Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:32 pm on 17 July 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:32, 17 July 2019

Certainly, and I completely agree with you about the excitement of a distributed energy system, and the ability of that to bring a social justice element into that system that the old centralised system would never have been able to achieve. And we're very excited to be able to do that. Tomorrow morning, I will be receiving the reports of the decarbonisation working group, and I've had some meetings with the group, so I have a little bit of a trail, I suppose, of what they're going to say. And I know that they're very interested in much of the thing that you've just set out there, the ability to exploit the technology of the future in making homes into power stations. It's part of the proposed plans for the Swansea city deal. I'm sure you know that the homes as power stations element of that is in there, and we're very keen on doing that. 

One of the other things that I'll be doing shortly, when I've got all of these reports back on housing in the round, is looking again at the setting of our rent policies. And in the setting of our rent policies, one of the things we'll want to look at is the social justice of the kind of thing that you're talking about. So, where somebody's home is used as a power station, and they're a tenant in a social rented place, I would like to see the benefit of that power coming back to that tenant, either in very much reduced bills, or in reduced rent, or a trade-off between the two. So, I'll be looking very carefully at the rent policy, to make sure that the kinds of injustice you're talking about do not occur in that system, and that the people who run their homes in that way get the benefit back to them, either, as I say, in reduced bills or shared services, or in reduced rent in certain circumstances and so on. And we'll be looking to have a flexible rent policy, without preannouncing the policies that I'm looking at. But, in the round, we'll be looking to have a flexible rent policy that gives credit to registered social landlords and councils that put those kinds of mitigating things in place, and that that should be reflected in the terms and conditions of the tenants that live in those homes. 

And in terms of the private rented sector, of course, we will also be, in responding to the affordable homes and the decarbonisation agenda, putting measures in place about what we expect the private rented sector to do in that regard as well.