Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 22 June 2022.
Yes. The very short answer to that is 'yes'. It's very much part of the optimised retrofit programme and the innovative housing programme. What those programmes do is they take a whole series of products and we build housing—new housing for the IHP and retrofitted housing for the ORP programme—and then we test out what the product has claimed against what it actually performs like. As I’ve said a number of times in this Chamber, we’re two years into the ORP, whereas five, I think I’m right in saying—maybe six—into the IHP programme, and that means we’ve got quite a lot of very good empirical data about how various types of things perform in conjunction with others. So, for example, for sheep’s wool, does that perform well sandwiched between two plasterboard walls, or two straw walls, or—? All that kind of thing. So, the programme is quite exhaustive. I’d encourage any Member who hasn’t visited one of the sites to do so. You’ll be given a comprehensive tour of the various types of tech. I visited one down in my colleague Mike Hedges’s constituency only yesterday, and it’s completely fascinating to see the data coming back. As a result of that, of course we will use that to increase the supply chains, help commercialise the product, develop a marketing strategy and get it into the main stream, as that’s the whole purpose of the programme.