Thanks to the Minister for today’s statement. I think these are interesting ideas and very worthy of exploration and I think there has been a good vision that we’ve seen today, so I hope that a lot of this innovation does come off. As the Minister said, there is a pressing need for more housing, and hopefully the innovative housing programme will help to address that. But of course we also need to ensure that it is good-quality housing and also that, ultimately, it is affordable. I appreciate that there’s a lot of risk involved with innovation, as the Minister stated, so we understand that not all of the different new ideas are going to take off, but it’s good that we investigate them.

The Minister stated that there is a wide array of innovative housing products that are coming on to the market, and he stated that a lot of it is now very good quality, so that is encouraging. I think there is a good idea, as the Minister suggested, of linking an innovative housing programme with training a new generation of construction workers, bearing in mind that this type of housing may take off, there may be less need for bricklayers, as you suggested. That’s possibly quite futuristic—I’m not sure how specifically we can train people for now. If the Minister does have any more to say on that I’d be interested to hear it, and how it’s going to link up with Ken Skates’s ideas of employability and apprenticeships and so on. But that may be for a future statement, because I appreciate it’s early days for the innovative housing programme.

Now, there are going to be 276 homes built in the first tranche. Given that there are risks in the innovation, as you stated, what safeguards do we have against the spiralling costs in the building—potential spiralling costs—to ensure that we do actually get close to 276 homes and that they do offer good value for money.

There are other issues over planning. David Melding mentioned the environment committee and our trip to SOLCER house, which is an example of a pioneer home as a power station. It was very interesting going around and looking at SOLCER house, but we were told that there was a housing association that are planning a similarly pioneering development and they were involved in a dispute with the local authority. I can’t remember the specifics—I have a feeling it might have been Bridgend that was the authority, but I might be wrong in that. But the one question is: what discussions has the Minister has with the environment Secretary, who is responsible for planning, about tackling possible problems over planning constraints and making it easier for the housing associations to get the planning permission to develop these kind of projects in future? There’s also the issue of the private sector. The Minister mentioned that he’s planning to extend the scheme to the private sector next year, which will be—. That’s another interesting development to look forward to. So, there’s also an issue of individuals who might want to build their own sustainable homes in future because there is a remarkable statistic that in Austria, 80 per cent of new properties are self-built. In the UK, it’s only 8 per cent. So, I wonder, in the future, what steps does the Minister think the Welsh Government might be able to take to boost this sector in terms of individuals who want to go ahead with this kind of innovative project of their own?

And one last point: obviously, there’s an environmentally friendly theme underlying all this, so has any thought been given to prioritising the development of brownfield sites for the innovative housing projects? Thanks.