Questions now from the party spokespeople. First of all this afternoon, the Conservative spokesperson, Natasha Asghar.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. Deputy Minister, last week, the economy Minister unveiled the Welsh Government's national space strategy, outlining its ambition to achieve a 5 per cent share of the UK space sector, which would equate to £2 billion a year for the Welsh economy. The strategy is focused on growing the potential of current and future developments in the space sector here in Wales, including space launch training and experience capability, together with the testing and evaluation of new, greener propulsion technologies at Llanbedr. It's clear this announcement calls into question the decision of your roads review panel to cancel the proposed Llanbedr bypass, wasting £1.7 million of taxpayers' money in the process. As the criteria influencing the decision have now surely changed, will you now agree to reconsider this matter and ask the panel to review its decision in view of the potential economic benefits for the area and the whole of Wales?

Well, again, I will just tell Natasha Asghar what I said to the Chamber at the beginning: the panel report on climate change that was published on Monday said the situation facing all of us is worse than they thought—it is at the upper end of the projections of the impact of global warming and the catastrophic impact that will have on our economy and our society. It said we have already been impacted, changes locked in, and there is now a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity to build a climate-resilient society. I think we should all take that seriously. We can't de-link these things because we want to score political points about a different issue. The roads review panel, as part of its criteria, looked at the impact of climate change on transport and the pipeline of projects we had, and concluded the Llanbedr scheme was not consistent with the Wales transport strategy and was not consistent with achieving net zero. Now, I don't think that can be lightly set aside. 

If you read the panel report on the airfield, it did show, in terms of access to that site, there were other options, and we have committed to work with Gwynedd council to explore those options to see what can be done. But we still come back to the fundamental point: climate change has profound and far-reaching consequences for us all, and we need to start reflecting that in the decisions we make. It's no good the Conservatives signing up to targets when every single time a decision is made as a consequence of those targets, they call for a different approach. It's not consistent. 

Okay. Thank you, Deputy Minister. I can assure you we are all concerned about climate change. There's no denying that, and I think my colleagues across this bench, and even in Westminster, will agree with me on that. However, having seen the information that was released by the Minister for Economy, it was clear that some of the areas that were in question are protected, so that causes a concern for us as to how this is actually going to be made a reality. 

Coming to my second question, I've already mentioned the cancellation of the Llanbedr bypass wasting £1.7 million of taxpayers' money on a few occasions now in this Chamber. Since then, the roads review panel has cancelled plans to remove the roundabouts at junctions 15 and 16 on the A55, wasting nearly £9 million. So, Deputy Minister, so far your policy has poured £10.5 million of taxpayers' money down the drain, and there are still more than 50 projects to improve Wales's road infrastructure under review at present. I've asked the question before and make no apology for asking it again, as I do not believe that the information is readily available to me or others. So, in the interests of transparency and accountability, if the roads review panel were to cancel each and every single one of the projects currently under review, what would be the total amount of money already spent that would be lost? Thanks. 

Well, the roads review panel hasn't reached a conclusion yet, other than on two schemes it was asked to fast track. On both of those schemes, it's published the rationale for why, on balance, those were the best decisions to go forward. Clearly, schemes have had money invested in them. Many of the investments in the A55 junctions, for example, as we've already discussed in the Chamber but I'm happy to repeat it, were on studies that would be still be useful to the Burns commission in the north for its future work. So, it's not wasted; it has been redirected. 

But, at some point, we need to pull a handbrake on schemes, because the logic of her position is we keep investing in schemes because some investment's been put in regardless of their impact on carbon emissions, regardless of their impact on air quality, regardless of their impact on congestion and climate change. And I don't think that is consistent with what the science is telling us, for needing to look afresh and to take different action. At the heart of this is that all of us have to confront the fact the science is telling us we need to change direction, and changing direction has consequences. 

Okay. Deputy Minister, you were recently reported as saying that electric buses—this will be something that I know you'll enjoy [Laughter.]—should be made in Wales instead of being imported from China, expressing the wish to see an electric bus factory opened here to create greener jobs. In response, Andy Palmer, the chief executive of Switch Mobility, one of the handful of UK-based companies already making electric buses, said he had approached the Welsh Government to build a factory but had received no traction. Recently, electric buses have been bought from China by bus companies in Newport and Cardiff, which is great news. Bus operators have claimed the plan to move the whole of Wales's bus fleet to zero-emission vehicles by 2035 needs a nationwide funding plan, but Wales does not have a Government-run fund to help them with the cost of green vehicles infrastructure, unlike England and Scotland. John Dowie, the director of partnerships of First UK, which owns First Cymru, said it's time for Wales to set up its own scheme that's suited to Welsh circumstances and drive its own agenda, not just wait to pick up the crumbs from England. Deputy Minister, when will you bring forward a funding scheme to support the transition to electric buses in Wales, as they have done in England and Scotland? Thank you.

