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