Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 8 December 2021.
Well, the juxtaposition of the two things at the end is quite startling, so I'll deal with that first. The idea that a national construction company would somehow get in the way of building new homes is quite extraordinary. We have yet, as part of the co-operation agreement, to explore with our Plaid Cymru partners exactly how we're going to use the construction company. But we have had a large number of conversations with our registered social landlords and our councils about the shortage of skilled labour, the difficulty of getting good apprentices in place, and the paucity of very good advice about bringing forward developments in good time. So, we will have a very productive conversation with Plaid Cymru about how to fill in gaps where there has been market failure, and other issues where we can bring forward housing in an appropriate way.
The evidence is really interesting, actually, from the Labour Government after the second world war, elected by the returning troops, that an enormous increase in social house building actually stimulated the private market and didn't depress it in any way. The graphs are very interesting, and we are absolutely certain that we will be doing the same thing with our ambitious 20,000 social homes programme.