Julie James MS (Minister for Housing and Local Government): We're
absolutely obsessed, really, with these houses being of the
absolute highest quality. So, I absolutely delight in telling the
people who move into them, as social tenants in Wales, that they
are living in the best housing in Europe and possibly the world.
This is by no means experimental second-best and so on. I mean,
having said that, some of the homes are more experimental than
others—they have very unique heating systems...Request free trial
(Minister for Housing and Local
Government): We're absolutely obsessed, really, with these
houses being of the absolute highest quality. So, I absolutely
delight in telling the people who move into them, as social tenants
in Wales, that they are living in the best housing in Europe and
possibly the world. This is by no means experimental second-best
and so on. I mean, having said that, some of the homes are more
experimental than others—they have very unique heating systems and
so on—and so you do have to make sure that the right tenant goes
into them, a tenant that's prepared to have a look at how to live
their lives with those kinds of heating and so on, because it's not
the same as just turning on your radiator—you do have to get used
to it. But we work hard with RSLs and councils to make sure that we
do have tenants who are very happy to do that. Indeed, I've spoken
to many of them who are absolutely delighted with what they've got.
Very recently in Rebecca Evans's constituency, I spoke to a number
of people who are in retrofitted bungalows that had gone from being
some of the poorest housing stock we had to some of the best
housing stock, which had been insulated, fitted with solar panels,
fitted with ground source heat pumps and Tesla
batteries, and who now had bills that were less in a year than they
had previously been paying in a month. Those people were absolutely
delighted. I mean, it makes me smile just thinking of the
conversation that I had with them about how delighted they were
with that. So, we absolutely are using it for retrofit as well, and
we're learning from the programme all the time—what works, what
doesn't, how we can build both the new houses and the
retrofits...
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