Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:21 pm on 3 March 2020.
Llywydd, I agree, of course, about the importance of evidence in this area. I think it's just a bit unfair to describe what is happening in Housing First for young people as a pilot. Of the £4.8 million that we have put into the youth homeless innovation fund, there are now six Housing First for young people schemes in operation already, and they're already in seven of the 22 local authorities in Wales. So, I think we've already gone beyond a simple pilot.
Of course, we want to learn from, as Delyth Jewell has said, the evidence of those first seven local authority actions, because while the Finnish experience is compelling, one of the things we have surely learnt is that you cannot simply pick something up that has happened, even in one part of Wales and drop it into another part of Wales and think it will just take root in the same way. We are adapting the Finnish experience and evidence so that it works in the Welsh context. That's what those six schemes are doing, and then, of course, we will want to learn from that to make sure that it is extended beyond that into other parts of Wales.