Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Local Government and Public Services – in the Senedd at 2:44 pm on 11 July 2018.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 2:44, 11 July 2018

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, we're very keen to build on some of those projects from last year, but also to look for projects where we are scaling up. So, we've invited projects for this second year, and the applications close this week for projects on a grander scale really, so that we can start scaling up some of the exciting work that's already being undertaken through the innovative housing programme. 

Also, we know that although we're doing a huge amount of work to try and support SMEs back into the sector, we do need to ensure that the volume builders are working in this way as well. So, we've done some work with our home builder engagement programme in terms of what we can be doing in future, looking potentially at the future of Help to Buy. That's been extremely popular, as you can imagine, amongst the volume builders, but it is an important lever that we do have, so we need to be considering how we use it to achieve our broader aims across Government.