I want to just talk about the opportunities posed by two Government policies. One is that Carl Sargeant announced an additional £30 million towards building affordable new homes, and the other is the Welsh Government’s target of 100,000 apprenticeships being created by 2021.

I think it’s very important that we use this opportunity to align these apprenticeships to the skill force that we’re actually going to need for the future Welsh economy. It won’t happen organically. Political drivers are required to make it happen.

I particularly refer to the way in which we build the homes that we need for the future. Private housebuilders are resistant to change and continue to build houses that are inadequately insulated and lack sustainable energy generation—an unholy alliance of the big six housebuilders with the big six energy providers. Now, the construction industry knows that low-carbon homes are achievable, but we have to have clear regulations, applicable to all new buildings, as well as a sufficiently skilled workforce with appropriate levels of knowledge of the precision skills required for zero-carbon home building. I hope that leaving the EU is not being interpreted as a cue for abandoning the requirement for all new buildings to be zero carbon by 2020.

We have excellent made-in-Wales examples in Pentre Solar and the SOLCER house, which demonstrates that we have the knowledge, but we just need to apply it. We need to ensure that we have all the apprenticeship skills lined up so that we can both build the homes we need for our own needs here in Wales and also pitch in for opportunities for construction work across Europe. So, I was astonished to be told, at a recent conference to brief employers about the new apprenticeship levy, by a senior Welsh Government official that he did not know how we would deliver on these important precision skills required. I don’t think that’s good enough.

We have to remember that it was Gordon Brown who led the way in 2006, announcing a zero-carbon homes policy, and Britain was the first country to make such a commitment. Had we kept to that commitment, we would have ensured that all new dwellings from last year would have generated as much energy on site through renewable resources as they would actually need in heating, hot water, lighting and ventilation. So, it was an absolute tragedy that ‘Six-jobs’ George Osborne axed these measures in regulations in July 2015—one of the first acts of the new Conservative Government—hidden away in a so-called productivity plan. The chief executive of the UK Green Building Council said it was the death knell for the zero-carbon homes policy.

Uncertainty breeds inaction, and the industry is always reticent to make firm steps to deliver low- and zero-carbon homes, unless there is clear guidance and legislation in place, because they feel that Governments have a track record of changing the goalposts, and, in light of what happened with Gordon Brown and George Osborne, that is understandable. But I feel that the Welsh Government, as a matter of urgency, needs to demonstrate its leadership by setting zero-carbon building regulations so that the new homes for the future that we are going to be building are built to last, like the ones built by Nye Bevan’s leadership in the 1940s and early 1950s, which are still widely sought after as homes to live in.