So, item 5 is a statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: re-imagining social house building in Wales—a modern methods of construction strategy for Wales. There we go. So, I'll call on the Minister for Housing and Local Government to move the statement. Julie James.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I'm very pleased to provide Members with an update on Welsh Government's modern methods of construction strategy, 'Re-imagining social house building in Wales', and how it will support our ambition to deliver more high-quality social and affordable homes across Wales.

Unlike other parts of the UK, this Government has continued to invest in affordable housing, providing £2 billion-worth of funding in this term of office, but we want to build more and we want to build better. Welsh social homes will be built to high space and beauty standards, embrace sound place-making principles, and, of course, be near-zero carbon in terms of emissions. Producing homes using modern methods of construction will play a vital role in making this happen.

The strategy I share with you today was produced in response to recommendations following the affordable housing supply review, which identified modern methods of construction, or MMC as it is known, as a way of more quickly increasing housing supply. Over the past year, we engaged with a range of key stakeholders and leading experts in the housing sector, construction industry and academia to co-produce and test the approach of our MMC strategy. We received overwhelming support for our proposed direction and I would like to thank everyone who contributed. Your invaluable input has helped ensure that our strategy is robust, well-supported and gives us the best chance of maximising the opportunity MMC presents for social house building and for our economy in Wales.

Although still in its infancy, there is recognition in Wales and across the UK that use of MMC can help us build better quality homes faster than traditional methods to meet housing need. We see MMC as an umbrella term that includes various construction methods, from new materials and technologies to off-site manufacturing, which either replace or complement traditional methods of construction.

Whilst some types of MMC may be more advanced than others, what is clear is that innovation in this field has advanced in leaps and bounds over the years. We have certainly moved from pre-fab to ab-fab. Gone are the days of association with poor-quality, temporary pre-fabricated housing; MMC now produces high-quality, desirable and energy-efficient affordable homes that tenants can be proud of.

Our approach to MMC aligns directly with other recommendations of the affordable housing review. It will support councils to build at scale and pace. Our grant system will ensure MMC schemes are not disadvantaged compared to traditional ones, and proposed new space standards ensure traditional and MMC buildings are treated with parity.

We recognise the need to cultivate a consistent approach to MMC adoption with our neighbours. This includes aligning to the UK-wide approach to warranties and accreditation of MMC homes to bolster lender and consumer confidence and utilising recognised definitions.

MMC opportunities go beyond house building. The strategy supports our ambitions to move to a circular economy, as building with MMC could reduce construction waste by as much as 70 to 90 per cent. Reducing emissions from the housing sector is a key element of our climate change emergency mitigation.

We are exploring how best to identify the new skills required to accommodate greater use of MMC, which represents a sea change in the construction industry. We need to ensure that the existing construction workforce is upskilled to meet our ambitions, attract new and diverse entrants and marginalised groups such as offenders, to explore employment and training opportunities.

Our plans provide real opportunity for Welsh MMC producers, many of which are SMEs and family-run, supporting Welsh businesses in finding a home-grown solution and strengthening Welsh suppliers. Linked to this is the longer term use of Welsh timber in house building.

As part of this approach, we have commenced an exercise to engage with all Welsh MMC providers to understand their capability, expertise and contribution to our social housing goals in Wales. We are fortunate to have a wealth of experienced MMC producers in Wales already supplying high-quality products to homes and commercial developments across the UK. The combination of their product, experienced workforce and indigenous supply chain means they are ideally placed and ready to respond to the increase in demand for MMC homes. We want to support these businesses to reap the rewards of increased order books and harness the economic and social benefits increased MMC production brings. Welsh Government wants to drive forward the use of MMC in social housing, and next month we are hosting a summit to bring together MMC producers and social landlords across Wales in order to share knowledge and broker new relationships and opportunities.

In many ways, we are already ahead of the game due to the success of our £90 million innovative housing programme that includes a number of MMC projects that are already under way. Nonetheless, to further accelerate the programme, I am making £20 million available for MMC businesses, who, in partnership with Welsh social landlords, want to build the next generation of social housing. I am making a further £25 million available for IHP round 4, focused on an MMC special.