Well, as Natasha Asghar has already very generously noted, we are investing in the transition to electric buses, particularly in Cardiff and Newport, where they have municipally owned bus companies. I want to do two things to make systemic change, rather than simply making announcements that please the industry. The first is to design a bus system that is coherent and where investment from Wales doesn't leak out. Now, at the moment, we have a fragmented commercial privatised system, where private bus companies are expecting the taxpayer to fund their capital, and then they'd pocket the profit and then don't give us services that are coherent and give people a chance to shift transport modes. That needs fixing, and that's what's going to be addressed in the forthcoming bus White Paper.

Secondly, I want a domestic industry to produce electric buses, and I think there is an economic opportunity for Wales. Rather than investing significant sums—hundreds of millions of pounds—to buy Chinese buses there's a chance to develop a Welsh and British bus industry. You mentioned an investor there. What we don't want is simply to fall back into the inward investment model. There's a chance to build local companies here; build the missing middle that we've often talked about. I set up a taskforce, led by James Davies, the chair and chief exec of Industry Wales, to look at how we can aggregate demand. At the moment, there are a lot of order books coming through the public sector. If we bring them together, pool our orders, there's a chance for a Welsh industry to emerge, and that's the work that we're doing.

Plaid Cymru spokesperson, Mabon ap Gwynfor. 

Thank you very much, Llywydd. The Wales Co-operative Centre has just released a report that calls on the Government to introduce a community ownership and empowerment Act to assist local community groups to develop permanent affordable housing in their communities. The report demonstrates how the current housing system, controlled by the open market, is failing people and communities in Wales. As house prices rise significantly across Wales and there's a lack of real affordable housing for local people, then the policies of the co-operative centre can play an important role as we look to ensure locally owned community housing. The report calls on the Government to establish a commission to encourage innovative thinking on local ownership of land and assets in Wales, to introduce a local ownership and empowerment Act, to develop a database or register of land ownership, to establish a financial support fund for housing projects that are led on a community level, and to develop a formal process for transferring community assets.

Does the Minister agree that such proposals would benefit the people of Wales? And will she consider including the recommendations of the co-operative centre as part of the Government's legislative programme? And I hope you would also agree with me that the ability of communities to to deliver housing commitments is dependent on the availability of land that will enable groups to build community housing. So, what steps is the Government taking to register land ownership and to identify land that is appropriate for developing community needs? 

Apologies, I lost a little bit of the translation there, but I got the gist of it, I think, so, forgive me if I haven't got a nuance, especially right at the end there. I don't know why it suddenly cut out for some reason. So, we absolutely welcome the work done by the co-operative centre. We absolutely agree that community-led housing is very much part of the housing solution in Wales and absolutely will contribute towards the delivery of our 20,000 social homes target. We've already reaffirmed that through the programme for government: our commitment to support co-operative housing, community-led initiatives and community land trusts. And I'm very pleased to be able to say that, just last week, we've been able to increase the grant to the co-op centre in order to facilitate a lot of this work. So, really pleased to have been able to do that.

The absolute core principle, as Mabon says, is to enable people to take more control of how their housing is delivered and managed. So, our support through the Communities Creating Homes programme, which is delivered by the Wales Co-operative Centre, has engaged and supported 64 groups since the start of the programme, in 2019, so far. There are also a number of opportunities available at the moment, particularly in rural communities, and I am pleased the current programme for support has influenced policies, including our Nest scheme, and it links to wider Welsh Government policies and programmes to provide real opportunities to overcome some of the barriers facing community-led groups.

But I agree that more needs to be done to facilitate this and to embed it, if you like, in the culture that we want to have. We're doing a piece of ongoing work to explore what additional support is needed through a future community-led housing programme. We've also been in discussions with the Wales Co-operative Centre regarding funding for community groups for several months now, and I'm looking forward to hearing the outcomes of those discussions as well. We meet very regularly—I meet with them, and my officials meet very regularly—with the Wales Co-operative Centre.

I welcome the report, but some of it—. Unfortunately, we haven't had an interaction over it yet, so I'll be looking forward to having that interaction. So, for example, it's clearly an expensive duplication of effort for Welsh Government to mimic the work of the UK Land Registry, but there's a real validity in making the available information much more readily accessible to community groups, and we're doing a big piece of work with DataMapWales that will help realise the ambitions laid out in the report for that, for example. There are a number of things where I'll be wanting to go through the report and just point out where we are, where we're happy to accept the recommendation, and where we've already actually taken some steps towards doing what's recommended there.

