Rebecca Evans: Diolch, Llywydd. I move the motion. I am pleased to open the debate seeking to agree the general principles of the Renting Homes (Fees etc.) (Wales) Bill. The Bill will ensure that tenants will be able to search for a home in the private rented sector with the confidence that they will not be hit by upfront fees. This should make the sector more stable, more reliable and more attractive,...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you very much for your questions and for your enthusiasm for the project in your constituency, which is obviously going to be a UK first—it's really exciting to have those vertical gardens and so on. You refer to it as a project that is regenerating the area, and what I think is particularly exciting about the innovative housing programme is that it's not innovative housing in a...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you very much for those questions. I certainly would like to see a planning system that does enable innovation in housing. We have an opportunity here with the review of planning and housing, which the Cabinet Secretary for environment, under her responsibilities for planning, announced earlier in the summer. I think that this is a chance really to put innovation at the heart of our...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you very much for your welcome for the statement, and also for your comments. The overall budget for the programme over the three years stands at £90 million. However, there are plenty of opportunities here for the innovative housing programme to work with other funds of money. So, the social housing grant, for example, has been used in a number of the projects that we're announcing...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you very much for those questions and your support, again, this year for the innovative housing programme. I'll begin with the final point you made, which was about how we will be monitoring and evaluating the programme. One of the exciting things about the innovative housing programme is that all applicants for funding must agree to an open-book policy. So, that will include regular...
Rebecca Evans: Diolch, Llywydd. I am very pleased to be able to brief Members on the second year of the innovative housing programme. The Welsh Government has prioritised Housing because prosperity is not just about material wealth, it is about every one of us having a good quality of life and living in strong, safe communities where individuals and businesses flourish. Building good-quality housing, and...
Rebecca Evans: Thank you very much for the question. We have been having regular feedback from those initial pilot projects, and we're using what we're learning from them now to fund a further series of what we're calling housing first trailblazer projects, and I was able to announce the first of those earlier on this week. I'm aware, actually, of some discussions that are taking place in the Mid and West...
Rebecca Evans: Welsh Government commissioned the Wales Centre for Public Policy to produce research on youth homelessness prevention. Their report, due to be published next month, will help inform future policy and funding decisions, including the allocation of the previously announced additional £10 million for youth homelessness.
Rebecca Evans: Well, I would start off by saying that Welsh Government fundamentally disagrees with your assertion that it should be the leaseholders who pay for this. Welsh Government is clear, and has been clear throughout, that, actually, it's the building developers who should be responsible for the remediation work. And that's why I met with all of the developers and managing agents of the private...
Rebecca Evans: I've taken a real interest in the evidence that your committee has received on this and I look forward to giving my own evidence to the committee next week. What I will say is much of the evidence that committee has heard only serves to reinforce the concerns that Dame Hackitt put forward in her report—so, issues about capacity, issues about the knowledge and expertise that there is in...
Rebecca Evans: Ever since the terrible tragedy at Grenfell Tower, Welsh Government has been working very hard, first of all, in the first instance, to identify all of our high-rise buildings, and then to work with those to understand whether or not they had the ACM cladding on them. So, I can confirm that Welsh Government now has a personal relationship, actually, with each of those high-rise buildings that...
Rebecca Evans: The task and finish group, which has broad stakeholder membership, has met twice. It has prioritised a number of issues that will complement the work of the Law Commission in this area. Working groups have been established to explore issues in detail. I expect to receive their recommendations next summer.
Rebecca Evans: Thank you. I am very pleased to move the motion. Following the passing of the Regulation of Registered Social Landlords (Wales) Act 2018, I am sure that Members will have noted the decision by the Office for National Statistics to classify registered social landlords in Wales as private sector organisations. This is good news, as the reclassification allows the current funding arrangements...
Rebecca Evans: Yes, I agree, and I've certainly read your document, and I look forward to the housing document coming forward in the autumn as well. I share your excitement about green roofs and we've seen some really good examples already. The Down to Earth project in my own constituency, in Gower, has built buildings with green roofs and they've found it to be not only good in terms of the...
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...
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: It's Vaughan Gething, but I'm happy to take the question.
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: 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: 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...