Translating the strategy into tangible benefits is not solely about financial investment. Over the coming months, we will shape these aims into an implementation plan that will provide more detail on how we deliver the objectives of the MMC strategy. I will provide an update for Members before summer recess, but work has already begun in earnest. Greater adoption of MMC presents some challenges, however these are not insurmountable, and I am confident that we have identified the right approach and partners to work with to address them. Our strategy keeps us at the vanguard of new and innovative developments, ensuring that social housing leads the way in driving up standards for all housing in Wales. Diolch.

Can I welcome this statement on modern methods of construction—MMC hereafter? The Welsh Conservative Party throughout this Assembly term has promoted this type of construction, and in our White Papers on urban design and on housing, we promoted the concept of greater use of MMC. It is becoming a preferred route rather than one driven by necessity or scarcity, as it has in the past. It's actually, as you've said, at the cutting edge of modern house building. So, it's really something that we need to focus on, and I do think, as you said, it's giving opportunities for SMEs and other firms to take this up. I've also visited a plant—the one I visited was in Pyle; I think you visited one in Neath—but it's important to see the opportunities that are there, and as you've said, it offers particular advantages and opportunities for the Welsh timber industry long term.

I think MMC does require training and upskilling, but this can also mean a more attractive career option—for one, most of your work is done indoors. I think the downside on this—and it will attract people who want the more highly skilled careers because of the nature of the work that is involved—as the Association of British Insurers have pointed out, great precision is needed, both in the manufacture and then on the on-site construction of MMC homes, or a lot of the advantages, particularly on energy efficiency and then in any repair work that's done in the course of the houses' lives—we can lose an awful lot of the advantages. So, there are real issues about training.

I've just got a couple of questions because, as I said, I think we're very much on the same page here. By my calculation, the Minister is announcing an investment of £45 million in MMC, but can she confirm this, please? I don't think there's any overlap between the £20 million that you're making available for MMC businesses and then the further tranche of the innovative housing programme round 4, which will be an 'MMC special', as you so vividly put it. But can you just confirm that?

As far as the strategy that is being rolled out, I look forward to the further statement in the summer term. Can you assure us that you have been working with—as well as the manufacturers and other stakeholders—the Association of British Insurers? Because they welcome this form of construction, but they are aware of the insurance risks if it's not done in a full and proper way. And you may have seen their note that they've put out to Members today, and I do think it's not just a case of special pleading; they're making very substantial points, which I think we should apply all due diligence to. But I conclude by welcoming the statement.

Thank you very much for those remarks, David Melding. On the insurance point, I made the point very briefly in the statement that we are co-operating with a UK-wide series of special interest groups, insurers being one of them, because it's actually very important so that people can get mortgages and get the warranties right. And there's a big issue with the International Organization for Standardization standards and needing to update them for modern methods of construction. So, some of the ISO standards were made back in the 1970s, when these things just did not exist. And, actually, the carbon-neutral elements of this often don't comply with the ISO standards, for all sorts of very good reasons. So, there's quite a bit of work to do, which is why there'll be an implementation strategy to follow around what we need to do to ensure that we're on the right page for all of that, and, quite clearly, we'll want people to be able to work across the UK—and, in fact, across Europe and so on—from a Welsh manufacturing base. And so it's very important to make sure that we get the standards that are right for the sector. So, I don't disagree with any of that.

I take the point about the precision in assembly and construction, but one of the things I was really struck by when I visited Hale Construction in Jeremy Miles's constituency yesterday—I've visited a number of these factories and it's the same in all of them—was that, actually, of course, there's much closer supervision of each section of the construction as it goes along. And, unfortunately, we've seen, with traditional methods of construction and all of the fire risks that we've discussed many times in this Chamber, that actually that oversight is not there on the traditional building site—for all kinds of perfectly good reasons, but it isn't there—and so, actually, there have been a lot of subsequent faults discovered, whereas this process actually highlights them straight away. We were shown yesterday the injection of the insulation into a panel, for example, where it's quite obvious that doing it indoors, in the dry, with an injection system, gets every single crevice out of it and all the air and everything else, whereas that's not the case when you do it on-site with an injection system. So, it has lots of advantages. There are a couple of disadvantages, though, that's for sure.

