The next item on the agenda is the short debate. Please leave the Chamber quickly and quietly before I call the short debate. I therefore call on Mike Hedges to introduce the topic he has chosen.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. No-one wanted a minute in this debate which is hardly surprising, because I think most people have got other things on their minds. It’s probably a bad day to have this debate: it’s not only the eve of a general election, but we’ve already had one housing debate today.

But I think housing is one of the great challenges facing all of Britain, including Wales. The post-war period in terms of housing can be broken into two periods: first, the period from 1945 to 1980. During that period, we saw a huge growth in council housing and the building of a large number of new estates, especially in the larger urban areas. We also saw the growth of owner occupation and the start of the building of large private estates, again predominantly in urban areas.

Housing has changed a lot in the last 50 years and I would say not all for the best. There has been a large increase in empty properties; there has been a change in housing tenure; an increase in the number of single-person households; an increase in pensioner households; and an increase in young people in houses in multiple occupation, especially but not only students, as student numbers have increased considerably. Council housing has declined through sales and the failure to build. There has been a substantial growth in housing associations. There was a decline in the private rented sector in the 1960s and 1970s, where, by the end of the 1970s, privately rented really often meant only student accommodation. That’s been reversed. Both the large-scale owners and those using an additional house as an alternative to a private pension, there has been a huge increase in it, especially in areas that historically have not been associated with having privately rented accommodation. As a consequence of benefit changes, demand has increased for smaller sized accommodation.

Suzy Davies took the Chair.

I wish to concentrate on co-operative housing. With the average age of first-time buyers being 37 and expected to rise to 40, it’s perfectly clear that the current housing system needs to be changed. Hefty deposits, the difficulty in securing affordable mortgages from lenders, and the overall lack of good quality housing are amongst the main reasons that have been attributed to the continuous rise in the average age of first-time buyers. For many people, the dream of buying their first home has been put on the backburner, and the only remaining options are to either move back in with their parents or to rent a property on their own or with others for many years, with the aim of saving up enough money for a deposit, and as house prices keep on increasing, that becomes more and more difficult unless the bank of mum and dad can come to the rescue. Unfortunately, for a large number of my constituents, they haven’t got a bank of mum and dad to go to. Despite this, the idea of home ownership remains the ultimate aim for the vast majority of people.

The Bevan Foundation in a recent report produced the following key messages: not enough new homes are being built to meet projected need; and owner-occupation costs more than four times annual earnings in almost all parts of Wales, and more than six times annual earnings in many areas. I remember buying a three-bedroomed semi-detached house in Ynysforgan, which is a lovely place in Morriston, at twice the salary. The mortgage I had was twice the salary I was earning as a college lecturer. I would need four times a college lecturer’s salary now to buy the same house. That’s made a huge difference to people like I was: a college lecturer would’ve expected to find ease of owner occupation, which we did in the 1980s, when I joined. It’s moved rapidly away from many of them now.

Social and private rents take up more than a quarter of earnings of the least well-off workers in most parts of Wales. Under the new Housing (Wales) Act 2014 duties, about 29 households a day are homeless and seek help to secure accommodation from their local authority. The pressure is worst in Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion, where all tenures are the most unaffordable in Wales, new house completions are relatively low, and homelessness is above average.

People are generally satisfied with their accommodation, but those in social housing and deprived households are much less satisfied than others. Behind every piece of data is an individual person or a family. I think we talk about housing—we talk about a lot of things—in the abstract, as if it didn’t affect people. This is all about people. I’ve visited people living in houses in which you can feel the wind coming in where the window doesn’t fit properly; I’ve visited people where they go to bed at 7 o’clock, because they can’t afford to heat it. These are people whose heating costs are probably more substantial than yours, Deputy Presiding Officer—or acting Deputy Presiding Officer—or mine, because it’s incredibly expensive to heat some of these houses, which have got single glazing, which are not wind- and weather-proof. These people are paying a lot more than we are. I think it’s deplorable and it’s something that needs to be addressed.

The UK has been traditionally dominated by two types of housing tenure models: owner occupation with a mortgage, and that of rented, either privately or from a social landlord. In other parts of the world, however, there is a third form of housing tenure, with housing co-operatives. In fact, anybody who watches American sitcoms and others will often hear them talking about ‘the co-op’—it’s not a shop down the road for them; it’s a housing co-operative. And it’s not for the poor, it’s for everybody. In fact, some of the housing co-operatives are in some of the most affluent parts of New York. Under housing co-operative tenure, members of that co-operative have the collective power to manage the accommodation between them. This involves taking responsibility for duties such as arranging repairs, maintaining the property, and making decisions about the rent. As the decisions are made by the members, the principles of both community ownership and democracy are placed at the heart of the housing co-operative model.

