Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Education and Welsh Language – in the Senedd at 2:52 pm on 6 October 2021.
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?