The other thing is that yesterday morning it was pouring with rain, and there were—. It was incredibly awful weather, as we've been hearing in the earlier part of business this afternoon, and the factory was in full production. And I had passed several construction sites on the way to the visit, which I know have social housing being built on them, which were all on stop, because the weather was appalling and nothing could happen. But this factory was in absolute full production, and all of its staff members were in the warm and dry and they were carrying on as normal. So, actually, that's no small thing in a climate emergency and a country like ours. It was also demonstrated to us yesterday that a large part of the construction is watertight immediately. So, even if you're assembling it on-site, it's still waterproof—the panels are waterproof and so on. So, there are lots of benefits for a place like ours.

And the last thing I want to just welcome your saying is the opportunity for the Welsh timber industry, because I think this is an important point in terms of the flooding problem that we had earlier. Obviously we need to plant a lot more trees—trees take up water; we need to plant them at the top of watercourses and so on. They take up water, they stop a lot of these flood events, they hold soil in place, they stop mountains from moving and so on. But you can also crop those trees, because, if you do it properly, you're not clear cropping—what you're doing is selectively cropping species of tree out of an existing forest, and not affecting run-off and soil erosion and so on. We just need to get a lot cleverer about the way that we use our forests so that they stay being forests, but are also a renewable crop for our Welsh timber industry. That would support very many more people off those acres of land than are currently supported.

There has been a consensus in this Chamber that we need to substantially increase the amount of affordable housing, although there has been less of a consensus on whether it's fair to class homes sold for over £150,000 through Help to Buy as affordable. For that reason, Plaid Cymru has preferred to specifically use the term 'social housing' when talking about our own targets for house building, and that is, of course, where the main problem regarding supply is. So, we welcome this strategy as a step in the right direction, and we agree that prefab housing of the sort that's been highlighted in the media today can be a useful part of providing that, with the usual caveats about quality control and so on. 

So, I just have a couple of questions for you, Minister. Firstly, are you in a position to give us some figures in terms of the numbers you want to see delivered? Now, the media reports, of course, use the 20,000 affordable homes figure, but we know that target includes homes that, in reality, are unaffordable, as we've discussed before, and that doesn't have a specific target for social housing. So, if you could give us an indication about how much social housing you'd want to see delivered through this, that would be helpful. And, secondly, currently the planning system already struggles to get the level of affordable housing it should through developments. Sometimes, this is because developers rely on the planning inspector to water down affordable housing commitments to guarantee that a development remains profitable, and that's something that no other industry has, and something that we really should reflect on. But at other times, it's simply because planning departments don't negotiate well, or they accept cash payments that are inadequate. I'm aware of one development where the cash payments amounted to around £50,000 per home they alleged to be able to build, which is clearly inadequate.

Now, of course, one advantage of prefab housing is that the cost per unit is substantially reduced, but, clearly, what we don't want is developers taking advantage of that and reducing their cash payments accordingly. So, instead, Minister, will you strengthen the planning system to actually require more affordable homes within developments to reflect the fact that it will cost less?

Those are two very good points. There isn't a target for this at the moment, because we're still running through the innovative housing programme stats. The whole point of the innovative housing programme is to test out what the manufacturers are claiming for the houses, and make sure that they actually deliver what they claim. So, all of them will tell you that they reduce bills by any number of hundreds of pounds and that the cost of building them is lower and all the rest of it, but they're all very new and innovative projects. So, what we're doing is we're monitoring them over the years of the project, so those that are in year 1, for example, of the three years of monitoring.

The truth is that many of them have done what they said they would do, but some of them haven't. And so what we're trying to do is make sure that we roll out at scale the ones that do do what they say, and the others are given an opportunity to figure out what went wrong and correct it and put that in place. So, I'm not prepared to put a target on that, because we want to get it right. It's important to get it right as well.

