4. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: The Housing-with-Care Fund

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 17 May 2022.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:22, 17 May 2022

Diolch, Mabon. You make a series of really good points there. We absolutely have learnt lessons from the ICF; we always look to evaluate our programmes as they run through and hope to adapt them as we go. Amongst the lessons learned, we've been looking at how the structure of the funds can be improved. In particular, we want regional partnership boards to focus on strategic functions, ensuring that they have the expertise to identify the capital investment opportunities appropriate to their population, and we are supporting them directly with the resources to do just that. At the same time, we want to see much greater involvement of social housing providers, local authorities and housing associations in delivery, hence the change in the emphasis of the fund. It was the integrated capital fund, this time it's housing with care, so putting housing front and centre to make sure that those providers are much more integrated into the planning than they were for the first iteration of the fund. They were there, but not quite as integrated as we would like them to have been.

We're also looking to encourage a mix of social housing grant and HCF, or the housing-with-care fund, to increase the number of schemes that can be funded, and that will ensure that regional partnership boards have pipelines of schemes that are more resilient to slippage, with things like the pandemic. We're currently experiencing, as everyone in this Chamber knows, real issues with supply chains and increased costs of supplies. So, we're making sure that the pipeline is there. We have a series of different funds that can be brought to bear. Also, I want—and everybody in this Chamber will have heard me say this—these sustainable communities that we talk about. We don't want retirement villages, we want people spread into their communities so that we have a mix of tenures. So, allowing our social housing grant to be used alongside it means that we can get social homes into the mix as well. I'm really keen to do that.

We're also using the same assessment criteria as our main social housing programme while making allowances for the additional requirements of specialised housing. The evaluation model will look the same, so we'll be able to compare them in a way that we weren't able to do with the first fund, and that's one of the lessons learnt, as well. There is a real call for strong leadership from the regional partnership boards to use the resources at their disposal to forge stronger partnership relationships with housing partners and to ensure the investment of support across Government portfolios for a healthy and more resilient low-carbon Wales. So, to that end, we're also insisting on low-carbon passive house-type standards for these buildings, so they have low energy requirements and they don't contribute more carbon than they need to to the climate problem, both in the construction phase and in the living phase. So, we're ticking a lot of different priorities here with the same thing. 

And then, just lastly, I actually opened a children's home, as it happened, in Torfaen, under the old programme, and it was one of the most—well, I don't know how to describe it, really—emotional things I've ever done as a Minister, because it brought two young people back from out of country, back into their community. Their parents were there to greet them, they had supported housing in the middle of their community, and the joy on their faces was just worth every single penny. But, even better, it was actually saving money as well, so what's not to like about this model? So, I really hope to see this rolled out across Wales ASAP.