Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:24 pm on 18 November 2020.
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.