In terms of the planning system, which is not today's strategy, but is obviously a related point, we are working very hard with local authorities and registered social landlords to get some pre-approved planning in place. Shortly, I'll be announcing some self-build schemes that we're looking at as well, where, basically, what we're saying is the local authority will put the planning in place before the land goes out, and then they'll be looking for partner developers or RSLs to develop the land. So, that takes that problem away. That's a related strategy, it's not this strategy today.

And the second thing is: you'll know, you've heard me talk in this Chamber a lot about moving that kind of planning to the strategic planning level at a regional point, and that's to do two things. That's to make sure that we spread the rare expertise around, so that authorities that are negotiating with the private sector for big pieces of land have access to proper expertise, because often that will be the only one they have ever done, and they'll skill themselves up and then lose it again—so, to share that expertise around in local authorities is really important. Also, it will enable them to put the strategic infrastructure plan in place, so that when a private sector builder comes forward, they will know what infrastructure they are expected to contribute to, as opposed to a random amount of money based on the affordability of the scheme in question. So, there are lots of other things to do.

What this is doing, though, is it's allowing us to build much more quickly the sorts of houses that people want to live in. I'll just share with you one story from—from Ammanford, actually, where I met Mr and Mrs Potter. You may have seen a little video online from Mr and Mrs Potter, who were ecstatic with the house that they were living in, developed by Coastal, a registered social landlord. Mrs Potter said this to me, and it's really stuck with me, 'We saw the old garage being knocked down and the houses going up and we thought, "Oh, another posh development for posh people. I'm still living in this terrible flat that I've been allocated and my son has got all kinds of problems".' And then she said, 'Somebody rang the doorbell from the RSL and said, "Would you like to come and look at the house we're thinking of allocating to you?", and they took me to this posh development that I had been slagging off in the local shop as not for the likes of us, and here we are, living in it.'

That's the point, that these are the best houses in Wales, not the worst. They're the ones that most people want to live in. They're houses of choice, not houses of necessity, and I think that is the most telling part of it.

I welcome the Minister's statement. I am pleased that this Government has committed to continue to invest in affordable housing, providing £2 billion of funding in this term of office, and its commitment to build more and to build better.

You've probably heard me—I think everybody else heard me—talking about the importance of building more council houses, and, yes, I agree with what the Minister just said: we want to build quality. Some of us have read about, though we're probably too young to remember, Parker Morris, but that was council houses being built to a quality that people could get.

I've also visited a development where the houses built for the registered social landlord were larger and to a higher quality than those being sold into the private sector. There is nothing wrong with that happening. I think that we ought to say, 'The public sector is a poorer quality should not be the mantra. The public sector should be at least as good, but preferably better.'

I am, however, sceptical but convincible about modern methods of construction as a way of quickly increasing affordable housing supply.

As the Minister is aware, the new methods of construction in the 1960s did not turn out well: steel houses in Swansea; high alumina cement in Olchfa school; Ronan Point; non-traditional houses in Swansea being demolished in Blaen-y-Maes and Clase and replaced by traditionally built houses by a registered social landlord; and also the tenements, which were more common in Scotland, but we had a few in Wales, and we had one in Swansea. You won't find that anymore either, because that's been knocked down.

An awful lot of these very modern, innovative developments of the 1960s are no more. So, why is the Minister convinced that there will be no problems with this generation of non-traditional housing build? Because traditional housing build has got one great advantage: they stay up for a very long time.

As usual, Mike Hedges makes a very good point very succinctly, although I will say something in praise of the steel houses. My grandmother lived in one of the steel houses, as he knows—four houses outside my constituency into his constituency. At the time, those houses were the most splendid houses in Swansea by a long way. Again, she couldn't believe that she was living in one of them. Although the steel cladding hasn't stood the test of time, the house is very much still there, and still beautiful and still spacious, actually. So, it can be done.

The reason I am quite convinced about these methods, though, is because of the innovative housing programme and, as I was just saying in response to Delyth Jewell, that we are testing it. We are getting claims from the manufacturers and then we are pushing them through a testing programme to make sure that the claims are realised. So, actually, we are not rolling out at scale and pace something that we hope will work; we are rolling out things that we know will work and do deliver what they are said to deliver. That's a very important point because we don't want to make the mistakes that have been made in the past.

