8. Statement by the Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs: The Climate Emergency

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:05 pm on 1 July 2020.

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Photo of Lesley Griffiths Lesley Griffiths Labour 4:05, 1 July 2020

Thank you, David Melding. And, yes, I'm certainly very happy to speak to my ministerial colleague, the Minister for Local Government and Housing. As I say, we do talk quite a lot about housing, and she's very keen to use more timber. I mentioned, and I referred to the innovative housing programme. We've also obviously had the consultation on Part L and Part F of the building regulations and what we want to avoid is expensive retrofitting down the line. We know that, in order to retrofit the current housing stock—. We know we've got some of the oldest housing stock in Wales and that requires energy efficiency measures. We need to avoid that at all costs. We need to make sure that the houses we're building now don't have those sorts of problems. These are discussions that I do have continually with the housing Minister.

I hope, when I was the housing Minister, we made some significant strides, and I know the Minister is talking to developers about how we can do that going forward, but those are ongoing discussions. Decarbonising the housing stock has to be a priority for the Welsh Government and it is for me and it is for Julie James. And I know she's made it very clear, in her response to the affordable housing review, that the expectation is that social housing providers will lead the way in terms of building the next generation of homes for Wales and that they're built to near-zero-carbon standards.