The explanatory memorandum to this Bill begins:

‘The Welsh Government is committed to doing all it can to help people meet their housing needs….This Bill…recognises the importance of safe, secure and affordable homes as being part of the fabric of people’s lives and of strong communities.’

A bit, sadly, of a tragic and sick joke. By the time the Conservatives left Government in 1997, right-to-buy sales in Wales were being replaced on an almost like-for-like basis, but, during the first three Assembly terms, Welsh Government figures show that Welsh Government—Labour Welsh Government—cut the number of new social homes by over 70 per cent, as waiting lists mushroomed, and the 2012 UK housing review said it was the Welsh Government itself that gave housing lower priority in its overall budgets. By the time of the second Assembly, the Homes for Wales campaign was warning that there would be a housing crisis. It was dismissed by the Welsh Government. As the opening paragraph of the October 2014 Homes for All Cymru manifesto states, ‘There is a housing crisis’; a crisis caused by Labour’s failure to build new affordable homes since 1999, not the right to buy.

Welsh Labour’s intention to abolish the right to buy in Wales would deny the prospect of home ownership to tenants and miss another opportunity to increase affordable housing supply and start tackling that housing supply crisis. The tenant’s right to buy has been the most effective low-cost home ownership scheme ever, but it did not herald an end to social housing supply, but a switch to not-for-profit housing associations as main providers, because they could access greater finance and build more homes focused on outcomes. There are of course restrictions on purchase. A tenant must have been a resident and paying rent for a minimum of five years and the size of discount is determined by the length of tenancy. If tenants sell early, they have to repay discount. Of course, most don’t. Independent research showed that two thirds of tenants who purchased were still resident two decades or more afterwards. Other independent research has shown that tenants in local authority properties are, on average, going to be remaining in them for a further 15 years or more, showing that the impact on supply of abolishing right to buy would be absolutely negligible.

The proposed scrapping of the right to buy does nothing to create more homes or increase the number of households with their own front door. As the Welsh Affairs Committee found some years ago, the suspension of the right to buy would not in itself result in an increase in the supply of affordable housing.

By contrast, the Welsh Conservatives did set out proposals to reform right to buy, investing the proceeds of sales in new social housing, thereby increasing affordable housing supply and helping to tackle Labour’s housing supply crisis, reflecting right-to-buy policy in England, where the UK Government after 2010 committed to reinvest, for the first time ever, the additional receipts from right-to-buy sales in new affordable rented housing. If a council fails to spend the receipts there within three years, they’re required to return the unspent money to Government, with interest.

Independent research presented to an Assembly committee some years ago showed us that, for each three sales, the money released could generate two new homes for two new households. By comparison, abolition will, by itself, not build a single additional home, won’t increase supply, and won’t therefore improve affordability. Between 2010 and 2015, more than twice as much council housing was built in England than in all 13 years combined of the last Labour Government at UK level, when English waiting lists nearly doubled as the number of social homes for rent there was cut by 421,000. The explanatory—