1. Will the Minister provide an update on the optimised retrofit programme? OQ55882

Thank you very much, Joyce. Yes. Initially £9.5 million was available this financial year but since we have decided to increase the budget to £19.5 million. I'm very grateful to my colleague Rebecca Evans for the ability to do that. Five schemes have secured support, including one large consortium, involving 26 social landlords. The schemes are pan Wales and will trial different solutions, including for those properties that are off gas grid.

I thank you, Minister, for that answer, and I do appreciate that the programme is very much in its infancy at the moment. I do welcome the Welsh Government's approach to trialling upgrades so that we can develop a good understanding of what is most effective. If, as hoped, the programme is rolled out over the coming years, the potential for skilled construction jobs is indeed hugely promising. We will of course need construction workers who have the skills to carry out this work. I'm aware that the Construction Industry Training Board will soon be launching a report that looks at that particular issue, and I look forward to seeing it.

Minister, can you tell me what actions are currently being taken to ensure that training facilities and courses are available, so that there is no delay between launching a programme and having the people with the necessary skills to carry out that work?

Yes, thank you, Joyce. Obviously, I'm very aware of your long and continued interest in skills in this sector, particularly for women, and one of the really lovely things about being able to do this this way is the diversity of the workforce that we'll be able to encourage. So, this is a trial involving over half of Welsh social landlords and helps us to quickly identify skills gaps in their own organisations, in their supply chains and in their delivery partners so we can establish the demand and put in place the appropriate training before the mass roll-out to every home. That's part of the point of having this as this scheme, so that we can test out what happens in each of the different types of property. It's a key principle, and it's sponsored jointly by me, the Minister for Education and the Minister for economy for this reason. It's a key principle that not only are we retrofitting the homes in the scheme, but we're trialling it for roll-out across Wales across all tenures. So, this is absolutely about finding out what works, what the supply chains look like, what the skills gap is and how we can ramp that up for that. 

We absolutely will be being informed by the dedicated net-zero skills analysis that you've just referenced from the construction industry training board, and we'll also be considering any relevant recommendations from the green recovery taskforce, which is being led by Sir David Henshaw. And we've also been working with the regional skills partnerships, who've progressed this agenda across all three regions of Wales, identifying the local skills that they have and what support they need to support the adoption of low-carbon practices and technologies. So, this is absolutely the integrated approach that I know you'd love to see us do, and it is absolutely about making sure that we skill up the workforce in order to be able to roll it out, but we also develop the supply chains and the delivery partners and their workforces, not just the public sector workforce.

Minister, I wonder if you could tell us how you're going to identify those older properties, which are a substantial part of the Welsh housing stock, and, certainly before 1930 and especially before the first world war, very few of those properties are in the hands of social landlords, and yet probably the biggest concentration of low-income families is in that type of housing. They're also difficult to retrofit. So, we need to concentrate on these harder to get properties if they're going to benefit from what I do welcome as a good initiative. 

Yes, absolutely, and you're right, there aren't very many of them in the social sector, but we are looking for those that there are. The idea is to identify a decent group of every type of house in Wales and then trial out what will work for those houses, without setting out impossible targets. So, we're not saying we'll bring every home to EPC A, what we're saying is: can we get every home as good as it can possibly be? And if that's at net-zero carbon, that's great, but if it's at EPC B and that's the best you're going to get, then we need to know that coming out of the programme, and we need to have a policy that addresses that issue going forward, because I very much doubt we want to knock down all our heritage houses on the basis they can't get to net-zero carbon. 

One of the big things the decarbonisation group looked at was actually the whole lifecycle. So, it isn't just about getting homes up to net-zero carbon, it is also what happens if you knock them down. You've then got an enormous pile of carbon-intensive waste that you've got to deal with. So, that's not the solution either, never mind the historic and family connections and so on. So, it doesn't work in terms of carbon anyway. So, the whole point of this programme is to get to the best we can get with our housing stock and then to be able to develop policies that allow us to address the remaining issues. And, absolutely, we need to make sure that we've got a solution for each type of house in Wales, including the very many Victorian stone terraces and so on that you're referencing.