Thank you, and I move the amendments. Home ownership is something many people do aspire to and it is something that is increasingly beyond the reach of many people, through a combination of low wages, insecure employment and a refusal by successive Governments to recognise that house price inflation is just as bad as conventional inflation. But, creating wider home ownership must not be done at the expense of social housing and the safety net that a civilised society should offer.

Beginning with our final amendment, Plaid Cymru is concerned about the decision of the ONS to reclassify housing association debt as public sector debt. Reclassifying housing associations as public non-financial corporations has the potential to limit their ability to encourage investment from a variety of private sources. If housing associations are considered to be public sector bodies, it opens the door for the UK Treasury to place borrowing limits upon them, as they already do with local authorities. This could jeopardise the ability of Welsh housing associations to build new homes and upgrade the quality of existing homes. So, I hope to hear what the Welsh Government has to say on the steps that they will be taking in this regard.

Turning now to the main issue being debated here, it’s quite clear that the right to buy has had an adverse effect on the availability of social housing, hence our extensive amendments to the motion. The right to buy has always made little financial sense, it has instead proved to be a subsidy for the better off and those in the right place at the right time, while reducing the overall social housing stock. The large discounts of between 33 per cent and 50 per cent for residents effectively meant a subsidy for home ownership. This means that for every four homes sold, there have only been two or three homes to replace them. Furthermore, as many lenders refuse mortgages above the sixth floor, tenants in the high rises have been unable to buy, meaning that those who took advantage of the policy were generally those residents of small, low-rise council estates located in areas that subsequently boomed. And we know that many of the high-rise flats that people did not buy have now been knocked to the ground—many in my home town, in Merthyr, in the Gurnos, and also in Hirwaun, close by.

Even ‘The Daily Telegraph’ has conceded that the law was exploited, and many homes were bought by elderly people who were lent the money by their sons and daughters, knowing that they would have large inheritances in a few years’ time. As a result, those homes that were not sold were generally in less-desirable areas, where long-term unemployment followed Tory deindustrialisation. It meant that people became isolated and concentrated in less-desirable estates that gradually became ghettos, and people felt forgotten. Some of those areas did boom—inner-city areas near universities especially eventually had housing stock bought by buy-to-let landlords who converted many properties into houses in multiple occupation to maximise rent. So, while there have been initial boosts in terms of owner-occupiers self-funding improvements, in the long run, those areas have recreated poor housing conditions through an unregulated sector that has often enabled bad landlords to get rich quick.

It also made living in a council house more of a stigma. This is why we have tabled amendment 3, and it’s something in this portfolio I hope to do more work on, because I frankly don’t think that we can just note it and move on. There are still people who feel the stigma of living in a social housing setting that feel that because they can’t afford—[Interruption.] They do. They feel that because they can’t afford to get on the housing ladder that they’re somehow a second-class citizen compared to those who can actually afford it. I think we need a discussion here in this Chamber about the fact that, yes, people will aspire to home ownership, but it’s more for me about the quality of those homes for those people, not specifically about whether they own that house or not.

I think, in general terms, that this Chamber is in danger of becoming stuck in a time warp. Two weeks ago, we heard calls for bringing back grammar schools and now we have a defence of the right to buy. What next—bring back Bananarama? We should be looking to the future instead. [Laughter.] Well, some of you might like Bananarama; perhaps it was just before my time. We should be looking at more innovative solutions to our problems, rather than reaching for yesterday’s clichéd and outdated policies. If we really want to tackle our housing supply problems, then maybe we should look instead at building new eco-homes with the latest environmental technology for use across all housing tenures, and we should properly implement a programme to upgrade the quality of our existing homes to the latest environmental standards.

In looking at other options such as co-operative housing, I know that Canada does this well having been there recently myself, although I wasn’t trying to be on a busman’s holiday. But there are other countries that are doing things well that we can be learning from. While I take David Melding’s point with regard to the importance of empty homes, I think that’s a totally separate debate to the right to buy.

One of the other things I’m passionate about, and I’ll finish on, is that maybe we should be placing limits on the rights of buy-to-let and second-home owners to price our young people out of the housing market, and take most of their wages in artificially high rents. These are issues that I think are more important than bringing back the debate on the right to buy.