In terms of design, I am absolutely with him on the subject of design. We want beautiful houses, beautifully designed, that are houses for life. So, for these houses, we are looking for designs that will allow somebody to buy them as a starter home for the first time, and then stay in that house for the rest of their lives, adding bedrooms and even taking bedrooms away. So, the house can grow with you and then diminish with you over time, with wide doorways that accommodate wheelchairs and prams and buggies, wide stairwells, proper bathrooms on the ground floor—all the sorts of things that you need for a lifetime experience in a single house.

These methods of construction allow you to do just that. So, people are not disrupted from their community if they have a disability in the family, or if they have an older person, or if they have caring responsibilities. The houses are adaptable in situ.

Thank you for your statement, Minister. As you are well aware, I have been a long-term proponent of prefabricated and modular housing as an answer to our social housing shortage and have been arguing for this approach since I was first elected. As someone who grew up in a prefab, I have many fond memories of my prefab home. I realise that the prefabs of yesteryear won't meet modern standards, but then neither do any homes built in that era.

I welcome the Welsh Government's new strategy for social housing, which accepts that traditional building methods cannot address our dire need for social housing. As the Minister has outlined in her statement, modern methods of construction and off-site construction will address our social-home shortage by building more of them, more quickly. Minister, I fully support this approach and hope to see the results very soon.

You state that building with MMC could reduce construction waste by up to 90 per cent. The need to decarbonise the construction industry cannot be overstated. Minister, given that the Welsh Government has failed to meet its tree-planting targets, will there be sufficient sustainable wood supplies to meet the future demands of MMC? Minister, how will you ensure that only Welsh-sourced materials are used in future construction products?

Your strategy states that MMC and OSM will help reduce energy bills. So, what consideration has been given to mitigating the need for active cooling as our climate becomes warmer and wetter? We have seen the devasting effects of severe weather events in the last few weeks. Minister, can you confirm that new homes built using MMC, whether on or off-site, will have in-built protections against flooding, such as one-way valves and flood barriers? 

And finally, Minister, one of the biggest advantages of growing up in a prefab was access to a garden and the community. Will you ensure that all social homes built with MMC and OSM have a garden? Access to a garden is essential for families and children, but also elderly people, as it enables them to keep pets. So, Minister, will you ensure that social tenants in these new homes will be able to keep pets in order to help combat isolation and loneliness? Thank you.

Thank you for that series of questions and comments. In terms of the wood supplies, as I was saying in response to David Melding, this is absolutely associated with the growth of the timber industry in Wales. So, we certainly do not have enough wood of the right sort at the moment; we need to plant it, and we need to plant it in a way that assures a biodiverse forest. So, it's a forest that's recognisable as a forest—for those of us who drew a picture of a forest, it would look like that—but it's also crop-able, and that's the point. So, you don't clear crop. It's not a crop in itself, it's a forest. But you can crop it in a way that means that the forest stays, but you have single-species cropping of various sorts running through it. That's the best way to do it. It's done in lots of places in the world and there's no reason why we can't do it here.

I can't at the moment, unfortunately, say that we'll only do it with Welsh-sourced materials because that wouldn't be possible. But it's certainly our aim to get to there, and we are working with all of the manufacturers in this field, alongside Ken's business advisers and Business Wales, to look at their supply chains and see what we can do about making sure that they are sourcing, where possible, Welsh products, and where there's a gap in the supply chain, what we can do to stimulate somebody stepping into that gap and making sure that there is a Welsh product available. So, that's very much ongoing, and my colleague Lee Waters, with the Better Jobs Closer to Home piece and the foundational economy piece, has been doing the same thing with us, about making sure that the supply chain pulls together.

In terms of weather-proofing, not all of the modular systems and the modern methods of construction—which are not all modular, I have to say—do have complete flood protection, because not all of them will be designed to be built on a flood plain. But we are looking to see what we can do for houses that are built on flood plains. Actually, the best solution to that is not to build them on the flood plain in the first place. But we certainly will be looking to see what we can do in terms of weather-proofing. In terms of heat and cool, that's absolutely built in. So, air-source and ground-source heat pumps both cool and heat the house, depending on what the ambient temperature outside is, and that's a very important point.

