Rebecca Evans: I thank you very much for those questions and for the warm welcome that you gave at the start of the contribution, and for your recognition about the importance of housing in the wider health and social care agenda. And we're not just talking about housing; you made the point that, actually, we're talking about homes, and when we listen to people, they generally tell us that home is where...
Rebecca Evans: I thank you very much for those comments, and before I address those points, I realise I had neglected to answer the point that Angela Burns raised in terms of how we're going to be monitoring and overseeing what is very significant spend. Effective monitoring and evaluation arrangements are important in order to provide us with those assurances that ICF capital funding is being fully...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you very much for those questions. I'm glad that you began by acknowledging that it's important that we don't work in silos in this regard. I think it's important that the Welsh Government shows leadership in terms of being able to work across traditional boundaries, especially when we are asking local authorities and health boards to do difficult things, including pooling budgets...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you very much for those questions. I'll begin at the end of your contribution when you were talking about innovative housing. I think that we are really on the cusp of a revolution in terms of the way that we build housing. There are so many exciting new ways of building homes. Some of those are being supported through our £90 million innovative housing programme. The current window...
Rebecca Evans: Okay, I will be brief. I just want to recognise that, as other Members have said, there is genuinely cross-party interest and support for this agenda, so I think it's only fair to recognise that. In terms of the social housing partners and the housing sector on those regional partnership boards, it is true to say that their voice has been heard very well on some of those regional partnership...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you for very much for those questions and comments, and I very much recognise the report to which you referred. We have asked our officials to explore that report to see what more we can be doing to ensure that we are building housing that is accessible to people. Certainly, housing that is built, or other accommodation that is built, through our integrated care fund would be very...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you. Across Welsh Government we know how important housing is. Because of the impact it has on people's lives, we've made housing one of our five priority areas in 'Prosperity for All'. Our ambition is for everyone to live in a good-quality home that meets their needs and supports a healthy life.
Rebecca Evans: In the last term of Government, we achieved our target to build 10,000 affordable homes. We have committed to an ambitious target of delivering a further 20,000 affordable homes during this term of Government. Whilst it's early days and we can't afford to be complacent, I am confident that we can achieve this by continuing to work closely with partners involved in housing delivery. We're...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you to everyone who has contributed to what I think has been a really helpful debate that will certainly set the panel off in the right direction in terms of understanding the concerns that there are in this Chamber. I'm going to try and respond to as many points as I possibly can, and I'll begin with the issues of modular and modern methods of construction, because that was raised by...
Rebecca Evans: The innovative housing programme also provides us with an opportunity to see what more we can do using Welsh timber. I think that's something that many of us within this Chamber, and certainly across Government, are very passionate about doing. But we're also aware that one of the challenges that we do have when we're talking about innovative housing is how we can ensure that the industry is...
Rebecca Evans: As I say, some of the data within that does go back to the 1990s. I think whatever our data comes up with, whatever Holmans data comes up with, I think we can all agree that we need to be building more homes and that we want to be building more homes. So, we certainly have that area of commonality. I'll just finish on the issue of housing as a human right. This is something that various...
Rebecca Evans: The five local authorities in Mid and West Wales have successfully ended homelessness for 2,907 households and successfully prevented homelessness for 2,421 households since commencement of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014. We have provided over £900,000 directly to these local authorities last year for homelessness services in addition to the revenue support grant.
Rebecca Evans: I thank you very much for that question, and I completely agree with you about the worrying trend in terms of homelessness, particularly rough-sleeping. But I think we can be proud of the record that we do have in terms of prevention. I gave you some of the figures of the thousands of people who've had homelessness prevented and relieved in your region, and the figure now across Wales is...
Rebecca Evans: I thank you very much for raising this issue. Of course, the legislation is not yet in place; it will be subject to a vote of the whole Assembly in the early part of next year. Of course, the approach I tried to take was a pragmatic approach, trying to be fair to both the park home owners and also the park home residents. I know that the Conservative Party was very much pressing the approach...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you for the question. I'm certainly aware of the issue, in terms of there being a large number of student accommodations within Cardiff that aren't being occupied by students. There's a particular difficulty in terms of changing those accommodations into non-student accommodations, of course, because my understanding is that the regulations surrounding the different types of...
Rebecca Evans: I think there's an onus on universities and on the local authorities to be having some serious discussions together in terms of their projections of local needs for both students and the non-student population, and to be planning their new builds and what's available in terms of accommodation locally in that way. I'm not sure that there's a role for Welsh Government in terms of stipulating...
Rebecca Evans: Well, the Minister with responsibility for planning has already said that she intends to issue a wide-ranging review of housing and planning rules over the course of the summer. So, I'm sure that this will be one of the issues that are drawn to the fore and drawn to attention within the course of that consultation, and it will be an opportunity to consider whether there need to be changes in...
Rebecca Evans: It's Vaughan Gething, but I'm happy to take the question.
Rebecca Evans: Thank you for the question. Of course, our innovative housing programme is certainly at the heart of our response to this serious challenge that's facing us in terms of creating homes that are low carbon—carbon zero ideally—and we've got some excellent projects coming forward now and being built and we're learning from them already from our last year's stream of projects. But, this time,...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you, and I certainly think that this is the time now to be having that challenging discussion with the volume house builders, particularly because I was quite disappointed to read some of the evidence that the committee has received, which almost suggested that everything's fine, 'Let's not change anything'. But everything's not fine, and we do need to change things. We are currently...
