Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:14 pm on 29 April 2020.
Thank you, David, for those. We've kept the construction industry going for essential work, and we've kept the care and repair system going, for example. They're receiving around 270 rapid adaptation referrals a week at the moment—urgent jobs to support hospital discharges, or crucial prevention to prevent somebody being admitted where there's no need. I mentioned the adaptation of the Nightingale hospitals, which has obviously been kept going. Actually, it's not the construction bit of that that's been a problem; it's keeping the builders' merchants open so that people can maintain adequate supplies, and we've had conversations with builders' merchants around how that works.
You'll know that going shopping in your local builders' merchant isn't one of the main reasons that you should leave home at the moment. But, obviously, if you're going there as part of a trade, doing essential work—construction work and repairs—then it has been very helpful to us that they've stayed open. When we start to look at the—well, it's a new term for the word 'easement', which pains me as a lawyer—easement of the restrictions, we will be looking to see if we can get more construction up and running as fast as possible.
As to support to the SME system, because the housing market is, not surprisingly, not terribly buoyant at the moment, we will be looking to see if we can introduce regulations to relax the DQR—the social housing standard rules—in order to be able to buy off-plan from SME builders, so that we can increase the supply that way. This has been done before; it was done after the 2008 crisis. Actually, the building standards in Wales are much higher now, so the relaxation isn't as great, but we are looking to support the sector in that way. And, of course, it has the added benefit of getting more people out of temporary accommodation that may be unsuitable. So, we're doing a number of things to support SME builders and to keep the essential repairs going.
And the last thing is that we're encouraging all registered social landlords and councils across Wales to work on their voids, to make sure that they are going as fast as possible to get all available social housing back into use as soon as humanly possible, so that we can move people on from what might be otherwise temporary accommodation into that permanent, secure accommodation. And I'm certainly determined that people are not going to go back out of that onto the street.