Renovating Houses for Older People

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:45 pm on 19 June 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:45, 19 June 2019

Actually, only this lunchtime I was at the launch of the 'Adaptations without delay' report done by the Royal College of Occupational Therapists, which my colleague Dawn Bowden had sponsored. We had a very good conversation about how we can accelerate the care and repair schemes in order to make sure that—. They have a number of functions, as the Member will be aware. They are preventative, obviously, and they help people stay in their own homes and not have to go into any kind of social care or NHS care, and also they are ameliorative in the sense that they get people back out of those settings into more independent living. My colleague Julie Morgan and I have had a couple of meetings very recently with various agencies delivering care and repair schemes, to see what data we can make the most use of to see what we need to do with it in the future, including actually looking to see whether we've got the demographic spread right, whether we've got the right kind of adaptations, and, frankly, whether we're building in our innovative housing programme the right kind of houses so that we build a 'house for life', as they call it, so that you don't have to have it adapted—they're built with stairs wide enough and all that sort of stuff.

I've been to some very good programmes. As it happens, only last week I was up in Ynys Môn and I went to see the new modular factory being built there for the passive house. The council leader was at the opening of that factory, and I know that they are commissioning bungalows especially with that in mind—with the increase in the older demographic in mind—with a view to having them being as flexible as possible so that people can stay in them for as long as possible. What we're doing is looking to see whether we can use the data coming back from our care and repair agencies to help us to decide which homes are worth adapting, which houses it's impossible to do it to economically, what the best options for people are, so that we can get them the right kind of accommodation in the right place, and what ameliorative programmes we can put in place to ensure that people stay as independent as possible for as long as possible. So, I think that's kind of a 'maybe' answer to your question, but I would be very interested in discussing it further.