Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:25 pm on 24 September 2019.
Thank you for that, Llyr. I very much welcome the commitment to work with us and I'm hoping to get, in the initial stage, a group of cross-party people together—perhaps the spokespeople, or whoever the party thinks is most able to do the work—just to shape it, really, so that we can take it forward and then we can decide how that group can reference it. But, as I say, Chris Jofeh has agreed to work with us to do this as well. So, we definitely want to get something that future Governments, of whatever colour and shape, will be happy to take forward. We need that commitment or we will never get it running. So, I very much welcome that.
I share your frustration about still building stuff that is going to cause us a problem. We are about to review Part L. I am hoping to be able to get consensus across the Chamber on a lot of this stuff, so that we can go further than we might do if we didn't agree. So, I am really hoping that we will be able to shove it forward when we do that review. We have to do it for fire safety reasons and all the rest of it, but there are other things that we can do as part of the review, which I'm really hoping that we can get through because it's a consensus across the Chamber. So, it remains to be seen, but we will be embarking on that shortly. So, I hope that will be the case.
In terms of things like mistakes that have been made in the past with cavity walls, which we're all aware of, and other unintended consequences—some of the Welsh housing quality standard stuff has clad houses that no longer breathe and have, of course, condensation problems and so on—what we need to be able to do is get the experts together and make sure that we are learning from those mistakes. We'll not be able to not make any further mistakes, but we need to learn the lessons of the ones that we are aware of. We do know that for some of the types of houses we've got in Wales we have no current solution. So, we need to look at that. We've also got to be aware that if the only solution for a house is that it's not able to get to this standard, we need to make decisions based on what would happen if you demolished that house. Would we be making a worse carbon footprint by demolishing it than we are by just getting it to whatever the best standard it can get to is? And it's all that kind of stuff, and there's a lot of historic environment things to talk about there about the shape of peoples' cities and towns.
So, there's quite a lot to consider here, but I think we can agree a broad direction of travel, and as I said in response to David Melding, we can also agree on what we don't agree on and we can park those bits and just continue with the bits that we broadly do agree on. So, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to do that swiftly. And we do need to consider things like if we have—whatever the data tells us—a percentage of stock that cannot go beyond EPC C or B, or whatever: what are we going to do about that? We'll have to consider what the recycling arrangements are. Demolishing a house causes carbon all by itself: what happens to the waste that you get from that and so on? So, we will have to make some difficult decisions about where we are.
And then the biggest one of all is greening the grid. So, we'll have to make some difficult decisions, which we'll have to try and be as consensual as possible about because unless you green the grid all the other stuff pales into insignificance. So, we'll have to work very hard together and face some difficult decisions, but I couldn't agree more with your German example. We have to do the stuff we can do and we have to fund and support our scientists and engineers to be able to take that a step further and we have to do it as fast as possible. We cannot wait another 30 years with this building up around us. So, I, for one, have believed in the climate emergency for the last 40 or more years and my parents became vegetarian in 1958 because they thought there was a climate crisis—I know vegetarianism isn't the solution to all, let's not start that hare running, but I'm just saying that people were trying to respond to it as far back as the middle of the last century. Whether the response was the right one or not, it doesn't matter—the point is they were trying to respond. So, it's just an accelerating picture, isn't it? So, we need to respond, we need to find what's consensual, and take that forward as fast as possible.