are characterising this is terms of suggesting that the Assembly Government want to use legislation to force a path around Wales, irrespective of the views of local farmers and landowners. That is not our aim, and I think it’s very important that we are able to demonstrate that just as the work that was done on the CROW Act, just as work that was done in terms of creating the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, the Anglesey Coastal Path, the Ceredigion Coastal Path, just as work that is done that supports the Tir Gofal access in terms of relation to the Heritage Coast Path down in South Wales for example. We’ve seen that actually voluntary agreements are achieving a huge amount and we want to be pursuing that route. The legislation will be about helping us make progress in those locations where no negotiated agreement can be reached with landowner interests so it’s very much for me about having back pocket legislation not front ‘in your face’ legislation, it’s absolutely not that. It’s back pocket legislation because if we end up in a situation where the potential for an ‘All Wales Coastal Path’ is frustrated by a couple of acres here and there, then we will need to have legislation in our back pocket and I hope that you’ll all be able to work with us because it doesn’t matter whether you are in a coastal path area or not in this context, it’s actually about opening up opportunities in the countryside and if people will start using those kind of opportunities, they’ll start using the others as well so we see this as very beneficial for all of this agenda in Wales.
I was delighted that I was able to persuade Rhodri Morgan, I have to say that it wasn’t hard, to put the promotion of cycling into my portfolio as well because I see all these activities related and I’m keen for the National Parks to do more to support this activity and you’ll know from your officers probably that at every single meeting I’ve had so far I’m literally asking you how many bicycles can travel behind a bus into the National Parks and I want to make sure that also we can have a dialogue with Ieuan Wyn Jones and his Transport role in terms of looking at how we can, where there are train access into places, that we can use the trains as well in terms of transporting Bikes International Parks, because the National Parks are already fantastic destinations for walkers, we already have cross-Wales cycle paths. I’m very strongly, I have to say in a personal capacity not as Minister, supporting the Sustrans bid for the major capital lottery funds in terms of extending walking & cycling routes and I think it’s important that we make Wales a destination – a lean, clean and green destination in terms of walkers and cyclists. I know there are already tremendous opportunities here and we want to see, as an Assembly Government, how we can build on that.
The disabled access works carried out recently by the National Park Authorities using our additional capital resources, I know have provided many useful opportunities for disabled people to visit and enjoy the Parks. Often specific locations they haven’t had access to in the past and I’m really grateful for that and it’s very exciting the way we could open up the Parks to those who aren’t able-bodied as well.
Now Rights of Way, another very important area. We must secure sustained improvements in our vitally important Rights of Way network and we do see that the new statutory rights of way improvement plans assisting in securing the necessary changes we need to make there. Brecon Beacons National Park Authority – one of the first authorities in Wales to produce one of the plans and the draft assembly budget provides extra resources for the plans. I’m also keen to see better public access to the many rivers and lakes in Wales for recreational use and I see, once again, it’s like the Coastal Path approach, many additional benefits to be gained for the rural Welsh economy if we do this in both a responsible and sustainable manner. We’re working, as many of you will know, with Environment Agency Wales to develop a new strategic plan on water access to identify potential new opportunities. We’re also supporting a range of water access exemplar projects. I launched one on the River Wye in terms of canoe access, strongly supported by the angling community as well. Recently we hoped to have the whole of the Wye dealt with relatively shortly, we’re talking about improved access on Mawddach and Glaslyn rivers in Snowdonia too and clearly the water resources in the National Parks are very diverse and extensive, follow up action on the strategic plan will therefore be very relevant to the National Park Authorities and I’m sure you’ll all want to play a major role in taking that forward.
We do want to ensure, and I particularly in my portfolio with the lead responsibility for sustainable development, want to ensure that we manage the large number of visitors to the National Parks in a sustainable manner so we’re very interested in the work that you’re doing on sustainable transport and sustainable visitor initiatives. It’s very easy just to add the word sustainable in front of things to make it look a bit greener and friendlier to a government agenda but I know that in the context of the way that the word is used by this group of people that this is real. You are looking at sustainable transport and sustainable visitor initiatives. I’ve recently been in touch with the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority about its sustainable visitor transport development plan and I’m keen to know more about the actions by the other Park Authorities on this important issue and I’m sure we’ll discuss that shortly.
Activity tourism is one of Wales’ strengths as a tourism destination and is a growing niche market for Wales and a significant proportion of these activities take place within our National Parks, giving communities and businesses located within the Park the opportunity to benefit economically. I’ve already talked about cycling but it’s also about making sure that all aspects of the visitor experience to the National Park match the quality of their natural environment and there the National Park Authorities have a key role to play in ensuring that tourism whereas the gentle enjoyment or for more demanding or physical recreation is developed sustainably. I’d just like to take this opportunity, once again, to commend the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority for being awarded the prestigious European Charter for sustainable tourism in protected areas, the first Welsh National Park to achieve that honour and it would be great if we could have all our Parks in Wales achieving that honour.
Now I want to turn to an area which is trickier in the context of the work that you do, but an area very close to my heart as the Minister responsible in overall terms for making sure that we have an additional 6,500 new build affordable homes over our four years term. We all know and you’ve talked to me already about the lack of good quality affordable housing in Wales both in urban and rural areas and particularly in your areas. We all know and if we look at the way house prices are increasing and where house prices are increasing disproportionately in the places that people want to live in the National Parks, in some of our beautiful rural authorities so we really do have to address affordable housing in a very focused way. I recently announced key changes to housing and planning policy intended to deliver increased levels of affordable housing and I’m sure a few people in this room would have been in the seminars that we conducted in different parts of Wales. One Wales commits us to providing an additional 6,500 new affordable homes as I said so we’re actually looking very carefully at how investment in both the social rented sector and low cost home ownership market can help increase the number of affordable quality homes. The draft budget published this week allocated £10 million to housing authorities in delivering our ambitious yet critical commitment so increase the supply of affordable homes. Not all of these extra homes can be provided through the social housing grant programmes so must look increasingly to the planning system and the private sector to deliver.