There are strong housing co-operative sectors in countries such as Sweden, Norway, Canada, Austria and Turkey, as well as the United States of America. In Sweden, for example, two large co-operative organisations provide over 750,000 homes—about 18 per cent of the total population of the country is living in co-operative housing. In Canada, which began housing co-operatives in the early 1970s, there are now over 400,000 living in co-operative homes. To put these figures into a domestic perspective, there are more co-operative housing homes in Vancouver than in the whole of the UK, with housing experts estimating that less than 1 per cent of people in the UK live in a housing co-operative. Creating affordable, long-term solutions for the housing market is something co-operative housing can do.

A report was published by the Conservative Government in 1995 entitled ‘Tenants in Control: an evaluation of tenant-led housing management organisations’, which, to the astonishment of many, including myself, concluded that co-operative housing models not only were cost-effective, but also provided their members with a number of significant benefits. Subsequent reports and investigations into housing co-operative models have since reinforced the findings of the original PricewaterhouseCoopers report, as well as identifying other potential benefits for its members. For instance, being part of a housing co-operative gives members the opportunity to use their existing skills or to develop new skills, provides members with a stake and vested interest in where they live, and can help reduce any dependency tenants have on landlords or the state. It’s their house, they help set the rents, and they are very important in making those decisions that affect them and others.

In terms of the social benefits, housing co-operatives can help promote community cohesion and integration as well as playing a role in reducing vandalism, because, if you’re vandalising within a housing co-operative, you’re costing your family money as well as the people whose houses you are vandalising. It also hits anti-social behaviour, because you want people to stay, and their empty properties affect your family. In some cases, other community services, such as childcare and social activities for members, arose from being part of a housing co-operative.

Furthermore, housing co-operatives give tenants control over the property rents, building services and contractors, and also rent arrears. I think that one of the weaknesses there has been in a number of leaseholds, for example, is where people are forced to have certain people in to do their repairs, which, quite often, can turn out to be rather more expensive than you could find if you were doing it yourself. Any surpluses made by the housing co-operative can then be reinvested into the property, depending on the will of the membership. Co-operative and mutual housing models provide us with a viable, sustainable solution that has the potential to radically change the way we view and think about housing.

With the National Assembly for Wales’s new primary law-making powers, changing the law to establish and promote a legally separate co-operative housing tenure is now feasible. I would not be being fair on the Welsh Government if I did not say that the Welsh Government have made progress on housing co-operatives in the last few years, and I thank you, Cabinet Secretary, for your commitment, which you’ve shown to it. We have started developing them in Wales, and we’ve also got Merthyr Valleys Homes, who are trying to turn themselves into a co-operative. But I just think there’s more to be done.

I’m committed to the housing co-operative model, and there are three things that will need to be done in order for it to be successful. We need to change in the law to make the creation of housing co-operatives easier. Secondly, lenders need to be convinced of the security of their lending, which may entail a Welsh Government underwrite. It’s one thing that always amazes me: they’re quite happy to lend to housing associations, which are put together in a certain way, but not to co-operatives, which probably have greater strengths of support within their organisations in order to ensure that they are able to be financially viable. I think that that’s the key; we want them to be financially viable. Thirdly, it needs to be publicised and people need to be enthused into creating and joining them. People don’t think of co-operative housing. Their first choice is to become involved in buying a house, their second choice is to try and rent, either from the public or private sector—a housing co-operative doesn’t cross the minds of far too many people. We need it to become an option, and I’m very keen on it becoming an option. It’s not right for everybody—nothing is right for everybody, and for people who are mobile there’s a great advantage in privately renting as you move from place to place, and for students there are certainly advantages in privately renting, because you wouldn’t want to end up owning a house in an area where you’re not going to live much longer after you graduate. So, it really is important that we do have this as an option for people who will benefit from it.

None of the problems I’ve raised are insurmountable, and, with political will, we can achieve it. But I’m very keen to help, again, promote co-operative housing, because I think that we need more housing, and I don’t believe we can afford to ignore what is traditionally viewed in the rest of the world as being one of the three strands of producing it. So, the Welsh Government have made progress, so thank you very much, but unfortunately there’s still further progress to make.

Thank you, Mike. I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Communities and Children to reply to the debate.

Diolch, Deputy Llywydd. As I said earlier in a debate today, Welsh Government is absolutely committed to supporting the increase of housing supply. You will recognise we are taking a comprehensive approach with our housing offer, seeking to address the wide range of housing needs, and I thank Mike Hedges for raising that debate today.

