Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:16 pm on 14 July 2021.
Yes, thank you for that. It's actually a very important point, because we've got a number of issues in the small and medium enterprise house building market around cash flow, pipeline and so on. And again, Lee Waters and myself were very prominent in the construction forum in the last Senedd—I think you came with a different hat on a couple of times—to make sure that we put a pipeline in place for construction companies in general, and house builders were one of the lines of work that was coming off the construction project, to try to help with cash flow and a number of other issues.
We have a number of other issues as well, including the self-build scheme, pre-planning approval schemes and so on that are designed to help the SME market with some of the issues around needing to hold big cash reserves while they get planning, and so on. And we're also encouraging registered social landlords to work with their local SMEs as directly contracted contractors to help them with cash flow issues as well. We're more than happy to help the market take the role we'd like them to have across the piece and, indeed, without them we cannot build the 20,000 low-carbon social homes, so we're very keen to ensure that our providers stay viable and solid and to work with them to ensure that they have the support and the pipeline of work they need.