Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:10 pm on 2 November 2021.
Diolch, Peter. I hope I feel better soon, too. Thank you for that. You've absolutely put your finger on the pulse of that, of course. We absolutely have to use public sector funding as leverage to lever in private sector funding across Wales. You referenced the Swansea project; that's a very good example. So far, I think it's fair to say, the Swansea project doesn't need any public funding. However, we're in discussion with Swansea and a number of other local authorities about which parts of the projects may indeed require public subsidy. For example, depending on what the energy generation looks like, I'm sure that they will be looking for contract for difference from the UK Government. We already know that they will require some additional public expenditure for infrastructure cost. However, the project is a good one. It's primarily funded by private investors so far. It would be really great to see it come to fruition in my colleague Mike Hedges's constituency—I think it is primarily located there. It relies on a company that thinks it can produce something that's both affordable and credible in terms of generation of power via solar, as I understand it, and battery storage on land. It's a good alliance of private sector companies with the council as a partner—so, the public sector partner underpinning it—and it's certainly something that we're keeping an eye on as it goes forward.
We have a number of other arrangements of that sort. For example, the innovative housing programme is a really good one. One of the things we do with the innovative housing programme is we encourage private sector developers and investors to come forward, with public funding that de-risks the initial commercialisation of a project. They do a proof of concept that then allows them to scale it up and attract private investment. So, one of the things I was delighted to be able to do through the innovative housing project, for example, was do the proof of concept we have in my colleague Rebecca Evans's constituency of an all-timber Welsh house. She and I have visited the project a number of times. If you haven't visited, I would recommend it to you, just to prove the fact that you could build an entire house out of Welsh wood. Now that company has proof of concept and, of course, it can start to look for private sector investors to develop the concept further. So, absolutely, using de-risking public funding to lever in private sector funding is where we need to go, because you're absolutely right in identifying that this is an agenda that we simply cannot do on public funding alone; we absolutely have to get every community in Wales, including private sector funders, on board with it.