I don't want you to think that because I'm saying we accept the recommendations in principle it's a mealy-mouthed way of saying that we get what they're saying but we're going to do something different. What we mean by that is that we've not yet had sufficient time to work through the detailed road map of implementing the recommendations. Just to be clear, we're not saying that there's some fundamental problem with any of them. It is just about a very complex set of things that we've got to work through in order to do that.

As I said, we want to get the system thoroughly, coherently, properly working together. We're doing that across three sets of regulators, and I've got most of those in my portfolio. The Hackitt review in England is recommending, for example, a joint combined regulator across that. We don't think that's the right solution for Wales as that puts another level of bureaucracy into an already very bureaucratic system. So, for example, we're looking to see whether there are any other mechanisms for pulling the regulators together in this regard rather than making another tier of regulation for a specific thing. So, that's just one example of where we're trying to work through the recommendations. So, it's not that we don't accept it, it's just that sometimes it's disproportionate to the level of risk here in Wales. So we're just trying to get the proportionality right. I just use that as one example of what we're trying to work through with that.

The fire safety Order—there are quite a few things we can do short of primary legislation, so we will be going at pace to do those things, and that will include statutory instruments to put some of that in place already, and we will consult on the new overarching Order. So, it may be that we can get it through in this Assembly term. I'm just not promising that we can do that, because I'm not in a position to be able to do that. If we can go faster than that because it turns out it's not controversial at all, then fantastic. At the moment there are quite a few varied views across the sector, and whilst everybody wants to get it done, there isn't, it seems to me, wholesale agreement about how to get it done. So we do have to get a consensus arrangement in place, or at least understand where everybody's coming from for that.

So, whilst we all agree about the need for doing this at pace, we also, I think, all agree on the need to do it properly and right. As I say, we're in a consensus about needing to do it, but not, unfortunately, in a consensus about what 'it' exactly is. Once you start to go down into the detail, you'll find that there are different views across the various regulators and the various stakeholders that we need to work through in order to get that right. And one of those is around building control issues, so I absolutely take the committee's point of view—it's certainly something we want to look at, but there are real issues around capacity in local government for that. What we would do about the current position where they sell services on the one hand and are the regulator on the other—there are a number of important issues to work through, which we will work through, and we will come to the conclusion necessary to make sure that the regime is robust. I understand entirely what the committee was trying to achieve by that, because quite clearly there is a conflict between being an inspector as the building is built and then being the regulator as well. There's a clear conflict, but how we work through that conflict and what process we put in place is another question entirely, and there are a number of ways of doing that that we need to work through. So, I get the point, but again, I'm not quite in a position to be able to come to that conclusion.

I too am disappointed that we're not. It's about seven weeks, I think, since I made the statement. It is taking us longer to get consensus on some of these things than we might have thought, and some of it is more contentious than we might have thought. If you remember the road map—and I stupidly haven't brought a copy with me—there were three or four 'stop points' in it that we need to think about, and as I said, we've established the different workstreams in order to work through some of those conflicts. It's the same for agents. There's still a conversation to be had about conflicts of interest, and how they work, and what the duty holders that I talked about in my statement are, and what the duties on the duty holders are, and how they work through. So, those things are addressed, but we've yet to come to quite the conclusion we need to be in to give the policy instructions to the lawyers to draft the legislation. We need to get to that stage for that.

On the retrofitting of sprinklers, again, we are discussing that: how we can do that in a proportionate way, how we can give access to finance for that, what the higher-risk buildings will look like, and what the schedule will look like. Ideally, of course, we would like all buildings to have sprinklers in them. Just to be clear: that's the ideal. It's just a question of how we get there and how we finance that. So, obviously, we will be looking at that for different sectors across Wales. There will be different solutions for social housing than there will be in the private rented sector, for example, and we need to have access to that. And I think we're all in the same place—it's just about trying to get there with the right conclusions, so that we get a robust system in Wales where we don't have an unforeseen consequence yet again, where people lose their lives because we haven't been able to think through the system.