In terms of a garden, the space standards will specify a garden in certain circumstances, but not in all circumstances. For example, sometimes it is both desirable and actually will be essential, because of the growing population, to have high-density, high-rise buildings. That doesn't mean low quality or low design or low spec.  But of course, if you're on the fifth floor, you will not have a garden associated with your flat for your own use. What you will have access to is good, green infrastructure around the high-density building, and that's very important as well, so that we get the green infrastructure in our cities, and we get the high-density residential buildings right, so that people do have access to that essential outside space. On that I do agree. But it's not quite as simple as saying that people have a garden; it's much more complicated than that.

The last thing I wanted to say—and I apologise because I should have done this in response to a number of people—is that, yes, the money is cumulative, but it's not all modular. So, modern methods of construction are not all modular, and some of the IHP stuff is about modern methods of construction that are not necessarily off-site manufacture. So, it's not quite as simple as saying it's £45 million for that, but it is all around the modern methods of construction. Some of the IHP programme is about the testing mechanisms for what the claims are as well; some of the money will be used on that.

And the last thing I want to say in response to Caroline Jones and a number of other people who raised it is that this is very much a system based on the life cost of the building. So, it's not about driving the upfront cost of building it down to the lowest common denominator—Delyth raised this point with me as well—this is about making sure that, when the planning authority and the local authority look at the cost of the house, they look at the lifetime cost of the house, including what it costs to live in it and so on, not just the cost of constructing it in the first place.

I agree with pretty much everything that's been said, so I just want to focus on some further aspects. I just want to focus on the word 'beauty' in your statement, because I think that's a really important ambition. Why do we want to build ugly buildings? There's a huge cost to ugly buildings that we shouldn't be allowing.

I recently visited Ewenny Court in Ely, which in the First Minister's constituency, to see the nine one-and two-bedroom homes that anybody would be proud to be living in, because they meet the beauty criteria as well as the placemaking criteria. In the Public Accounts Committee inquiry that we're doing into planning, I've come across the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission's report that was produced about a month ago, which has three asks: ask for beauty, refuse ugliness, and promote stewardship. That echoes the Minister's ambitions for placemaking. In that report, they quote a senior building expert who says:

'Some housebuilders…believe they can build any old crap and still sell'.

And I am sure that is the case. I just wondered what we can do to outlaw rubbish that costs huge amounts of money to rectify, and to ensure that we not only have the same high-quality standards for private housing as we have for social housing, as well as ensuring that planning authorities have the guts and the ability to refuse poor proposals, which are a cost to society. If we put up rubbish buildings, we've then got to tear them down or redo them.

So, I wondered if you could incorporate that into your review of the building regulations, as well as in your instructions to planning authorities, to simply refuse building proposals that aren't good enough and are not fully integrated into the placemaking ambitions that we have through this statement.

Yes, I'd probably agree with that. The problem with the word 'beautiful' is that it's obviously subjective. So, what we're doing is we're using it as a short-term word for 'built to very good and exacting standards'. So, you might not look at a house and think, 'Gosh, that's beautiful', but another person might; but what you will be able to say is, 'It's built to a high quality, with good-sized rooms, good light, and good sources of everything else', and the fact that you don't like it because it's pink or blue won't matter.

And actually, one of the things we're looking at doing with local authorities that are developing some of this alongside us is having pattern books, so that they can pre-approve planning applications for particular sets of patterns of housing that obviously conform to all of the highest design quality requirements—the DQR, as they call it—but obviously look different. Because people have a different idea of what beautiful looks like. What we mean by beautiful is beautiful in size, in space, in energy efficiency, in liveability, and then whether you think it's green or pink on the outside is a matter for you and for the rest of the development. So, I do think it's important to make that point.

But we are designing that in, and we are rapidly going—in our consultation on Part L and the White Paper that will follow it—towards having the same space standards and the same beauty standards across Wales for all types of housing, and not differential as they are now. Mike Hedges I think pointed out that, at the moment, if you have social housing in Wales, you're probably in a better standard home than if you've recently bought one. I don't know that everybody knows that, and I don't have problem with that from a social housing point of view, but I do have a problem with it for the sustainability of the private sector. So, we are rapidly going towards having the same standards throughout.

