5. What is the Welsh Government's strategy for decarbonising Wales's housing stock? OQ55702

Thank you, Jenny. Building on the long-standing success of the Welsh housing quality standard and the Warm Homes programme, our new reconstruction plan identifies the upgrading of Welsh homes, particularly social homes, as an early priority. This will drive green, economic recovery and innovation in our SMEs and communities.  

Well, excellent work going on in social housing. Retrofitting existing homes is obviously a major challenge for us, as I see that 1,000 homes are to be retrofitted as part of the COVID recovery programme, but there must be hundreds of thousands of existing homes that need retrofitting to meet our zero carbon targets, as we have probably the oldest housing stock in Europe. So, I hope that our COVID recovery strategy will embrace that challenge. On a more urgent note, before the internal market Bill prevents devolved administrations from ever taking the action needed, what is being done to fast forward change in the new building regulations so that all new homes meet those zero-carbon standards?

Thanks, Jenny. I know it does seem like a small amount of work, but it's a part of a very important journey to decarbonise all homes in Wales, and I am delighted to say that, actually, we've just put an additional £10 million into the optimised refit programme this financial year, so that does bring the total amount available to £19.5 million. The whole point of the optimised retrofit programme is to establish the pathway for how we decarbonise the whole of the housing stock. So, I'm sure you've heard me say before, but it's quite clear that a one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work, and so if you're decarbonising stone-built terraced housing in a steep valley, you would want to have one set of techs and systems in place, and if you're decarbonising 1970s cavity wall ranch style housing in my constituency for example, you would clearly want something completely different.

So, the whole point of the optimised retrofit programme builds on the recommendations in the Jofeh report to trial and test the way forward to decarbonise homes in Wales, to establish the new processes based on a common-sense approach, and create opportunities to ensure that we have the right tech, the right measures and materials, we have the right supply chains, we have the right foundational economy for this, we have the right skills, we work with our FE colleges to make sure that we skill up the workforce as we learn from our innovative housing programme, which this is very much a part of, so that we can roll it out across the piece outside of the social sector and into the private sector. But, we're in a good place to start that piece of work, and I very much hope that we'll be able to do that with some speed and dispatch so that we can trial that and then roll it out accordingly.

Minister, this is probably one of the most important areas of public policy, and will be in the 2020s, and even in the private sector we'll require a lot of grant aid so that home owners can install new boilers and insulation schemes, and so forth. So, all this retrofitting, particularly in the old housing stock—a good proportion of it before the first world war—will require great skill in fitting and installation. We've heard about the leasehold scandal just now, and some of that was caused by, actually, good materials being so badly fitted that they were a fire risk. So, how will you ensure that the regulatory system does not fail again, as it has in the last 20 years for our poor leaseholders?

I think that David Melding, as always, makes a very, very good point. One of the reasons that we want to do this in the way that we are is to understand what the build requirements look like for retrofit, to make sure that we can work alongside our skills providers to ensure that we have that right set of skills, and that we understand what the new technology looks like, and how to fit it, and what the consequences of not doing it properly are, and that we can build that into the new system for building quality control, which I was just discussing with Delyth Jewell in an earlier answer.

I know that the Member has taken a great deal of interest in the building safety programme that we put forward, and the pathways, and I think that he concurs with me that there isn't much that is controversial in that. It's just a question of making sure that we get those regulations right, and we get the skills programmes right that go with it. In addition, of course, we have a number of tried-and-tested programmes that the Welsh Government supports: Nest, Arbed. There are a range of schemes available to tenants in the private rented sector, for example. Just very recently—he may not be aware—landlords in the private rented sector with an EPC rating of F and G have been contacted by Rent Smart Wales and offered grants that are available from the Warm Homes fund, ECO and ECO Flex to bring their properties up to a better standard.