Diolch. I am grateful to Plaid Cymru for raising this issue, because I think it’s an extremely important one. I want to talk about two changes in the law that are likely to make the problem worse, not better: one is the universal credit and the other is the new immigration rules.

I fully acknowledge, as indeed has Bethan Jenkins, that the Welsh Government has made supporting communities and tackling child poverty a priority, stating that early intervention is key to long-term health and well-being, and eviction of households with children—deliberately making children homeless—would undermine all of this. Housing associations and councils go to great lengths to avoid evicting people who fail to pay their rent or are creating antisocial nuisance to their neighbours. Since 2002, evictions by housing associations have gone down by 32 per cent, and 6 per cent in the last year, and that’s no doubt as a result of the housing Act, which requires everybody to do their best.

Tenant support officers do their best to help people with chaotic lives get back on track, but we have to acknowledge that it doesn’t always work and that some people are deeply damaged by adverse childhood experiences. At the end of the day, there has to be a sanction if people (a) don’t pay their rent and (b) are causing absolute havoc to other people’s lives, because everybody is entitled to have the quiet enjoyment of their home. I’m afraid I deal too often with examples of families who are just creating absolute havoc, and causing huge emotional and mental distress to other people. So there has to be a sanction if people don’t play by the rules.

But if you contrast that situation, where we make every effort to ensure that people’s tenancy doesn’t break down—private landlords are entitled to evict families under section 21 of the Housing Act 1988 without giving any reason at all. They simply have to give them 2 months’ notice. It doesn’t matter if they’re model tenants, they just have no right to stay in a place that their children call home. So for these families, there’s an endless churn of looking for a new place to live, and struggling to try and ensure that their children are continuing to attend schools that they’re settled into and are desperate not to lose their friends. They may well be on the council’s waiting list, along with—in Cardiff—9,000 other families, but they undoubtedly have a very long wait in most cases. This poses some extremely challenging problems for schools as they see new children arriving in year, and children having to change school time and again.

It’s all extremely tragic. But the universal credit is going to make the problem a whole lot worse because—both residential landlords and social housing providers are very concerned about this—housing benefit at the moment can be paid direct to the landlord to avoid the money being spent on something else. That’s particularly important if someone in the household has a serious addiction. Universal credit in the future will only go to one adult in the household, and that will normally be the man—traditionally the main breadwinner—and this is a particularly worrying issue for families living in abusive relationships. Inevitably, as a result of that, the numbers being evicted in my view will go up, whatever local authorities or housing associations or, indeed, private landlords try and do about it. If people don’t pay their rent, that is what will happen.

The other big threat is the Immigration Act 2016, which hasn’t yet been implemented in Wales, but once implemented it is bound to increase destitution. Indeed, that is what it has been designed to do. Currently, when an asylum claim is refused, asylum support ends unless you have children in your household, and then you are continued to be allowed to stay in the house that’s provided by the Home Office to allow you to appeal the decision. It’s important to remember here that a very significant number of asylum seekers who have been refused get it overturned on appeal once they’ve got proper legal representation to put their case. But the Immigration Act 2016, under the ‘right to rent’ checks, will make it an offence to rent to a person who’s disqualified as a result of their immigration status. What then is going to happen to these people, particularly these children? Potentially, we’ll be talking about families with children being turfed out of their temporary accommodation as soon as their initial application for refugee status is refused. Do we really want them ending up sleeping in the park? If and when—