I was really pleased to be awakened by your dulcet tones this morning on the tv, announcing with a cheery smile that you were going to build more homes in Wales. As chair of the cross-party group on construction, that is extremely good news.

But to be successful in achieving the ambition set out in the strategy, of course, we have to take many people along that journey with us. The Construction Industry Training Board and the industry are keen to support the strategy and to work with us to deliver the outcomes, and they are particularly interested in hearing more details around the number of homes, the projected timescale for development, and the proportion of affordable homes to be built using off-site manufacturing.

They are interested—and I'm sure everybody else here is—about the clarity that is needed to help develop the pipeline the sector will require to enable it to invest in these new types of technologies, and therefore the skills required to meet them. Therefore, Minister, they're hoping for fairly accurate and readily available information in the near future. Because it is important to recognise that the skills requirements for delivering more social housing through modern technologies will be somewhat different to the skills that are required now, and it will be the case that the Construction Industry Training Board, the employers and the colleges will want to help you deliver your desired outcome.

With that in mind, they would like to understand, really, how we're going to teach those skills, and whether we might consider teaching the modern methods of construction through the eight new qualifications that are going to be introduced in 2021, and maybe include a new GCSE, an AS-level and A-level in construction and the built environment within that proposal. So, it would be really interesting to know whether that is in our thinking.

And finally from me, I am, and others have asked and are extremely interested to know where the raw material—the wood, in other words—is going to be sourced from. And I know that you answered that question several times today, but what I'm particularly keen to seek from you, Minister, is an absolute assurance that we will not, in our ambition to build good houses for some people, destroy the homes of others because that would somehow be an almost ridiculous situation. 

Thank you very much for that, Joyce Watson. Just on the wood point, I'll just reiterate it, because I think it is worth reiterating. The strategy aims to create a strong domestic market for Welsh wood, and links to our aspiration to be a forest nation. And they are not in opposition to one another at all. Our ambition is to develop that thriving timber industry, and that requires a thoughtful national approach to commercial tree planting and harvesting. So, as I say, you don't clear crop mountainsides causing devastating soil loss, and all the rest of it; you have careful planting and cropping strategies in a sustainable biodiverse forest. That's perfectly possible and it's done in lots of places in the world, and there's no reason why we can't do that. That will need to harness our natural assets and it will help our economy, and it will help our environmental outcomes for that. 

And then, the whole point of the IHP programme—the innovative housing programme—is to trial that so that we know what will work, we know where to plant it, we know where they're currently sourcing that wood and that we work with NRW and our councils to make sure that we source that responsibly. As I said in response to Caroline Jones, we can't currently do all of that from Wales, but we are working very hard on planting the timber now that will enable us to do that in the future. So, I think that's a really good point, well made; we do need to be really emphasising that. The fact that you're using a timber industry doesn't mean you're deforesting, because we definitely are not wanting to do that.

In terms of the construction industry, we have been working very closely with the construction sector. We certainly welcome their response to wanting to work with us to assist us in skills development, and so on. I mentioned in the statement that we'll be developing an implementation plan for the strategy, and as part of the implementation plan, we will certainly be addressing the skills base necessary in the workforce, and how we plan to integrate that with the qualifications and, indeed the apprenticeship programme that my colleague Ken Skates is looking at alongside the new qualifications, Joyce, that you've already mentioned.   

And then, the last thing to say just in terms of prioritisation, we are very keen on getting vulnerable groups into employment via that route. I did say briefly in the statement that we'll be looking at groups like prisoners, but we're also looking at long-term unemployed. These factories can be really quite small so they can be local to where the house building is, so you don't have one big source—a big, massive factory taking up a load of land somewhere and distributing stuff by lorry; you've got small, local factories building local housing for local people, using local employment. So, creating local employment using local people.

So, there are lots of win-wins in this strategy that I think we will be working on with the construction industry and the SME house builders, in particular, to take that forward.

Thank you very much, Minister.