Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:35 pm on 25 February 2020.
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.