Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:55 pm on 24 September 2019.
Well, just dealing with a few of those things there, building on previous learning is absolutely built into it. And so understanding what has been built in the past, how that worked, why it worked and whether it's scalable is a really big thing, but whether it's scalable is one of the big things as well. So it's all very well to build one house, but whether you can build 400 of them simultaneously is a big issue for the programme. And as I said in the statement, we're just in the process of scaling up some of the things that we do know worked.
The recycling issue is a huge issue as well. Most of these houses are modular, actually. Almost all of the schemes use Welsh timber in one way or another, and we're very keen on short supply chains so that we reduce the carbon footprint of the entire build, as I said in the statement. We're also very keen to make sure that any construction waste is kept to a minimum and is reused or recycled as appropriate, and that we're not causing inadvertent problems as a result of this. And then, once we understand that, we can scale it up again to make sure that that happens.
The whole issue with skills, which I discussed with David Melding, is about skills transfer, so that we skill up the people of the future. And some of the schemes are using the people who will eventually be their tenants in order to build them. So, actually, effectively building their own homes. In particular, there's a great scheme on Anglesey, actually, that I was really pleased to see which is utilising that. They're really exciting, but you're absolutely right about the scale. We need to build around 4,000 houses a year in order to address the issue of people in temporary accommodation.
The issue around homelessness isn't about just the sharp end at rough-sleeping, it's about the people sliding into homelessness as well. So that's why we need to build 4,000 social homes a year, in order to prevent that cycle. So it's a big ask, but this year we've built very nearly 1,000 and last year we only had a few hundred. So we're ramping it up very quickly. We're going as fast as it's possible to go, making sure that we're building the right thing for the right people. And although you can call any particular group of people a group, each of them will be individual, each of them will have different requirements. We need to build the variety of housing and mixed tenures that address all of those needs.