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 6:11 pm on 16 October 2018.

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Photo of Rebecca Evans Rebecca Evans Labour 6:11, 16 October 2018

Thank you very much for those questions. I certainly would like to see a planning system that does enable innovation in housing. We have an opportunity here with the review of planning and housing, which the Cabinet Secretary for environment, under her responsibilities for planning, announced earlier in the summer. I think that this is a chance really to put innovation at the heart of our thinking in terms of our planning system for housing.

In relation to skills, I'm really aware that this is an area—naturally, of course, because it's an innovative area—where we don't have the skills necessary to scale this up at the pace we would like. This is why it's important that we're working with the regional skills partnerships on this agenda and these are very much at the centre of the Welsh skills policy agenda. So, the regional skills partnerships, I can confirm, have considered the low carbon agenda during the development of their annual reports for this year. I know this is a discussion that is ongoing between the skills officials and the regional partnerships and others.

Certainly, we need colleges to be thinking in terms of what they can be doing to ensure that people are coming forward now with the skills for innovative housing. It is a very different kind of skill that's needed. I visited a few of the factory developments where innovative housing has been created, and they were really keen to impress on me how important precision is when you're building innovative housing, because you're building components that will be put together on site, and actually there's no room for error at all in terms of where the bits fit together and so forth. So, it is a new set of skills but it is an area where we're very much working across Government to ensure that we're ready to meet that challenge. 

Again, on the issue of brownfield sites, we've seen lots of projects coming forward filling in sites where building hasn't happened before. We're really keen to work with the local authorities and the housing associations to ensure that they have access to the land that they need in the places that they need it. One of the projects that we do also have is the land for housing fund. This is several million pounds of funding, which is grant funding for housing associations in order to help them purchase the land that they need in order to do the building work that's required in terms of meeting our ambitious targets for housing.