8. Will the Minister provide an update on Welsh Government support for co-operative housing? OAQ53424

We are committed to supporting the development of co-operative housing in Wales and community-led housing more generally. Through our co-operative housing in Wales project, we fund, with the Wales Co-operative Centre, to encourage, promote and support housing co-operatives.

Oh, sorry; I wasn't sure if you'd finished then.

Whilst co-operative housing provides a substantial proportion of dwellings in places as diverse as New York, Vancouver and Scandinavia, it has failed to become a major provider of housing in Wales. Will the Minister set up a taskforce or take some action to identify what needs to be done to substantially increase co-operative housing in Wales? I believe it's something that we are missing out on and an opportunity to increase the number of houses, which we all keep on talking about wanting.

The Member talks about innovative initiatives that are happening elsewhere, not just in Europe but across the world globally. I agree there are things we can learn from elsewhere in housing as well as other public policy areas as well. Likewise, there are things where other countries could learn from the things that we are doing. We do have innovations in co-operative housing in Wales. At the moment, these are fairly small scale, but some are obviously more successful than others, and we need to learn from these examples and scale upwards based on the lessons learnt.

We already have a number of expert groups on this topic. There's the Wales Co-operative Centre, which is grant-funded by the Welsh Government, and there's also a co-operative housing stakeholder group, where both the Wales Co-operative Centre and the Confederation of Co-operative Housing are joined by Community Housing Cymru, the Welsh Local Government Association, as well as community-led housing groups themselves. Whilst at the moment we're not convinced by the merits of another expert group, I think it's certainly something that these expert groups can look at to ensure that they learn from examples in other parts of the world and see how they can apply successfully here in Wales.

Finally, question 9, Nick Ramsay.