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 4:43 pm on 25 February 2020.

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Photo of Joyce Watson Joyce Watson Labour 4:43, 25 February 2020

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.