Deputy Presiding Officer, may I move the motion in the name of Paul Davies? Deputy Presiding Officer, if policies are measured by their take-up, then the right to buy has been one of the most outstanding, successfully delivered policies in, really, I think, the history of British and Welsh politics. [Interruption.] Since 1980, 130,000 families have taken the opportunity to buy their own homes in Wales.

Sadly—and I think we heard immediate indication of this by the mutter from the front bench—the Labour Party has always had a problem with the popularity of right to buy amongst, traditionally, their own supporters, it has to be said, or many of them. I fear that this ideological antipathy is what’s driving current policy choices in the Welsh Government. I think this needs to be addressed and scrutinised very, very effectively.

In the fourth Assembly, Labour halved the discount on right to buy from £16,000 to £8,000. It went up in England to account for rising house prices to, in some places, £75,000. So, there’s a big, big policy shift now in devolution, of course, and we’ve got to live with that. But it is something that’s got to be clearly justified. It did mark, I think, the first real move in force against this very, very popular policy. And now the Welsh Government intends to abolish the right to buy altogether. A very, very sad rejection of one of the most popular policies ever, as I said, in the history of Welsh and British politics.

What I find most reprehensible about all this is that I think it’s done in part to deflect attention from the real challenge, and that, of course, is to build more houses. That is what really should be the central focus, not an ideological distaste for a particularly popular policy that was introduced by a different political party. You should have a wider and more expansive vision by really focusing on what we need, and that’s to build more houses.

It’s not even as if the Labour Party has a great record in terms of affordable homes and their provision. We are way behind the trend and the numbers that were built in the 1990s and, as I will discuss a little later, we’re even seeing that in what at first appeared to be some improvements in the targets for affordable homes. The Welsh Government under Labour, consistently in the era of devolution, has performed very badly in this sector, despite the talk we sometimes hear from Ministers.

Let me turn, then, to housing need. There is, I believe, a very wide consensus that the housing crisis is caused by a lack of supply. Simply, we do not build enough homes. This has led to high prices in the private sector and long waiting lists for social housing. The average house price in Wales is now over six times the average income—a historical high. And 8,000 families in Wales have been on an affordable housing waiting list since before the 2011 election, and a further 2,000 have been on the waiting list since the 2007 elections. This is not a good record, as I have said. This unmet need obviously blights severely the lives of many, many families in Wales, but is also a lost opportunity for the Welsh economy. House building—you know, if Keynes was here, he would say that it is the macro-economic factor from heaven, really, because you can have such a wonderful multiplier when the state backs, through various policies, house building. It is something I think that we need to do. It employs local labour, often local firms, and it is a huge boost to the economy as well as, obviously, to the social circumstances of people. I will give way to Jenny Rathbone.