Item 5 is the statement by the Minister for Finance and Local Government on Ystadau Cymru, and I call on the Minister, Rebecca Evans.

Diolch. I'm pleased to provide an update on the work of Ystadau Cymru. Ystadau Cymru brings together asset managers from across the public estate in Wales. Our public estate is diverse, ranging from built assets such as hospitals and schools, and the monuments and heritage buildings managed by Cadw, to the vast natural environment that includes our national parks and the national forest of Wales. The work of Ystadau Cymru is underpinned by the principles of collaboration, sharing assets and experiences to maximise the opportunities from our public estate.

Asset managers have, of course, faced considerable challenges in the light of continuing austerity, balancing the need to cut costs and preserve public services. Those challenges remain as we move into even more strained financial times. The pandemic created additional pressures. The collaborative and innovative approaches by asset managers led to our public buildings being speedily adapted to house field hospitals and vaccination centres. There are many examples of where public services co-located prior to the pandemic. Post-pandemic ways of working set particular challenges for asset managers, who continue to strive to demonstrate value for money, particularly from our public offices.

Ystadau Cymru has continued to pursue this agenda and encourage public sector partners to work more closely together. I am pleased that the Welsh Government is leading by example, actively seeking opportunities to optimise the occupation of our own office buildings and those of others. Our Llandudno Junction, Aberystwyth and Cardiff offices are now being shared with a number of public sector partners. In Llandrindod Wells, we've vacated our former offices and moved to a smaller footprint, occupying available space in Powys County Council offices. This has had a positive impact on both carbon reduction and delivering value for money within the public sector.

Our surplus buildings and land have also been used to support our public sector partners. Our policy is to offer surplus assets within the public sector before placing them on the market for sale. This approach has enabled our former offices in Llandrindod Wells to be used by Powys Teaching Health Board as part of its strategic approach to rationalising its estate, and, in the longer term, will improve health service provision within the town.

Climate change, decarbonisation and biodiversity remain key priorities for the Welsh Government, including insofar as the public estate is concerned. Our £11 million Wales funding programme is providing loans to support our public partners with renewable and energy-efficiency measures on the public estate. This is supported by Ystadau Cymru's partners' work with the Welsh Local Government Association in developing a carbon sequestration mapping tool. Many of our other collective landholdings include a wide range of valuable habitats and species. Strong biodiversity management underpins both the Welsh Government’s and Ystadau Cymru’s work in this area, further consolidating our leadership role.

This work is complemented by the Ystadau Cymru-led Assets Collaboration Programme Wales, which has provided funding for a range of collaborative projects. This investment in surveys, feasibility studies, and the implementation of decarbonisation measures will support the resilience and longevity of our public assets for future generations. The ACPW funding has also addressed some of the issues identified in the Senedd inquiry into community asset transfers. Powys and the Vale of Glamorgan councils, for example, have been able to use this grant to support communities to improve and decarbonise their community assets. By using the councils’ technical and professional skills, communities have benefited directly from the collective investment of time, expertise and funding.

The successes of asset collaboration have been celebrated at the Ystadau Cymru annual conference and awards since 2019. I have had the pleasure of making awards to a wide variety of collaborative projects from across Wales, each focused on the public estate. Many, such as the Llantwit Food Project and the St Davids Befrienders project in Solva, have demonstrated the way that communities and public sector partners, working together, can innovate to solve local problems and have a significant and wide-ranging benefit for our communities. Others, such as with the Crown Buildings in Wrexham, have shown that a fabric-first approach to modernization and decarbonisation can achieve impressive results, and that demolition of existing buildings is not always the best or most cost-effective option. There is great value to be taken by all of our public partners from sharing these experiences through Ystadau Cymru.

I have referred to the Senedd inquiry into community asset transfers. Ystadau Cymru has been working with key stakeholders to develop a robust methodology to progress the recommendations of the committee. This work will be led by the Ystadau Cymru board, with input from other key stakeholders, and will involve extensive community engagement. We will continue to update colleagues as this work progresses.

The range of issues dealt with by Ystadau Cymru colleagues is broad, but the safety of the public and our workforce is foremost. Asbestos and reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete are continuing concerns. Ystadau Cymru members responded quickly to my request for information about RAAC in our public buildings, and the Ystadau Cymru building safety group continues to work with the workforce partnership council in raising awareness of, and improving knowledge about, asbestos management in our public buildings in Wales. These areas of health and safety are not devolved to the Welsh Government. However, I do want to reassure Senedd Members that they are nonetheless a priority for Ystadau Cymru and the Welsh Government.

