4. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Welsh Housing Quality Standard 2

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:39 pm on 10 May 2022.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:39, 10 May 2022

Diolch yn fawr, Mabon. And thank you very much for your comments at the beginning in particular.

You make a whole series of very good points, and one of the reasons we're going out for the consultation is to just tease out some of these things. Just in terms of the acceptable fails that we have already, I'm very keen to look again at what we consider to be an acceptable fail for the new housing quality standard. Some of them are really obvious. So, we have people who are living in flats, apartments, who don't have access to the outside space that's necessary for some of it. Clearly, we can all understand that that's an acceptable fail in terms of that kind of thing. But I'm not keen at all on it being an affordability acceptable fail. Our view is that, if the home is capable of being brought up to the standard, then it's not about how much it costs to get there, it's about how you get the house to that standard over a period of time, and perhaps through a number of iterations of retrofit, taking into account the point that Janet Finch-Saunders made about making sure the tenant is happy with the ongoing work programme. And one of the things that the consultation is doing is asking both tenants and housing associations, councils, to look at how they plan that approach in, so that—. Not all homes will be brought to standard immediately in the first iteration of the retrofit, for example. And then, as you heard me saying, we're also hoping to learn the lessons of the optimised retrofit and the innovative housing programme on the technology that can be brought to bear in particular types of home in order to get them to particular energy efficiency, et cetera, standards.