Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. I’m very pleased to move this motion in the name of Paul Davies and look at the housing crisis that currently exists in Wales. Successive Welsh Governments have failed to tackle the housing needs that have been quite apparent now for a generation or more. An increasing requirement for social housing, underinvestment since devolution, and the post-2008 economic shock, and just a sheer lack of ambition amongst the Welsh Government, have all led to an overall reduction in house building compared to what we need to do. Instead of addressing housing needs though a whole-market solution based on home ownership and boosting house-building rates for private and social renting, the Welsh Government has decided to chase the mirage of abolishing the right to buy, as if that’s going to be a key part of addressing our housing need, or set targets that, on the face of it, may look encouraging, but when you really dig into the detail are far less ambitious. I refer to the target of 20,000 more affordable homes to be built in the course of this Assembly term, which is just 2,500 more than previous plans. The focus should be exclusively on house building. To quote the Bevan Foundation, not enough new homes are being built to meet projected needs. That simply is the situation we are currently in. In fact, the Welsh Government does not even achieve its own inadequate targets. In 2015-16 just 6,900 homes were built, well short of the Welsh Government’s target of 8,700. In fact, the last time the Welsh Government achieved its own target was in 2007-08, nearly 10 years ago.

If I can talk about the general shortage of homes, I think we’ve had a problem since at least 2004, when successive Welsh Governments—and it’s not just been exclusively Labour-led; Plaid have been in Government as well—have been warned of the impending housing need but have not taken the necessary steps to build more homes. Those on waiting lists in Wales have been estimated at 90,000. That’s the same figure today as was reported in 2011—no progress. Furthermore, it has been estimated by Community Housing Cymru that 8,000 families in Wales have been on an affordable housing waiting list since before the 2011 elections, and a further 2,000 have been on the waiting list since before the 2007 elections. By comparison, English councils have significantly reduced the number of households on their waiting lists: the figure’s fallen by 36 per cent between 2012 and 2016. In the private sector, homeownership is, effectively, beyond many couples even on reasonably good incomes unless they have access to other resources. The average house price in Wales is now 5.8 times the average Welsh salary because—in part, at least—we simply do not build enough homes, and prices rise exorbitantly.