Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:55 pm on 10 May 2022.
Thank you very much, Joyce. I know you've been campaigning on this issue for as long as I've known you, so it's nice to see you still coming to the bat, or whatever the sporting analogy is for that. Yes, absolutely; one of the things we were able to do with the first Welsh housing quality standard was overtrain the number of apprentices necessary to make them available into the private sector for that kind of retrofit. We'll be able to do that with this one as well, and build on what we've been doing for both the optimised retrofit programme and the innovative housing programme, which is understand what the tech looks like to retrofit, and then make sure that the dialogue with CITB and others, our FE colleges and so on, is absolutely front and centre of that programme, so that they are changing their apprenticeship training programmes as we are changing the technology. There's no point in churning out gas refitting engineers if what we're saying is, 'You don't want a gas boiler'. So, obviously, there's a retraining issue for existing tradespeople, and there's new entrants into the market.
The last thing to say is that a lot of this retrofit we hope will be done with renewables—Welsh timber for insulation panels and so on. Much of that is done in our new modern methods of construction factories. I've been really struck, when going around those factories, at a much more diverse workforce, because it's not at height, it's not out in all weathers, it's in a factory setting. So, you see many more people with disabilities and many more females in those settings than you do on a typical construction site out in all weathers. I'm hoping that that will be the wedge, if you like, to get those people back into the profession.
The last thing I would say is that, of course, we're very much pushing the point, which I know you have pushed on numerous occasions, that this isn't only about the tradespeople. The opportunities for work in the construction sector for this are all the way through—all the way through the assessors, the quantity surveyors, the architects, the project managers and so on. We'd like to see a lot more diversity in all of those tiers in the construction industry, as well as in crafts. Diolch.