I'm very pleased to speak in this annual report of the Climate Change, Environment and Rural Affairs Committee on the Welsh Government's progress on climate change mitigation. I'm not a member of the committee, but obviously climate change is something that affects every one of us in this Chamber and does affect every department. As the Chair said in his opening remarks, this isn't something that we can pinpoint to one particular committee. And, of course, we've all experienced first hand recently the results of climate change: the beast from the east and the hottest summer on record for over 40 years. So, I think climate change is obviously one of those huge issues that is very important to us all, and we simply cannot deny that our climate is changing. So, it's therefore absolutely imperative that we do what we can to ensure it doesn't get any worse, and I think this report highlights some of the ways in which we in Wales can do our bit, and certainly highlights the fact that we can do a lot more than we are able to do.

I was particularly interested in the section of the report regarding the energy standards of housing and buildings and how they can be improved across Wales, and I was pleased to see that the Warm Homes programme will address energy efficiency in 25,000 homes in this term and that the Welsh Government will build 1,000 new types of homes across Wales through the innovative housing programme. In my role as chair of the Wales programme monitoring committee, I've been lucky enough to visit several European-funded projects that are committed to tackling climate change and improving energy efficiency. As most of you know, SPECIFIC, based in Swansea University, is funded by the European regional development fund and aims to turn buildings into power stations. Buildings as power stations generate, store and release their own solar energy, both heat and electricity. This means that buildings are, in effect, active rather than passive structures, and it means that carbon emissions in buildings are eliminated and dramatically reduces reliance on fossil fuels and gas.

This is huge progress, and I know we have spoken in this Chamber about these developments before, but it is amazing, I think, that you're actually able to build houses that are active, that can actually generate energy, and it just seems to me that there has to be a huge push to make sure that we get new houses that are built to those standards. And that's where, I think, we are not actually doing as much as we could do. If all future houses were built in this way, then we'd see an absolutely dramatic decrease in the use of fossil fuels, and homes would be powered by renewable and clean energy. So, we've got that. That technology has been developed here in Wales, in Swansea, and it is being—. Small-scale developments are using it. But, in Cardiff, we have thousands of new homes being built, because of the population that is rising in Cardiff, many of them in my constituency in Cardiff North, and, talking to the private house developers, none of them will be putting any of these active houses into the developments. So, I think that is very, very regrettable, and I know that there is, I believe, a review of building regulations going on, so I hope that the building regulations will come up with something that will enable builders to go forward in this way. [Interruption.] Yes, certainly.