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 6:13 pm on 16 October 2018.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 6:13, 16 October 2018

I'm sure Carl Sargeant is smiling benignly on us today because it's just short of a year since he announced stage one of this fantastic innovative housing project. I'd really like to congratulate the Government for pushing ahead with this and more than doubling the number of houses that we're going to be building. I'd like to talk about one of the projects that you mention in your statement, which is the one on City Road in my constituency—£9 million to a housing association called Linc Cymru to build a fantastic 10-storey building, 50 homes made out of cross-laminated timber. It's on the site of an old furniture warehouse that caught fire a couple of years ago, so it's going to be regenerating a brownfield site in an area that is plagued by air pollution. This building, as it's proposed, is going to really help tackle that level of air pollution. There are very few green areas in the area, so it's fantastic that each of these 50 flats are going to have their own green balcony, with vertical gardens, as well as a two-storey garden on the top for residents to share collectively. It's all based on the Bosco Verticale in Milan, which is two tower blocks that contain 900 trees. This is obviously not that ambitious, because the site is not that big. But I'm sure that this is going to be the way forward for the type of housing we're going to need in our cities. I'm really excited by it. In fact, this cross-laminated timber uses a lot less carbon than the Bosco Verticale, and is also going to take a lot less time to construct. Linc Cymru's even talking about building a storey a week, based on the fact that a lot of it will be prefabricated in the factory. So, absolutely fantastic, and thank you very much indeed for making the money available.

In light of the success and the interest in all the innovative housing projects that you've received, I just wondered why we can't go a bit faster on implementing the recommendation in the 'more│better' report, which said that buildings need to be delivered in shorter timescales with lower embodied energy and be carbon storing whilst having an ecologically positive impact. Well, this tower is going to do that, and I wonder when we are going to get around to amending the building regulations to put a stop to the unimaginative, difficult-to-heat and overpriced homes that large private house builders in Cardiff are continuing to put up. So, I do hope that you'll be able to reassure us that we are now going to push ahead with the sort of energy-efficient building regulations that were torn up by the Tories in 2015.