I spoke earlier of the significant investment we’re making across many different programmes, and I believe the breadth of offer bears repetition. It includes tried and tested products and programmes, such as the social housing grant and housing finance grant, Help to Buy—Wales, providing an opportunity for home ownership, especially to first-time buyers, the new rent-to-own product, which enables those without a deposit to purchase a home, which we will be launching later in the year, and the innovative housing programme—this will look at new ways of doing things, both in terms of the sorts of homes we build and how we build them—funding the Houses into Homes scheme, which provides another tool to assist local authorities to tackle the problems of empty homes, and confirming our intention to fully protect the social housing stock from reduction by ending the right to buy, and, again, encouraging councils to build again by exiting the housing revenue account subsidy system during the last term of Government. These are just some of the initiatives we’re offering to increase supply.

We don’t build houses as Welsh Government, but our partners do. We’ve got to enable them to be able to do that, and that’s why we’re working with our partners to put a number of collaborative arrangements in place. This includes a housing pact with the WLGA and CHC, the housebuilders engagement programme, including representation from SME businesses, land for housing initiatives, the co-operative housing stakeholder group, and the rural housing strategy group, to name just a few.

I share, Mike, your enthusiasm for co-operative housing. I’ve visited co-operative housing schemes and seen for myself the benefits that the model brings to tenants. And, you’re right, the ownership of the suite of tools in a co-operative housing scheme gives people much more confidence in the ability to do that. We are really pushing hard to give communities that confidence that they need, and it’s been incredibly difficult. I, like you, am perplexed as to why it hasn’t taken off in Wales as it has in other countries. We continue to work hard to do that. Co-operation has a rich history in Wales, however, historically, featured on a large scale in other parts of Europe and America. We want to change this, and, working with you and others who are committed to the co-operative housing scheme, we should hope to gain some momentum.

People can get involved in the governance of the co-operative, taking ownership of the issues that affect their lives, democratically deciding on solutions, and I expect the pilot scheme of £1.9 million of capital funding to help and support the development of three co-operative schemes here in Wales, providing 87 new homes for communities. We recognise the different skills that are needed when requiring the development of co-operatives, and we are working to provide revenue funding with the Wales Co-operative Centre to provide emerging housing co-operatives with support. This community development expertise has been used to support groups, which I’ve seen, as I mentioned earlier on.

Over the last five years, I believe we’ve built a platform for co-operative housing to develop and grow, including legislating to allow mutual housing co-operative grants assured and assured shorthold tenancy, strengthening their ability to develop housing schemes. I’d be interested to have a further conversation with Mike Hedges in regard to the legislation he believes is required to build the opportunities in co-operatives that he recognises.

Across both housing debates today, Llywydd, I’ve explained the comprehensive and innovative approach—and, of course, while we may differ in politics on some sides of the Chamber, what we all do agree is that we do need to increase the housing supply across Wales and across the UK. It’s important to remember that added value housing investment provides by creating new jobs and also training opportunities. It also helps keep local businesses viable, and the housing sector in Wales has already delivered very significant community benefits to our joint efforts to improve the way that we build homes—

David Melding rose—

Of course.

I’m keen at this stage of the afternoon to help build consensus. We do need a range of models. I think that’s very, very important. Mike Hedges said that, for the foreseeable future, many people will not be able to become home owners, and co-operative models, I think, give that—it is a bit of an in-between situation, in many ways, because you have responsibility for setting policy and for maintaining the properties and that. One thing the Welsh Government could do is give funds to clean up brownfield land on the basis that that land will then be released to people who want to form co-operatives for the higher density urban housing that I referred to in an earlier debate.

Of course, and it was remiss of me in the earlier debate that we had in terms of that, because I didn’t recognise your contribution in terms of not giving money for brownfield sites for regeneration. We do that in some cases already in Wales, and we have done with some—certainly in regeneration funding. There’s one I can think of in Torfaen where we’ve aided the ability to gain access to land that is prime development land and, therefore, not just building the homes on that site—actually, it’s just about enablement, sometimes, and we’ve recognised that in terms of the challenging landscape we have in Wales, because of ex coalmines, et cetera, and brownfield sites are something that we are keen to explore.

I recognise there’s much more to do, Llywydd, in terms of housing and the needs across Wales, and I will continue to work with all partners to develop the ways of increasing supply. Whilst doing this, I want to ensure we remain focused on building homes and building successful communities for us here in Wales. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you.

Thank you very much, and that brings today’s proceedings to a close.

The meeting ended at 16:58.