Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 2:13 pm on 19 May 2021.
Well, Llywydd, I'm very proud to lead a Government where two thirds of Ministers are women. Indeed, my party will continue the tradition of the Senedd in making sure that representation in this Senedd reflects the Wales that we live in.
I'm very glad that we've had the innovative housing grant now for a number of years. Inevitably, when you are trying things out for the first time, innovative building methods are going to cost more until you're able to make them happen on a larger scale. That's why we have the grant. It's to enable innovation to take place, and then to apply the successful innovation on that larger scale. That is why we are confident that the 20,000 homes for social rent that we will build during this Senedd term will be housing of the future, creating as much energy, for example, as they consume.
Now, we began the process in the last Senedd term of reforming the housing regulations, and there is more to do. There will be more action taken by this Government to make sure that those standards of house building are applied generally and not just in an innovative context.
As for the points that Jenny Rathbone made about European citizens living here in Wales, I entirely share her sense of frustration, and more than that, at the way in which individuals who have made their homes in Wales, who have made huge contributions to Wales, now find themselves feeling that all of that has been undermined. We have put nearly £2 million into the funds of Citizens Advice in Wales to provide advice to people about acquiring settled status. We've provided nearly £0.5 million to Newfields Law, a specialist firm, to make sure that where people's circumstances are particularly complicated, they get that extra level of assistance to find their way through the new thickets that the UK Government has created for them.
I urge the Home Office, as we have many times, to take a properly flexible and human approach to this, not continually to be setting deadlines that mean that people find themselves fearful that they will be on the wrong side of an arbitrary date and denied all the rights that they have quite properly and legally enjoyed up until now. Here in Wales we celebrate the fact that we have people from other parts of the world who come here and make their futures part of our future, and anything that undermines that sense is surely to be regretted.