9. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Regeneration: Update on Year 2 of the Innovative Housing Programme

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:57 pm on 16 October 2018.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 5:57, 16 October 2018

Thank you very much for those questions and your support, again, this year for the innovative housing programme. I'll begin with the final point you made, which was about how we will be monitoring and evaluating the programme. One of the exciting things about the innovative housing programme is that all applicants for funding must agree to an open-book policy. So, that will include regular progress reports to the innovative housing programme working group. They must agree to monitoring during and post construction. They must agree to data collection, so particularly on issues of cost and performance. And then they must agree to the public dissemination of the lessons learned through their projects. So, the specific things that we'll be looking for in the monitoring and evaluation will be about the technical side of things, the performance of the buildings, the construction experience, and, as you've recognised, the tenant-based work as well.

So, simple questions: do the tenants like their home as a pleasant and comfortable place to live? Are the homes flexible to accommodate current and future lifestyles? Are they low energy for occupants to live in? Are they low cost for occupants to live in? Would these homes be affordable to build in future? Can they be built at pace? Can they be built at scale? Are they well built? Are they affordable to maintain in future? And does the overall development create a good place to live? So, these are the kind of questions that we will be asking through part of our work to undertake the monitoring and evaluation. 

You referred to the affordable housing review, and this work, very much, is going along in parallel with that and is informing the work of the affordable housing review. As you'll be aware, underneath that review, there are several work streams that are looking at specific areas that need attention if we are to increase our ambitions for the building of affordable housing in future. One of those work streams is about standards and the development of quality requirements. So, we'll be looking at to what extent our existing standards are correct and where they might need changing if we are to build in different ways in future. And there's also a specific work stream looking at construction supply chain, including modern methods of construction. So, this work stream will consider how the supply chain, right across the modern methods, will work and how we can scale that up in future as well. What's the capacity? Are there skills shortages? These are all questions that that particular sub-group will be looking at. 

You referred to the excellent announcement recently regarding the funding that SPECIFIC and Swansea University have secured. Welsh Government was really pleased to provide supporting letters to that project and is delighted to be able to provide £6.5 million to support that project as well. There are a couple of our projects that we're announcing today that relate specifically to the SPECIFIC development, and one is land at Park Yr Helyg, Colliers Way in Swansea. That will be a homes-as-power-stations project, combining renewables—so photovoltaics, batteries, ground source heat pumps, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery—and also using what's called a Swansea standard fabric first timber frame. And that is a collaboration between SPECIFIC and the Swansea city deal. There's a second project as well at Crown Way in Llandarcy, which will be an innovation park to showcase modular and volumetric house building and to compare the systems and compare some of the learning that we have here in Wales with what is experienced overseas. So, this is an interesting part of the research and learning of the project, so it's very much linked into the active homes work that's already been announced.

In terms of design, I think it is really important that we have high aspirations and high ambitions for our affordable housing and social housing. It should be our goal that people who live in social housing live in beautiful housing that everybody can be proud of. When we see surveys, community—sorry, the Chartered Institute of Housing undertook a survey recently. People who live in social housing are proud of it, they're proud of their communities, so let's try and build the most beautiful houses that we possibly can for those communities. So this is, again, something that the affordable housing review is looking at but something that I want to have a greater focus on in year 3 of the programme.

And then, I should mention that, in devising the technical specifications for the innovative housing programme, it was done with a steering group, which was chaired by Gayna Jones of the Design Commission for Wales. So, we certainly have a strong focus on good quality design.

And finally, I was really pleased to be able to open this up to the private sector this year. I'm really keen to have a strong focus on supporting SMEs particularly to return to house building. They left house building some time ago and have been concentrating on renovation work and so on, but I think they have a really strong role to play in the future of house building. Of course, when housing associations are building homes, when homes are being built through our innovative housing programme, it is SMEs that are partnering with them to deliver that. So, I think that this is another string to our bow in terms of supporting SMEs alongside things like the property development fund and our work on stalled sites.