6. What action is the Welsh Government taking to protect the housing industry during the COVID-19 lockdown? OQ56224

Thank you, David. We've undertaken a range of actions to protect and support the housing industry across all tenures during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Our action includes the provision of financial support, sustained investment and working collaboratively to develop guidance for safe working across the industry as a whole.

Thank you for that answer, Minister. I'm deeply concerned about the SME sector, which is reliant on the sort of housing improvement that can often be easily postponed, especially in a time of great instability. So, I wonder what you're doing in terms of providing assistance. And also how are specific schemes, like the Self Build Wales scheme, which is looking to encourage people to build their own homes, often with SMEs—in fact, nearly exclusively so—to ensure that schemes like that, which was, unfortunately, just announced at the beginning of the lockdown, to ensure that that is up and running and will work well in the future?

We have maintained regular contact with the industry through our house builder engagement programme and the construction forum and its sub-groups, which my colleague Lee Waters chairs, but I attend. Through the construction forum, we have developed a recovery plan—COVID's the standing item on the agenda—to address the issues the industry faces, which I know David Melding will be very familiar with—so, supply chain issues, outbreaks in the workforce track and trace or onsite testing regimes where projects are being held up by people being asked to self-isolate and so on. We've also continued collaborative working in matters relating to early payment, procurement. And I'm very pleased indeed to say that we've managed to put together a pipeline to ensure cash flow and awareness of work opportunities particularly for SMEs across the piste. So, they've been very pleased to work with us to make sure that that pipeline is in place. And we've also got a number of funds, which are available for SMEs—specifically targeted at them, in fact—across Wales, managed by the Development Bank of Wales, including, for example, the stalled sites fund and so on.

The other thing we've been doing with the industry, which I know will be of particular interest to David Melding, is that we've been working with them to understand what the social house space standards are to encourage builders who are building small numbers of houses across Wales—plots of five houses and so on—to build to those standards, to allow, if there are cash flow or market difficulties, RSLs and councils to buy off-plan from those builders, to assist with cash flow and to keep them alive and in the market and in the procurement cycle. So, we've been doing a range of work with SME providers, as I say, across Government, to make sure that the industry as a whole stays afloat, and that we can assist if there's market volatility as the pandemic unfolds.