6. How is the Minister ensuring that all new school building projects are zero carbon? OQ56953

The education sector has a fundamental role in supporting the Welsh Government's response to the climate emergency. I was discussing this in a meeting with other Members of the Cabinet and local authority leaders only this morning. That is why net-zero carbon is a key consideration under the twenty-first century schools and colleges programme investment, and why additional funding has already been made available to support net-zero-carbon school pilot projects.

I'm not quite sure whether net-zero carbon is a key consideration or an obligation in all new projects, so perhaps you could clarify that. I just wanted to highlight the fact that, in a past life, I was a lay Estyn inspector, and I was up in a school in the Valleys—over a decade ago, this is—which had a ground-source heat pump installed in its new building, but they said they didn't know how to use it, so they were still using gas. This wasn't really the subject of what we were inspecting, but I went away from it thinking, 'This is really terrible.' I'm aware of schools in Cardiff where, for example, the grey water system has never worked, or the building management digital systems are so complicated that nobody knows how to use them. So, I just wondered, Minister, what you're going to do to ensure that local authorities are really raising their game on ensuring that, when they're signing off projects, they know that all the bells and whistles on this building are working correctly and that the end user, which is going to be the school, knows how to use this equipment?

I think that's a really important point, if I may say. On the first point, in relation to net-zero carbon, we are on the journey to making sure that all schools are, but we aren't, obviously, anywhere near the destination at this point. Our task as a Government is to make progress along that path as fast as possible. The role the pilots play in that is to help us work through some of the challenges that the Member's identified in the second part of her question, which is the practical deliverability of some of those policy requirements. So, there are questions here about the maturity of some of the technology, about some supply chain capacity issues. All of those are practical limitations on the speed at which we can progress along that path. But that's the role of the pilot—to help us do that more quickly. 

On the second point, about how we connect the construction of the building to the operation of the building, as her question says, in order to get full value from that investment and the full benefit in environmental terms, we need to make sure that there's an understanding between local authorities and their estate managers about how the new zero-carbon buildings work. One of the issues that is being explored in the pilot projects is how we can develop teaching and learning resources, both to support the schools themselves and also to provide technical support and training to help those staff maintain schools and to operate the schools in a way that enables them to take full advantage.

Minister, the Welsh Government has set out a carbon reduction target of 37 per cent by 2025, and 67 per cent by 2030. What assessments has the Minister undertaken of the current carbon output of our schools and what investment is needed by him to support all schools to reach his Government's carbon reduction targets?

Well, just to echo the point that was being raised in the discussion earlier, certainly, we can make more of a contribution than we're currently making. That's why we've set the policy for ourselves of ensuring that we are moving towards net-zero-carbon schools, but that needs to be done in a way that is deliverable, and the pilots that we've launched—there's one in the Vale of Glamorgan, there's one in Flintshire, there are three schools in Rhondda Cynon Taf being looked at under the arrangements—are helping us understand what more we need to do and how quickly we can move along the path to make sure that the school estate in all parts of Wales is taking advantage of the latest technology, the latest building methods, in order to deliver its contribution to decarbonising the public estate in Wales.