Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Constitution and Cabinet Office – in the Senedd at 1:34 pm on 19 June 2024.
Gareth Davies
Conservative
1:34,
19 June 2024
The housing crisis is one of the biggest challenges we face as a nation, and every year that passes without drastic action is another year of homes becoming more unaffordable and more unavailable, unfortunately. And whilst I agree that urgent action is needed to rapidly accelerate the construction of social housing and private housing too for those on middle and low incomes, I do not think that leaving more debt to our children is the way we deal with the shortage of housing we have right now. The Welsh Conservatives put our housing plan before the Senedd in February, which covered many bases, such as measures to speed up planning approval and to make the use of more than 100,000 vacant, unoccupied dwellings in Wales, including numerous unused public-owned properties and public-owned land. The Welsh Government should consider a support scheme to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to build social housing, whilst providing public-owned land for this purpose. This is something that has been championed by my esteemed colleague Janet Finch-Saunders, the Member of the Senedd for Aberconwy. In the late 1980s, SMEs were responsible for 40 per cent of all homes built in Britain, but recent figures from 2020 are closer to 10 per cent. So, could the Cabinet Secretary outline what financial support the Welsh Government is offering to small and medium-sized house builders for the purpose of building more social housing? Thank you.
The cabinet is the group of twenty or so (and no more than 22) senior government ministers who are responsible for running the departments of state and deciding government policy.
It is chaired by the prime minister.
The cabinet is bound by collective responsibility, which means that all its members must abide by and defend the decisions it takes, despite any private doubts that they might have.
Cabinet ministers are appointed by the prime minister and chosen from MPs or peers of the governing party.
However, during periods of national emergency, or when no single party gains a large enough majority to govern alone, coalition governments have been formed with cabinets containing members from more than one political party.
War cabinets have sometimes been formed with a much smaller membership than the full cabinet.
From time to time the prime minister will reorganise the cabinet in order to bring in new members, or to move existing members around. This reorganisation is known as a cabinet re-shuffle.
The cabinet normally meets once a week in the cabinet room at Downing Street.
The Conservatives are a centre-right political party in the UK, founded in the 1830s. They are also known as the Tory party.
With a lower-case ‘c’, ‘conservative’ is an adjective which implies a dislike of change, and a preference for traditional values.