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 6:31 pm on 24 September 2019.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 6:31, 24 September 2019

Thank you for those points. The very simple answer to the last two points is 'yes, absolutely'. And one of the reasons that we have the innovative housing programme is to test some of the technical solutions, and we're very keen on looking to see what can be done. I'm also very keen in Wales on community energy solutions as well. So, I have had meetings with the grid. I've not yet had meetings with the UK Ministers, but my colleague Lesley Griffiths has the energy portfolio so she will have been taking that forward. We do work very closely together with Lesley's portfolio, and pulling this together is very much part of the picture of how to take this forward. But I've met with the grid about some of this as well.

There are some innovative solutions that we can look at, but I'm also very keen to capture any new markets or job opportunities or supply chains for Wales. So, I do think that a lot of the solution to this will be around community focused energy projects or local or distributed energy projects, as well as what the grid can do. So, we will need to work very closely with the grid suppliers and the big energy companies, and we will need to look very carefully at what kind of energies we want to consent across Wales and what the communities that host those projects get out of it as well as what Wales gets out of it more widely. But we're very interested in any technical solutions and we have a large number of universities here in Wales working on a number of those.

We're also looking to see what we can do, and I'd like to get a cross-party consensus on this, about getting a scheme together to test some of those as part of our retrofit as we go forward and as we decide what to do once we make the Welsh housing quality standard. I just want to make the point that, when we said what we were going to do with the Welsh housing quality standard, a lot of people thought we wouldn't be able to do it and that it was a very difficult target indeed, and here we are—we've done it. So, it is about having the right level of ambition as well.