5. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: Re-imagining social house building in Wales — A modern methods of construction strategy for Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:19 pm on 25 February 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 4:19, 25 February 2020

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.

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