3. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: The Innovative Housing Programme — Year 3

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:44 pm on 24 September 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:44, 24 September 2019

Certainly. Going backwards on that, in terms of a road map, what we're very keen to do is make sure that the analysis over the three years, as we go forward, is fed immediately back in to both the programme and to the main stream. So, as I said earlier, where we see that something has been built, it's being lived in, it's stood that test, so it's delivered what it set out to do—so, for example, it is in fact carbon neutral, it does in fact deliver lower energy bills for people, they enjoy living there, we're getting feedback from the tenants who go in—. Some of the technology is very innovative. So, tenants in social housing that go into these programmes have been asked to volunteer and have some training on how to use your air source heat pump and so on. It's not intuitive; you have to learn to use the technology and we're getting feedback about how they found that.

Where it’s been possible to get that information quickly, and it has been on some schemes, we've fed those in, and that’s what I was saying about encouraging people to come forward to upscale what we'd already done and make sure that it did work at higher scales. And there are some great sites around that people are delighted to show you around and show you how that works. So, we're very keen to get that test-and-feedback model, and then to feed it into our social housing grant model so that when they come forward with a scheme of that sort, we are very keen to fund it through the normal mainstream funding and not through the innovation stream funding. So, that’s the first thing.

In terms of the private sector, coming up to half of the bids—23 of the 52 bids that have been successful—are private sector. So, it’s pan-sector this. What we're looking to do is develop sites of mixed tenure, because we know that single-tenure sites of any sort—all owner-occupied or all social housing or any other 'all'—don't work. We want mixed tenure estates. So, what we're doing is we're encouraging public authorities, including the Welsh Government, to utilise their land in order to facilitate those kinds of developments. 'Planning Policy Wales' in its last iteration, which my colleague Lesley Griffiths was in charge of just before we changed jobs, and the new national development framework are underpinning that as well. And we're encouraging councils in negotiating with people bringing forward private land inside the local development plan to ensure that mixed tenure as well. So, you still have the conversation about how much affordable housing might be put in by a private developer, but we're encouraging the public sector to come forward and say, 'Is there another way to look at the funding envelope for this so that we can drive a different scale of mixed tenure?'

And then the last thing is, and I can't emphasise this enough—I said it clearly in my statement—that you should not be able to tell from the outside of the house what the tenure is. So, they all look the same, everybody lives together in a mixed community, in a place and not an estate. And that cannot be emphasised enough. That’s why the NDF is important as well, because that requires the infrastructure to have been planned out in advance, so that we know where the schools and the GPs are, we know where the work is, we know where the public transport routes are, and we know that there are cycle paths and walks to school and all that sort of stuff. So, we're developing exemplar sites around Wales. I went to visit one in Newport just last week, and then we're taking other people there and saying, 'Look, this is what you can do with these kinds of funding streams', just to mainstream it.