7. Will the Minister make a statement on post-COVID housing support for communities in the Heads of the Valleys? OQ56237

Thank you, Alun. We've continued to provide support for affordable housing with all communities through the delivery of our 20,000 affordable homes target. Our record levels of investment are seeing benefits for housing in all areas, including in the Heads of the Valleys.

I'm grateful to you for that, Minister; I think that part of the overall position taken by the Government has been very successful over the last five years. But you will have seen the reports, which I asked the First Minister about yesterday, which have demonstrated very clearly that areas such as Blaenau Gwent and the Heads of the Valleys region will suffer disproportionately as a consequence of the COVID pandemic. So, I'd be interested to understand how your department is able to provide additional support for house building, house ownership, house development in areas such as Blaenau Gwent, to ensure that our whole community can join in the recovery from this pandemic?

Thank you, Alun. We've very keen on ensuring, for example, in our—. We've got our optimised retrofit programme where, as you'll know, we'll be working with a range of registered social landlords and councils across Wales to understand what a retrofit programme looks like for all housing stock in Wales, and we're very keen to have done that in combination with the Minister for Education and the Minister for Economy, Transport and North Wales. The reason for that is to ensure that the skills mix that comes out of those programmes is able to be translated into jobs on the ground in communities such as Blaenau Gwent, the top of the Heads of the Valleys and, indeed, through the Valleys taskforce that you were instrumental in setting up and is still very active in this area.

We’re also investing additional moneys into the housing support grant, another £40 million into the housing support grant, bringing the overall total to £166 million, seven hundred and six—£166,763,000. That’s a hard figure to say, it turns out. That brings a transformational change in housing in particular, but, of course, it provides a large number of jobs in the support services necessary, and the reason that those jobs are particularly interesting is because, of course, they're spread throughout Wales, they're in every community in Wales, and they're accessible. We're making sure that, in partnership with a number of our stakeholder organisations we ensure that those jobs are available to local people to support people in their local housing.

And the last scheme, there are a large number of schemes, but the last scheme I want to particularly mention is the £10 million to roll out the empty homes grant scheme across the Valleys taskforce area. We've had over 600 applications in total across phase 1 and phase 2, and that's to bring a large number of the older empty homes back into beneficial use for those communities. That has two beneficial things, it brings much needed work for renovation SMEs in those areas, and, of course, it reinvigorates communities by having people come back to live and work in the area. So, I'm delighted to say there are a number of initiatives going on.