Ystadau Cymru remains an important collective resource for our public estate in Wales. The critical element of all of these examples of their work is collaboration—a core behaviour of our well-being of future generations commitments. The challenges our asset managers have faced over recent years have not gone away, but, with the support of Ystadau Cymru, we can continue to provide support to create efficiencies, improve public services and maintain an asset base that supports our communities and environment across Wales.

Thank you, Minister, and I genuinely mean that. I welcome what Ystadau Cymru are doing and have been doing, encouraging excellence in active management of the Welsh public sector estate, or that strategic collaboration and good practice guidance, and we have to welcome that. In fact, this is one of the more sensible initiatives your Government has brought forward, so I congratulate you on that. The organisation works to encourage strategic collaboration and develop good practice guidance using those criteria, including creating economic growth, delivering more integrated customer-focused services, generating capital receipts, reducing running costs and decarbonising the public estate—all really important things. And these are objectives that I wholeheartedly, and the group wholeheartedly, agree with. I think we could all agree that the functions of organisations such as Ystadau Cymru are becoming ever more important as our public finances are being stretched by the increased pressures. And we have to recognise the positive contribution that these organisations actually make in delivering those aspirations that we have.

However, I was disappointed to see in the draft budget that it seemed that the resource budget to Ystadau Cymru is likely to be cut by £300,000—almost halved. I would hope that an office that encourages the effective use of public finances and the public estate would continue to receive the support from the Welsh Government, although I do recognise the challenges the Government is facing. But, as our public funding is seeing increased pressures, we need to carefully allocate funding where we get the most value. This is why we need to invest in organisations that effectively improve the use of public spending in Wales, as these are areas that, actually, will justify their investment—they will return on that investment. With this in mind, Minister, what assessment has the Welsh Government made of the effect of these budget cuts on Ystadau Cymru and its ability to effectively carry out its role? And further, with the cuts to the funding, what effect will this have on the speed and effectiveness of the community asset transfer working group to implement the recommendations they have made in the Senedd inquiry? Thank you.

I'm very grateful to Peter Fox for those questions this afternoon, and also for the welcome that he's given to the work of Ystadau Cymru. I think that, often, Peter Fox and I have debates across the floor of the Senedd about budgets and, often, we're talking about some very bleak aspects of public life here in Wales, when we talk about parts of the portfolio that relate to abuse in politics and that kind of thing. But, actually, Ystadau Cymru is one of those areas of sunshine, I think, in the portfolio, because it really does give an opportunity for the public sector to come together in that spirit of collaboration and deliver really, really good, worthwhile benefits for communities across Wales, and it's lovely to see that recognised across the Chamber. And I agree that it is absolutely the time now when it will become ever more important to do the kind of collaborative work that's important through Ystadau Cymru.

It's important to recognise that the particular funding, through the Assets Collaboration Programme Wales, is only part of the work of Ystadau Cymru. But just to answer that point, really—the important point about the budget—there have been, as colleagues know, difficult decisions taken across all portfolios, and this is one of the difficult decisions that was taken in my portfolio, so that we could reprioritise some funding towards the NHS and then also to ensure that we were able to keep our commitment to local government. So, the draft budget for 2024-25 does see the Ystadau Cymru revenue budget reduce from £800,000 to £500,000, but I have been able to retain the capital budget at £1 million. And I think that's important, because we've got some really good examples of things that have been carried out through that capital fund. For example, in 2022-23, there were 13 different projects that were approved for funding. I think there are some really good examples, such as the refurbishment of a dilapidated sports facility in Llanelli, a city rain garden in Newport, and the development of a large-scale solar farm in RCT. And, in this financial year to date, there have been seven projects approved for grant funding, and they include the refurbishment of a further facility in Llanelli and also the continued development of that solar farm in RCT. So, even though the budget on the revenue side is reduced next year, there will still be important capital funding available to support these projects.

And I think that some of the real value that we get from Ystadau Cymru is through the thematic work that it does in terms of looking at building safety, and they provide an excellent resource for the whole of the public estate in terms of asbestos management, but also have recently really proven their worth in terms of supporting the public sector to respond to the concerns that were raised around RAAC. Community assets, again, is another really important part of the work of Ystadau Cymru, responding in part to those important recommendations made by the Senedd committee that looked at community assets. And then, also, sustainability is another one of their key thematic areas. Again, they provide excellent leadership in terms of the decarbonisation of the public estate and also ensuring that we take opportunities to support biodiversity across the public estate as well.