You obviously are not housing authorities, but the critical element is actually the planning authority function and you do have registered social landlords working in your area, you obviously have house builders working in your area so you are critical partners in the delivery of affordable housing and where there is evidence of the need and we know that need is actually universal across Wales but it needs to be pinpointed in the local development plans and that commitment must be followed through in planning decisions, helping to ensure that more affordable homes are built sooner rather than later. Last year we published a comprehensive package of measures with examples of how affordable housing had been delivered using various mechanisms such as the section 106 agreements and publicly owned land and that package included the affordable housing toolkit, the housing ministerial interim planning policy statements otherwise known as the housing maps and technical advice note 1 on joint housing land availability studies and technical advice notes otherwise known as tan to planning and affordable housing. Those are the critical guidance from the housing and planning side in the planning terms. The affordable housing toolkit, the housing maps on joint housing land availability studies and tan 2 on planning & affordable housing. We’re confident that that package of measures will result in more affordable housing in the medium term because the local development plans don’t kick in yet for a few years but more needs to be done now. In One Wales we’ve announced our intention to require local authorities to prepare affordable housing action plans and officials are preparing detailed guidance setting out the process by which they will be prepared and their content as a matter of urgency and National Park will clearly have a role in delivering these action plans. We need National Park Authorities and local planning authorities to have the right planning policies in place, to provide a robust basis for negotiations with developers to provide affordable housing, and that includes appropriate size thresholds above which the requirement to provide a percentage of affordable housing kicks in. That includes quotas, that is the percentage of affordable housing that will be sought from qualifying sites and where appropriate planning policies are not currently in place I have asked officials to identify potential mechanisms to rectify this shortcoming at the earliest opportunity. Now if I unpack that sentence for you it basically means that if the planning authorities do not actually fulfil their obligation in terms of their 5 year allocations of housing and their affordable housing action plans, then any application for housing in an area that does not contradict with national policy requirement we will just agree. So you need to do your work to make sure that you are in control of doing this and you are fulfilling your requirements on the housing front. Now to illustrate this point, the University of Sheffield has recently completed a piece of research on the use and value of Section 106 agreements in Wales and the research provides a valuable snapshot of the quantity of affordable housing potentially secured through the planning system in 2005-06. Now in that year only 869 affordable homes were contained in planning agreements with a number of planning authorities reporting that they had secured no affordable housing through the Section 106 agreements. I think that life has improved since then and certainly anyone with a technical interest or a member interest in this issue might well want to look at this research from the University of Sheffield but we want to work with you from the Assembly Government to build on the findings of this research to identify and implement a range of policy initiatives and I’ve requested that officials consider the possibility of organising training for local authority and planning authority officers to improve negotiating skills and produce best practice guidance on the use of Section 106 agreements to secure affordable housing. We want to encourage the sharing of best practice, making use of financial appraisal techniques which look at site economics and tell officers what amount of affordable housing specific developments can support. Those authorities which have a dedicated Section 106 officer are finding that you get a return on that investment very quickly indeed, and that it may well be that this is an area which actually could be jointly worked on through the National Parks.
We ourselves have a land protocol inside Welsh Assembly Government and that land protocol means that we are asking all our departments to free up land for affordable housing right across the ownership of the Welsh Assembly Government, that includes Forestry Commission which has already done this work and offered up land for affordable housing, or any other department of the Assembly Government which has land holding. The NHS is a huge landholder across Wales and often in rural areas and in National Park areas as well and I’ll be convening a meeting of all our officials along with my deputy minister before Christmas to actually look at how much land can be released from the Assembly Government under the land protocol to put into this mix as well.
We’re fully aware of facing particular problems in rural areas including in the National Parks where the housing sites may not be large enough to generate the cross subsidy required to help build affordable housing through the traditional routes but the Section 106 research also provided evidence that local planning authorities are not making full use of existing policies that allow rural exception sites to be used to provide affordable housing that is available for community use in perpetuity and last year we introduced the ability to identify sites solely for affordable housing. We are continuing, as you will probably know, to support the work of the rural housing enablers which is very important in your context who will work across Wales to provide solutions to rural housing problems and we’re looking to expand this service as a means to better understand the needs of rural communities and we’re also providing funding towards the development of community land trusts on a pilot basis which aim to enable communities to build and control the future occupation of affordable housing.
Now I’ve talked about housing in the context of your role as local planning authorities but I should also like to mention the ongoing issue of the service provided to the public and developers. While improvements have been secured by the planning service provided by National Park Authorities, we obviously would want to ensure that those benefits continue to accrue so we will be looking to you to continue to work hard to secure a planning service which is open and efficient and which delivers sound consistent decisions in which communities can have full confidence. You’re making progress here but there is still more to do. You will be aware that in the Queen’s speech a new planning bill was announced and that planning bill will bring a large new number of framework powers as they’re called at the moment for Wales to make its own measures in terms of planning so there are big opportunities for us at the moment in terms of the way that we take forward this agenda to see if there does need to be any new legislation that we can deliver that from the Assembly Government.
So there’s a big agenda facing us all, there’s a lot for the National Park Authorities to get involved in and to contribute towards and I look forward to working with you in helping to deliver the ‘One Wales’ agenda for the people of Wales.
Thank you very much
