Thank you. Often in these debates we scrutinise an area where we believe the Welsh Government could be doing better and highlight what we perceive to be its shortcomings, before proposing positive alternatives. For this debate, we want to try something a little different. We are taking a Welsh Government scheme that has successfully saved money and helped people, with one proviso which I’ll come to, and we’re asking for it to be protected against cuts for the duration of this Assembly.

We would, of course, like to see more resources allocated to the scheme, and it could be tweaked to improve its effectiveness, but we’re starting from the pragmatic position that, before expanding the scheme, we need to protect it.

The Supporting People programme helps around 60,000 of the most vulnerable people in Wales to live independently and prevent them from becoming homeless—very successfully, as I’ve said. It helps people back into education, sustains tenancies, and gets them back into work. The moral case for doing this is well understood, but there is a financial case for doing so as well. In 2006, it was found that, for every £1 spent by the programme, there was a £1.68 saving to the public purse. This was before improvements were made to the programme, so we could see even greater savings when the next evaluation is published.

This is because we now know that dealing with homelessness costs public services far more than preventing it. Research conducted in New York City that tracked nearly 10,000 homeless people concluded that each cost public services $40,500 each year, including time spent in hospitals, shelters and jails. Once housed, these costs were reduced to the point where they effectively offset the entire costs of providing people with housing subsidies and intensive supportive services. Had homelessness been prevented in the first place, these people wouldn’t have needed services that were as intense, saving even more money.

The UK Crisis report of 2015 underlined the New York findings by modelling several scenarios of homelessness in the UK—recognising, of course, that the reasons for homelessness are different to each individual, and that some individuals may be more resilient than others and others would require fewer services. The conclusions were stark. In every scenario, the savings to public services outweighed the cost of preventing homelessness by a magnitude of 3:1 over just one year. For some scenarios where you assume additional costs such as frequent arrests and use of mental health services facilities, the savings could be as high as 20:1. There is a very clear message here—preventing and rapidly resolving homelessness always costs less to the public than allowing homelessness to become sustained or repeated. There is an underlying lesson here about the way public services interact, complement and enhance the effectiveness of what they do when they focus on preventing problems and take a longer term view of what really costs money.

One aspect of austerity that is under-reported is that it fails on its own terms. Right-wing Governments come into power and cut spending on public services only to find themselves having to spend money dealing with the consequences of their short-sightedness. For example, potentially, when schools fail, we often end up with increased demands on benefits, adult education services and the criminal justice system, in particular when you are talking about people who are not in training or education. The response to this isn’t usually to reverse the cuts and make our schools better, but to then cut entitlements to benefits and make further cuts to adult education. The prison system then gets told to warehouse people and not to bother with educational or creative means by which to stop them reoffending, and so the cycle repeats itself yet again.

When the health service gets cuts, it can mean botched operations due to staff shortages. People who would have recovered then become chronically ill and become repeat users of the service, and perhaps are unable to work and contribute towards the income of the state.

We have long recognised the dangers posed to schemes that are good but don’t have the same level of ‘brand recognition’ as other services. They are often the ones most at risk during periods of financial challenges. We also know that schemes that mainly benefit groups of people who are socially excluded, as opposed to those who always vote, may also be at risk when it comes to facing the axe, regardless of how effective and value for money they are. That’s why we here in this institution passed the Mental Health (Wales) Measure 2010. We recognised that there would always be the temptation to focus spending on health conditions that didn’t attach a stigma over those conditions experienced by people unable to articulate and defend themselves for very, very complex reasons. So, we made it a legal requirement that health boards could never cut those services. Similarly, this motion today is simply asking to send a message that it will not be acceptable to cut the Supporting People budget during the course of this Assembly term. And, if we pass this motion today, we’ll be showing that at least some of us in this Chamber are capable of understanding the notion of invest to save—that public services and policies to help people stay in their homes are cheaper—