6. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: The Innovative Housing Programme Year 4 — Modern Methods of Construction/Modular Special

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:47 pm on 3 November 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 5:47, 3 November 2020

Thank you, Mike. So, I absolutely do remember the steel houses. You'll know, of course, that I spent a very large amount of my childhood in one, in Gendros estate, and I well remember my grandmother's sheer delight on moving into that house, because it had big, spacious rooms and a lovely garden, a nice kitchen and an upstairs inside bathroom. I can still remember her unbounded delight, really, at being given such a house. Of course, those houses, although the steel part of them didn't last, have lasted, and you'll know that they've been retrofitted with good insulation and so on, and they are still lovely, spacious houses in nice, big green-spaced estates there, so still a lovely place to live, actually, in the Gendros housing estate, where I spent a fair amount of my young years.

You are absolutely right about the space standards, so we're absolutely existing on good DQL as it's now called, good space standards, so that people have the room to live and breathe. I had a great site visit with our colleague Huw Irranca-Davies in his constituency to look at what was called a house for life there, where you're looking at a modular build that's got big wide doors—you can get a pram through it when you've got your young family; you can get a wheelchair in it in later life. You could add modules to it, so you could add bedrooms and more living space when you needed to, and then, indeed, you could take it away again when you no longer needed it and you wanted to downsize. So, you literally had a house for life on a single site, very flexible and able to be adapted for people to stay in the communities that they love, where they've got all of their contacts and so on. That is absolutely the aim of the programme, that we build houses for life that people can have a growing family in, live a life that they want to live, work, live, play in an area with all of those things. What we're doing with the programme is proving that that can be done, and I'm very happy to accompany any Member you like, because we've got them all over Wales now, to go and have a look at the ones in your constituencies, and you'll be able to see the sheer delight of the people who are living there as well. Huw and I had a good poke around in the house that we were in, didn't we, Huw, with the big wide stairs. I particularly remember all the closet space and so on, so it was a really nice place to live.

So, absolutely, Mike, I completely agree with you—we've got to make sure that they're good, high-quality, nice places to live and that they live a long time. Most of them are forecasting lifespans of 100 years as a minimum, but it's hard to tell, isn't it? You'll all remember some of the prefabs in the war that were supposed to last 10 years and they're actually fought over in my constituency, as people really want to live in them still. So, we think they'll be longer than that, but that's the forecast for most of them, and everybody in Wales now—councils, registered social landlords and so on—are embracing them as the way forward. So, we will be able to see that scale and pace going forward, alongside the real knowledge that these are the best houses in the world.