Chair, we need to build more homes—many more homes. This is the only way to meet the housing crisis. Demand for housing has outstripped supply in Wales, as across the UK, for many years. The extra requirement for housing is mainly due to the increase in the number of households, especially one-person households, but also other factors such as the increase in the overall population. The sustained attack on the right to buy is a marginal diversion from the main issue—a lack of house building. The abolition will remove a vital opportunity for social housing tenants to become home owners. It has been a massively popular policy—perhaps the most acclaimed of the twentieth century.

Instead of addressing housing needs through appropriate house building rates, the Welsh Government has set a target of 20,000 additional affordable homes in the current Assembly—welcome, but insufficient. Since 2004, successive Welsh Governments—always involving Labour, one involving Plaid—have been warned of the impending housing crisis, unless house building was dramatically increased.

Professor Holmans’s report, which was commissioned by the Welsh Government—I give it credit for that—and is entitled ‘Future Need and Demand for Housing in Wales’ estimated that Wales needs up to 240,000 new housing units, or 12,000 annually, between 2011 and 2031, under what is called the alternative projection. This means that, even if the Welsh Government succeeds in meeting its own targets, in 2031 Wales will have a shortfall of some 66,000 homes, or a town the size of Merthyr.

But the worst aspect is that the Welsh Government is not even meeting their inadequate targets. The new housing completion rate consistently falls short of the target set by the Welsh Government, with just 6,900 homes completed in 2015-16, as opposed to the target of 8,700. The last time the Welsh Government achieved its own housing target was in 2007-08. If the Welsh Government really wants to tackle this housing crisis, they need to stop wasting time on peripheral factors such as abolishing the right to buy, and need to adopt the alternative projection that was put forward by Professor Holmans. In 2015, the Federation of Master Builders argued that Wales needs 14,000 more homes a year to keep up with demand. Whatever projection you take, it is quite clear that the Welsh Government is falling very, very far behind anything like an adequate rate of house building.

As the Minister said, between 1981 and 2016 139,000 homes have been sold under the right to buy. And you have to say it’s met its intended purpose—139,000 families have been supported into home ownership, and that’s something that the Welsh Conservative Party warmly welcomes. It’s however the case that, in recent years, the sale of social housing stock has been at very low levels, therefore having a marginal impact on overall housing availability. The impact is only felt at all because the Welsh Government is not building enough homes—that’s the root problem. And, indeed, the Welsh Government’s own research, whilst developing this legislation, found that, and I quote,

‘The Right to Buy has had very little or no impact on the ability of local authorities to invest in new social housing over the last ten years…. Other factors, such as the economy and the availability of land and funding appear to carry greater influence.’

I only wish you listened to you own expert advisers in this respect and tackled these problems, because that is obviously what we need to do.

Now, I have to say, even the most successful policies should be reviewed from time to time. And if the Welsh Government were to propose a reform of the right to buy, then we would engage constructively with that, because there are some arguments that can be made for that sort of policy. But—