So, the work that they do through that particular funded programme is important, but actually there's a lot that Ystadau Cymru does beyond that which doesn't require the same level of support. And, just to conclude, really, it's about creating a different way of thinking in the public sector, supporting creative thinking and, of course, these public sector organisations have their own budgets that they can then use. And we, obviously, would like to encourage the collaborative use of budgets to support work across the public sector as well.

Thank you for the statement this afternoon, Minister. It's a change from discussing the budget with you, so it's good to discuss something slightly different.

During a time of acute financial hardship, it is vital that the assets at the disposal of the Welsh Government are utilised effectively. This includes a range of public buildings that fall under the remit of Ystadau Cymru. In this post-COVID world, which has included the proliferation of hybrid ways of working, there is now a unique opportunity to re-evaluate the use of public buildings to maximise their social benefit. Firstly, could you give an indication of the current average occupancy rates of Government buildings, such as Cathays Park? How is this being monitored and at what stage would you consider selling, renting or repurposing buildings that are consistently underused?

We also need to consider how the management of public buildings can enhance the vitality and cohesion of our communities. I hope that you're aware of the recent research undertaken by the Building Communities Trust on building resilient communities, which has highlighted the obstacles faced by community groups in Wales to acquire and manage public buildings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these barriers are more pronounced in more deprived areas. Part of the problem is legislative. Wales lags behind the rest of the UK in terms of the rights of its citizens to initiate asset transfers from public bodies. According to the Institute of Welsh Affairs, this has left our communities as the least empowered in these islands. But, there is a broader issue here insofar as the support mechanisms and guidance available to community groups on asset transfers are also not particularly robust. Again, this is particularly apparent in more deprived areas. Could you therefore explain what measures are being undertaken by Ystadau Cymru to strengthen community ownership models across Wales? Does the Welsh Government intend to facilitate this by introducing legislation and mandatory guidance to enhance the ability of Welsh citizens to initiate asset transfers?

And finally, as we've heard from various quarters, the spending plans in the draft budget are also going to exact a heavy toll on the charity sector in Wales. Oxfam Cymru has warned that cuts to the social justice portfolio will pile the pressure on a sector that is already overstretched due to the disastrous impact of Tory austerity. At the start of my statement, I spoke about maximising the social benefit of public buildings. One option, as I've already mentioned, would be to sell off underused assets or to repurpose them to support community-centred initiatives. Could an alternative solution involve housing certain charities rent free in Welsh Government office space, thereby mitigating the squeeze on their operational capacity? This could eventually lead to the creation of regional charity hubs across Wales, encouraging collaborative working within the sector. One of the defining principles of Plaid Cymru is the progressive use of society's resources for the common good. We are also passionate about empowering communities across the length and breadth of our nation, shifting away from the overly centralised power structures that have become entrenched for so long within a pan-Wales and UK-wide context. It's in this spirit that we've put forward these ideas before the Senedd, and I hope that the Government is willing to engage constructively with us to this end. Diolch yn fawr.

Thank you very much, again, for those questions this afternoon. I completely agree that the way in which the Welsh Government uses its own administrative estate really sets the tone for the whole of the public sector. And, of course, there was a recognition there of the way in which things have changed following the pandemic, with the greater level of flexibility that people have now, and often want, in terms of working from an office part of the time, but remotely in other ways. That can increase productivity and it can improve your work-life balance and so on, and, of course, have those carbon reduction benefits as well.

We do regularly publish information on our estate in Wales; it's a report that I publish annually called the 'State of the Estate' report. That includes details, actually, on a whole range of things, including the use of the estate, but also the efficiency and sustainability of the estate. Really importantly, it allows us to benchmark our own use of our public estate, particularly the Welsh Government estate, against that of other governments, so that we can test how we perform against the benchmarks provided by others across the UK. I think that using our estate in an imaginative way does allow us to move towards that one Welsh public service that I know many of us are committed to.

I'll give some examples of how we're already trying to use our own estate in a different way. Legal aid and Trydan Gwyrdd Cymru are both based now in our Merthyr Tydfil office; Natural Resources Wales is at our Aberystwyth office; the Student Loans Company, the NHS executive, Ambition North Wales, Audit Wales and the Senedd Commission now have space at our Llandudno Junction office; and the Food Standards Agency is also in our Cardiff office. Those are some of the examples, and I know that we're always working to bring partners together on the Welsh Government estate. It obviously has a whole range of benefits as well as using the estate better, actually; it allows you to have those human connections and discussions as well. We're currently working with a range of other public bodies across Wales to progress some further discussions on leased occupations on our administrative estate. We also have a 10-year future workplace strategy for 2020-30 for the administrative estate and we're continuing to review that all the time.

