5. What is the Welsh Government doing to deliver retrofitting in social housing? OQ60534

Thank you very much, Jayne Bryant. The challenge to retrofit Welsh social homes is vast. We are supporting social housing landlords to understand their stock and the retrofit requirements to help us achieve the ambitious Welsh housing quality standard with programmes such as the optimised retrofit programme, through which £190 million has been allocated to date.

Thank you for that answer, Minister. Housing associations across Wales are taking innovative action to tackle the climate emergency, including Pobl, Linc Cymru and Newport City Homes in my constistuency. Whilst carbon savings are very welcome, I want to focus on the health and well-being benefits of those measures. The current cold temperatures and cost of energy bills once again highlight the importance of heated, well-insulated homes. Increasing the number of retrofitted homes across Wales will undoubtedly improve public health, yet not all residents are aware of the health benefits of retrofitting or what exactly the process might involve. The short-term disruption of building work can also be a deterrent for people offered work by their housing provider. Minister, what more can be done to engage residents in the decision-making process for retrofitting their homes, helping them to understand and take advantage of available support?

It's an excellent question, Jayne. The underlying principle of both the Welsh quality housing standard and the optimised retrofit programme is to deliver improved social, economic and well-being outcomes for tenants and for their whole communities. We actively engage with and encourage social landlords to undertake clear, targeted stakeholder engagement to outline the benefits and successes of the retrofit work to date. The idea is that the social landlords, who we fund and who have selections of housing that they can look at, will be able to tech and test exactly what you've just said—how long does this take, what's the outcome, what is the disruption and how can we minimise it—with a view to, through the Warm Homes energy hub, giving advice out to people in other sectors for how to go about that and what the programmes are. And in answering Jenny Rathbone earlier, I spoke a little bit about the ECO programmes and the boiler replacement programme from the British Government, which we signpost through our Warm Homes scheme. Unfortunately, because of the way the programme works, I haven't been able to announce it yet, but I am hoping very shortly to announce the outcome of the new Warm Homes programme procurement. The websites are active already, to give that information. The information is real and practical, because it's coming out of the optimised retrofit programme, which has literally tested it out on homes and then on people living in those homes, to make sure that what's claimed for the tech actually comes out the other side.

We also pick up tech from the innovative housing programme, which has been running for seven years now, so that we are able to recommend to people things that we know work. We've tested these out; some products didn't do what they said, other products have been fantastic and we're able to roll those out. We're also able to roll them out into our new build programme, so that when we build our new housing, it is low carbon, highly energy efficient and brings all the health benefits.

Llywydd, if you don't mind indulging me for one second, I will say that I did meet a lady in Ammanford in Adam Price's constituency, actually, who had recently moved into one of the new low-carbon homes. Her son had been using inhalers for his asthma in very large quantities for a very long time. When I met her, she'd lived in that new social home for about four months and her son wasn't using an inhaler at all. So, that is the evidence of what happens if you live in a well-heated, well-insulated home. It has massive health and social benefits, as well as the energy efficiency and money benefits that it brings.

Minister, no-one can doubt that we need to make our social homes more sustainable and not just our social homes but our private homes as well, to make them carbon neutral, to make our homes warmer and to keep energy bills low for the people who live in them. Many of the social homes in my constituency are also in the national park and within conservation areas. These areas have very, very strict planning laws when it comes to altering external windows, external insulation and other energy efficiency measures. So, can you outline today, Minister, how you work with national parks and within conservation areas to make sure that everybody can benefit from the schemes that the Welsh Governments is providing?

Yes. It's an excellent question, because what we need to be able to do is find a solution for every type of house that we have in Wales, and that's very much what we've been trying to do. So, there's no point in a one-size-fits-all approach; we have seen the outcome of that. So, with the last iteration of the Welsh housing quality standard, for example, most homes, the vast majority of them—well up into the 90 per cent—have benefited from that, but there was a percentage of them that experienced really bad condensation and so on, because the one-size-fits-all approach just didn't match the kind of home that they had and wouldn't have worked in a conservation area, for example. So, the point of the ORP programme is to take every kind of house that we have and test out what can be done, working with our national parks and our planning authorities, for what is allowable, and to do it in a way that becomes a practical piece of advice for people who live in other tenures who can access it. 

I've also been working with the Development Bank of Wales for some time to figure out a way that we can do a decent loans programme and, as I said in answer to Jenny Rathbone, also talking to some of the renewable generators across Wales about how their community asset programme—'community benefit programme', I should say, not 'asset programme'—could be used to help people understand what retrofit needs they have, particularly in areas like that, so that we can get a bespoke solution for each of those people. And in addition, what the optimised retrofit programme does is it skills a workforce that can do it, because even if you know what the solution is, it can be hard to find somebody who can actually do it. So, I'm very keen that the optimised retrofit programme produces a skilled workforce as well as the tech solutions that would help people in houses such as those.