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 6:18 pm on 24 September 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 6:18, 24 September 2019

Well, I very much welcome that, David, and what we're hoping to do is thrash out very quickly the parameters of a discussion that would be able to gain the approval of virtually everybody in the Chamber, we would hope, in terms of a way forward. The report goes into a lot of detail about possibilities, but what we need to do is explore how real they are and what consensus there is around some of them. I mean, there are a number of things that are frustrating, which we—I completely agree about the data collection, so we're in the process of actually trying to get people in to do that. I'm delighted Chris has agreed with us that he will continue to work with us to take that forward.

We have a whole series of things that we can do more quickly than the targets in here, but we need to just make sure there's a consensus around that. So, I will be asking people to come together and just try and agree some of that. I absolutely am not trying to put it off. What we're trying to say is, 'Look, the report sets out a series of principles—we accept those principles. What we need now to do is agree between us what we can do now, what we need to do in the slightly longer term' and so on. And without binding the hands of future Welsh Governments, what we need to do is see if we can set an agenda that looks consensual and moves fast enough.

But there are some things that we will need to look at. We might struggle to agree and so we need to think about them. One of the things I'm very frustrated about is that if you are a home owner, there currently isn't a market benefit in getting your house to EPC A. So, in the market, people just flip past the bit at the end that says what the energy rating is, and you could spend £40,000 on a three-bedroomed house to energy retrofit it and it won't get you the £40,000 back on the price. So, we will need to look at Government levers that might move that market in that direction, for example, but we don't want to do that until we've ensured that we've got the skills and the materials and so on likely to benefit owner-occupiers so that they can properly retrofit their houses. So, we need to make sure that we know, for example, what the most likely type of house in Wales is that's likely to do that and whether we get those skills and what the supply chain is and so on. So, it's just about getting some of the practical stuff in place, and I think we will, working together, be able to agree a programme that we do, and we'll also be able to agree some things that we can't agree on, and it's just as useful to be able to do that and park those for a future Government to have a look at. So, I'm really looking forward to getting a group together that we can use to steer that.