The other important area of questioning related to community assets. Obviously, it's important that we support this agenda and take very seriously the Senedd committee report. Ystadau Cymru has had a focus on community assets for a number of years, and to emphasise the importance of community assets does remain an important part of the Ystadau Cymru work. I described those three thematic focuses that the group has, and one of those is community assets. In 2019, the internal research programme was commissioned jointly by Ystadau Cymru and the communities and third sector policy team in the Welsh Government. That undertook a piece of research to broaden and deepen the evidence base around community asset transfer. There were a number of recommendations that flowed from that, which have informed some of the next steps. It also led to the development by Ystadau Cymru of a community asset transfer best practice guide, and that included a due diligence guide, a practical example of the transfer process and real-life case studies to help the sectors as well. 

We've continued to communicate best-practice examples through Ystadau Cymru. Case studies have included Llanrumney Hall in Cardiff, the Maindee Triangle in Newport and the Open Newtown project, and, again, that sports facility that I referred to in response to Peter Fox, which is in Llanelli. But moving forward, we do recognise that we need to take things to a new level now, so I've agreed to a commission being established to look in depth at the various factors relating to community asset transfers, following the work that was undertaken by the Local Government and Housing Committee of the Senedd. That work, in terms of establishing it now, is well advanced. That will be overseen and funded by Ystadau Cymru. So, certainly, this isn't the end of the story by any means, in terms of responding to the committee, and it's something that, I should say, I'm working very closely with the Minister for Climate Change on. 

And finally, Sam Rowlands.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and thank you, Minister, for this important statement here today. I join Peter Fox in a genuine welcome of it, because I see the value in the work that's being done here. As a member of the Local Government and Housing Committee, I'm very pleased to see you endorsing our recommendation of a commission on community ownership. There were a number of comments within your statement pointing to other recommendations from the committee, which is also welcome.

I want to support colleagues in the room who've already spoken in their comments about those hard-working individuals in many of our communities who want to make the most of those assets that are in their communities, of course, which help boost not just the social life of towns and villages across Wales, but also local economies as well. As you've pointed out, there are some opportunities to ensure that asset transfer happens more easily for those who want to get hold of those assets.

I just want to ask and comment specifically on some of the opportunities that are very, very practical in regard to the housing crisis, Minister. You will recognise that there is an opportunity for the Welsh Government to seek to release land and property to support whether it be social landlords or developers more broadly to build affordable housing, in particular. I just wanted to perhaps hear from you what you expect from Ystadau Cymru when it comes to supporting access to that land and property to enable affordable housing to be built, especially on public sector-owned land at the moment, to get that balance right between value for money in terms of the investment of the asset versus actually enabling house building to take place in our communities. Thank you for your patience.

Thank you, again, for the recognition of the work of Ystadau Cymru. Just to that point, really, about the community assets and so on, which I know is also something that you take a particular interest in, I should have referred in response to the previous Speaker to the Welsh Government's corporate asset management strategy. We published that in 2021, and that does set out a more ambitious approach to managing our own assets. We hope that that will inspire others across the public sector to look closely at that strategy to explore what they can extract from that in terms of making the best of their own assets. Particularly, there are some interesting things about how we would support the third sector by collaborating effectively through that. I think that that is an important aspect.

I think that there are so many areas in which the public sector can continue to work, and work ever more closely together, with housing being one of those. I'm really pleased that we have made £25 million available through the land release fund, and that's intended to support the ambition for small-scale energy-efficient low-carbon developments. That fund allows land that for some reason has yet to be developed—it might need some remediation, there might be access issues, for example—to be released. That is financial transaction capital as well, so it just means that we can keep on investing and recycling that money, which, again, is quite an exciting prospect there. Also, of course, we've got the housing support grant as part of our wider investment in the public estate in Wales, and, again, those projects are really important in terms of preventing homelessness and helping people to live in their own homes and so on.

But then, finally, I would refer to the work of the land Division within the Welsh Government. That's something that was established in recent years, and, again, that has a really important role in terms of identifying those pieces of public land that are suitable for housing. Then we can work with partners in the social housing sector, for example, to release that land for housing, using the land release fund. I think what you see there are lots of different policy areas coming together to support what I think is a really important agenda in terms of improving and increasing the amount of low-carbon social housing available.

Thank you, Minister.