7. Will the Cabinet Secretary outline how changes to planning regulations can help tackle climate change? OAQ53083

Thank you. Last week, I published a new version of 'Planning Policy Wales', which has a clear focus on decarbonisation. PPW establishes hierarchies for energy and transport to promote renewable energy generation over fossil fuel extraction and to encourage walking and cycling over motor vehicle-based transport. 

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. Planning and building regulations aimed at improving the energy efficiency of new-build homes require homes to be so well insulated that they require little heating. However, as a result of climate change, the UK is set to experience more frequent heatwaves, summers like this year are thirty times more likely. During the summer, many new-build properties overheated and led to increased demand for air conditioning. Cabinet Secretary, how will your Government ensure that planning and building regulations take account of our changing climate and don't lead to increasing energy demand?

I think it's very important that we do, certainly, address that issue. I think you make a very good point about the issues that we faced during the last summer. And I think it's very important that we don't build houses now that will have to be retrofitted 25 years down the line, even that we're coping with historical housing already. So, I mentioned that I've brought forward a new 'Planning Policy Wales'—PPW10—last week and that does very much have a clear focus on that energy efficiency to which the Member refers.

I'd be interested to know—. I support the whole issue of being more energy efficient; for a long time, I've been saying we should be following the Merton principles and, with every new property that we build, we should have automatically put into it ground source heating or some other way of being able to offset our carbon emissions. How, though, using these regulations, are you going to be able to square the circle of improving our climate emissions, but, at the same time, ensure that our prices for building houses do not spiral out of control, because we have too many people in Wales who are so desperately in need of appropriate homes?

I think the Member raises a very important point about balance, and, certainly, in my discussions with my colleague, the Minister for Housing and Regeneration—we meet with the developers, for instance, and obviously, they're very concerned that anything we bring forward will have an impact on cost. But I think it's really important that we look at how we build our new houses; how we take into consideration decarbonisation; how we take into consideration our climate change. You'll be aware we passed new regulations in this Chamber last week, where we set legally binding targets for Wales, and obviously, housing has a big part to play in helping us achieve those targets.