I'm really happy as well to have been able to facilitate community land trusts and co-operative housing with a registered social landlord partner to access the social housing grant, and I'm sure the Member is aware of the Solva community land trust, which we're looking at as a sort of pilot to see how well that works. We have a number of other groups doing it as well. So, in principle, I completely agree. We need to work through some of the detail to make sure that we've got the best bang for our buck—sorry, a terrible cliche, but you see where I'm going. We're also, as it happens, doing some of it, but not quite in the way the report sets out. So, in principle, we're absolutely on board with that, and I'm really keen to see as large a number of people come together in co-operative housing as we can manage in Wales. 

I thank the Minister for that response and, for the record, I'd like to thank Vikki Howells for presenting the report in the cross-party group this morning. There is cross-party support for developing such proposals, and therefore I look forward to seeing the steps that will be taken to that end. 

If I could move on to retrofitting, please. Fuel poverty is a huge problem across Wales, as you know, and as a Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd I am aware of the detrimental impact of fuel poverty on communities there. We have the oldest housing stock in western Europe and they are among the least efficient homes in terms of energy. This leads to many people having to choose between heating their homes or eating—a choice that no-one should face. The price of fuel is at its highest and the cap on energy prices is to increase by 54 per cent from 1 April, as you know. Those on a default tariff who pay by direct debit will see an increase of between £693 and £1,971 on average per annum. This will push over 0.25 million people in Wales into fuel poverty. 

We need to tackle fuel poverty now, more than ever, by responding to the crisis and improving energy efficiency in homes. It's worth noting too that 10 per cent of carbon emissions in Wales come from residential property, and solving fuel poverty will help us to fight climate change too. The social housing sector will be crucial as we decarbonise our homes and ensure that the economic benefits of doing that remain in Wales. It's a challenge that we need to face over the next 10 years. The Minister will appreciate, of course, that decarbonisation of homes can't be implemented without the right combination of grants, private funding, regulatory standards and a clear road map set out. 

The final budget—

A question, please, Mabon ap Gwynfor.

I'm coming to it now, thank you for your patience. 

The final budget—

It's not endless. [Laughter.]

—sets aside an additional £35 million from financial transactions capital to experiment and develop new funding models in order to assist with accelerating the scale and how quickly we can decarbonise housing in Wales. Can the Minister confirm whether the social housing sector will be able to access or benefit from that funding—[Interruption.]

Later on, maybe. Later on.

And how will the fund be used in order to accelerate the policy and the funding for the decarbonisation of housing?

Good question. [Laughter.]

Yes. I'm very tempted to just say 'yes' and sit down. [Laughter.]

Absolutely, we've already done something in Wales that has not been done in the rest of the UK, and that is, through the Welsh housing quality standard, we've brought all our social housing up to energy performance certificate D, which is a long way up from where it was before. We were repeatedly told that that wouldn't be possible when we started on that journey, so I'm delighted to say that, with one exception, which we've accepted for COVID reasons, everyone else has done it, and that one exception will have finished that process by the end of this year now.

So, we're in discussion with our councils and social landlords already about what the Welsh housing quality standard 2 will look like, and what will be expected, whether we'll be asking them to bring housing up to EPC B or A, what we will do with the housing that can't be brought up to that standard and what other measures can be brought to bear. We're also learning the lessons from the Welsh housing quality standard 1, because for the vast majority of homes it was very successful, but for some homes it was not successful and it led to some problems with condensation and damp, which I know Members will be familiar with, and I certainly am in my own constituency. So, we've learned that lesson. We've put the optimised retrofit programme in place to figure out what each house in Wales actually needs, so what combination of insulation type, tech, roof type and so on is required to get properties up to the highest EPC rating that they can achieve.

We also haven't yet announced the successor to the Arbed scheme. The Arbed scheme was very good for many people in fuel poverty in Wales, because it replaced very inefficient boilers with much more efficient ones, but they were still gas and they were still contributing to carbon, so we don't want to do that, but it's not sufficient to just say, 'We'll give you an air source heat pump,' because, as I've said many times in this Chamber, you may as well be heating the field behind your house for some houses. So, we need that combination.

As we did with the Welsh housing quality standard, we will overskill the workforce through the social housing projects, so that we can then offer grants to people in the private sector, knowing what will suit their type of house and knowing that we will get good value for money. I think I'm about to be asked a question on the order paper by another Member of the Plaid group about some of the issues we've had, and what we are trying to do is learn the lessons there, so that we aren't fitting the wrong type of tech solution to the wrong kind of property. So, these things are always very successful for the vast majority of people who have them, but then we have had problems with some housing, so we're trying to learn those lessons and to make sure that we get the right solution in the right place. So, we'll be shortly announcing the new Welsh housing quality standard to bring that up.

There's a piece of work to do in the private rented sector to make sure that we have the right incentives, so people don't just come out of the sector but bring their houses up to quality, which I've mentioned many times, and there are a range of other things that we can do for owner-occupiers, including using carrots and sticks in the local tax system, which we'll want to bring to the floor of the Senedd.