Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 3:02 pm on 20 February 2019.
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.