Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:31 pm on 25 February 2020.
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.