7. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: The Independent Review on Decarbonising Welsh Homes

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:41 pm on 24 September 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 6:41, 24 September 2019

So, just on that last point, we have been discussing with industry and industry representatives having some kind of licensing scheme. We're very keen to work with the UK Government on that, though, because lots of people in this kind of industry across the board are very regulated and they're very anxious not to have to comply with two different regulatory regimes. But we are very keen on getting a licence scheme going.

My colleague Mike Hedges has been involved in a couple of social media arguments about whether you can call yourself a particular type of trade without any qualifications and so on, and I think we've got to move to a situation where, actually, you aren't able to do that because there are some professional standards to be met, and that's for all kinds of reasons, not just for retrofit: so, that you can't, you know, have somebody knock on your door and offer to fix your roof if you can't check what their qualifications might be to do that. So, I completely agree with that and we're exploring with local authorities ways that we can use their approved lists to give people reassurance about contractors and so on. So, I very much take that on board. 

But here we have a situation where we actually have almost no skill in this area anyway, so we'll have to develop it anew. There are huge opportunities here. I think Llyr said, didn't he, 'Don't think about the cost of it; think of the cost of not doing it.' Well, that's absolutely right. But also there are opportunity costs here. So, we can make an industry out of this and we can make Wales the centre of it if we do it fast enough and in the right way. So, I completely agree with that. But we do have to make sure that we start in the right place with the right experts and we start where we can do things and we get the right research going for some of the rest of it. 

As I said, there are some difficult decisions to be made here. So, yes, we absolutely are setting up the finance to do it; we'll have to leverage in other finance to do that. As I said, we'll have to incentivise homeowners—people lucky enough to be able to be buying or who already own their home outright, we'll need to get them to do it as well. We'll need to probably do some market intervention to make people be rewarded for—you know, if they have spent that much money on it, they need to be getting that back. We need some incentives here, and it's not just the lowering of your energy bills, is it, it's the value of your asset. It's probably the only asset most people have, so they will need to have that.

And then when we do the shared equity schemes that we talked about earlier in the innovative housing programme—some of the stuff Dawn was talking about earlier up in Merthyr Valleys Homes—we'll need to make sure that people get their share of that and that we're able to spread the skills and expertise. But you can see this as a huge opportunity. You don't have to see it as a doom and gloom, my goodness. If we do it right, we can stimulate an industry here that gives employment to our communities and actually keeps the power in them as well. But we have got to get it right. That's why I wasn't hesitant about saying we'll accept them in principle, but we need to start somewhere and then build on it. So, I take whatever he says about that, but we really are not trying to fob it off. We are trying to start in the right place to get consensus to build a programme here.