Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:56 pm on 19 June 2019.
Yes, that was an excellent scheme and a very good visit, and I was very impressed, as I know Huw Irranca-Davies was, at the speed of construction, the niceness of the house—I can't think of another word, but it's just a really lovely home. But I was also very impressed by the ability to add on another unit if you had a growing family, and to actually pick the whole house up and put it down somewhere else if you needed to. It was a very interesting and, I thought, instructive visit, and he's absolutely right—what we are looking to do in Wales is, using Welsh materials with as low a carbon footprint as is humanly possible, build house to passive standard if at all possible, so the bills are £100 or less a year, using local labour in local factories.
And one of the lovely things about modular factories—I haven't visited that one, but I did visit one in Ynys Môn last week—is that no matter what the weather—and although Ynys Môn is very beautiful, the weather was a little inclement, I think it's fair to say; a bit horizontal rain last week—of course, in the factory it was warm and dry and the people could carry on their jobs, they were not having to work at height, and so on. They were constructing the house that would then have its final stage of construction actually on the site, exactly like the programme we saw.
So, I actually believe that is the future for housing in Wales and, at the moment, we're about to go out to what's called the third iteration of the innovative housing programme, so that was the fruit of the first part of the programme. That will deliver 1,000 new homes across Wales in the next few years. It's got 45 schemes running, and we expect to learn a lot of lessons about the way that we can build at pace and scale using that kind of modular construction.