5. How is the Welsh Government supporting households on a low income to make improvements to their property? OQ55489

Welsh Government initiatives such as the Warm Homes programme, the Welsh housing quality standard and optimised retrofit programme support our ambition for everyone to have a decent home that is affordable, warm, safe and secure.

Thank you, Minister. Since 2011-12, the Welsh Government has been providing financial assistance for household improvements via Nest. Now, this scheme has been in decline since 2015-16, with fewer households seeing improvements through the scheme each year. The numbers are down from 6,000 in 2015-16 to 3,800 in 2018-19. While the Welsh Government is winding down assistance with property improvements, the UK Government, on the other hand, has launched a green homes grant scheme, which should see over 600,000 homeowners in England supported. Will you commit to working with the Minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs so as to be bold and to create a Welsh green homes grant scheme to support low-income households in Wales so that they can afford improvements here?

Well, Janet, you won't be at all surprised to find that I don't share your analysis at all. You are obviously aware that the Nest scheme is not my portfolio; it is actually in my colleague Lesley Griffiths's portfolio. But, since 2011, more than 61,400 households in Wales have benefited from our Warm Homes programme, which supports people living on lower incomes to improve their home energy efficiency and save money. Between April 2017 and March 2021, we will have invested £104 million in the Warm Homes programme to improve up to another 25,000 homes.

We've also recently launched, through my portfolio, our optimised retrofit programme, which will support the retrofitting of 1,000 existing social homes this financial year. That's not very many, but it's the format of it that matters. The reason that we are doing that is because we disagree with the UK Government around the way that they've done the green homes initiative because one size simply does not fit all. It's quite obvious that the way to retrofit a Victorian stone terrace in the Rhondda is not the way that you would retrofit a 1970s cavity wall-built house in my constituency, for example. So, what we've done with our optimised retrofit programme is we are supporting social landlords who have every single type of house in Wales in their portfolio to come forward with a variety of technologies and schemes that will raise those houses from the Welsh housing quality standard that have already achieved C up to A. We will be able to see what works, and then we will be able to roll those programmes out so that what works for each house is available, rather than just a blanket one-size-fits-all programme that, frankly, will not work.