It’s very difficult to disagree with David Melding. Good housing is a right for all, and so thought Nye Bevan. He was the one who drove the very high standards of social housing that we were blessed with in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Obviously, we would be well served to come back to those higher standards, because those houses have lasted the test of time and are sustainable.

Whilst I would agree that the Welsh Government has an ambitious housing programme, it is not sufficient to meet the needs, because for most people private housing is unaffordable and social housing is inadequate to meet the demand. I would agree with Hefin David that we cannot rely on the big six house builders to meet our needs. They simply aren’t going to build for the people who most need to be housed.

I just wanted to look at the programme of innovative housing that was approved by Carl Sargeant in October last year. There were 30 different projects awarded, some of them in Cardiff, and I think that this sort of project (a) tells us that there’s a lot of people out there who want to build innovative housing and (b) that this can be a way of providing housing that's flexible to meet people's needs and also is energy efficient. For example, Cardiff council is building eight energy-efficient family homes in the grounds of Greenfarm Hostel in Ely, which is currently going to be used as temporary accommodation while families wait for a more permanent housing solution. But they are going to be movable so that they can be relocated to another site if they no longer are needed for the purpose for which they're going to be built at the moment. 

It's indicative of how long it takes to get projects off the ground, because Cardiff council is absolutely behind what is their scheme. It's now been awarded planning permission, but they still haven't got people able to live in these projects. Nevertheless, using the shipping containers that this is based on is a way of getting quick housing in order to meet the desperate need that we have. There's a similar project being developed by Cadwyn Housing Association using sea containers for one and two-bedroomed homes with solar photovoltaics—12 homes here in Cardiff in Bute Street, on a vacant piece of land. These are excellent contributions to the desperate need, but clearly insufficient for the massive demand. 

You can see that there are many other projects around Wales: Pentre Solar, who already have some excellent housing in parts of Denbighshire, and they are now building homes using local timber in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. Other organisations are building to passive house standards, and these are the sorts of things we need. I just think we need to do an awful lot more of them. 

In terms of the land banking that's going on by the big house builders, I hope that the vacant land tax that the Welsh Government intends to bring in in the next session will help to deal with that. But meanwhile I think there are other things we might want to embrace as well. There's a Newport-based charity called Amazing Grace Spaces that is creating homes out of containers, and they've recently supplied Merthyr Valleys Homes with two fully equipped containers for families to live in, and they're in the process of converting four containers for Wrexham County Borough Council. So, I'm hoping that that sort of thing can be embraced. 

I was also particularly impressed with another organisations called Down to Earth, which is Swansea-based, and therefore hopefully the Minister knows about it. They're doing absolutely stunning housing—well, not housing, but building development, working with vulnerable people of one sort or another—some of them are asylum seekers, some of them are people with mental health issues—and it's helping to transform those people's lives. They are acquiring the skills to build the buildings that are going to enhance their well-being, and Down to Earth is now on the approved procurement list for the Welsh Government, so I'm hoping that health bodies will embrace projects like Down to Earth. 

I would urge the Minister to consider amending the building regulations to reinstate the zero-carbon standards introduced by Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and then abolished by George Osborne, because we cannot be building more homes that we then need to retrofit. But I look forward to hearing the Minister's response.