Housing Stock Energy Efficiency

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:01 pm on 11 January 2023.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:01, 11 January 2023

Diolch, Siân. I very much want to visit, and I hope you will invite me formally and I can do that very soon. We're very pleased with the way the decarbonisation hub is working out. You've set out the history of the factory that closed and so on there. We were very pleased to be able to give £239,000 worth of a Transforming Towns placemaking grant to enable the transition into the hub—very delighted to have done that.

We know that the in-house contractor for Adra is going to do a retrofit of Adra-owned social homes and will have itself a space in the hub. As you rightly say, what we're hoping from all of these programmes that we're supporting—the optimised retrofit and these programmes—is that we will both overskill the workforce to produce the skilled workforce that you were just talking about, which we absolutely need to do, that we'll be able to identify what the skills are and where the shortages are, so that I can work with my colleague the education Minister and my colleague the economy Minister to make sure that our FE colleges are providing the right kind of provision for the workers of the future in the retrofit space, and that we can do the learning so necessary to ensure that we don't have the problems that you've rightly identified we had with previous schemes, which not only didn't always do what they said on the tin, but actually didn't even come with guarantees of the work and so on, so we've certainly learnt those lessons. We don't want to be in that position in the future. So, I'd be delighted to come and visit. I think it's a really good exemplar scheme of its type, and it is exactly the way that we're rolling out the right fit, the right tech for the right home, right across Wales, rather than the one-size-fits-all that has led to the problems in your constituency and Huw Irranca's and others', with the resulting misery to the homeowners, which we certainly wish to avoid in the future.