Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 8 February 2023.
Thank you very much, Rhys. I met Lucy Frazer. Unfortunately, she changed jobs pretty immediately afterwards. I'm not going to take that personally. I'll have to look to meet the new housing Minister as soon as I know who that is. I do meet Michael Gove regularly at the higher level inter-ministerial group meetings, in which we discuss these matters as well, but I haven't had the opportunity to do that in the last month or so. We have 11 developers signed up to the pact, so we're really pleased that they've done that. We're in the process of agreeing the legal documentation that goes alongside that, and we've been working with them to make sure that they can commence in advance of that. Two of them, Persimmon and Bellway, have commenced work in developments in advance of the legal documentation. We're working with others to see if we can accelerate that. I would encourage them right now to start those works as soon as possible, but nevertheless we'd like them to sign up to the legal documentation.
Without giving too much up in the way of commercial confidentiality, the range of things we're discussing are, for example, whether the Government can help with cash flow problems by paying upfront and being repaid, whether the work can be shared in some way, and also what the supply chain and employment chains look like. Because with the best will in the world, we'll all be fighting over the same resource if we're not careful. So, we do need to make sure that it's calibrated. We also want to take into account the outcome of our surveys, including the intrusive surveys, so that we're looking at a 'worst fabric first' approach here in Wales. But as I said in response to Janet Finch-Saunders, I will also take a very dim view of any developers who don't sign up and get started as soon as they can.