Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. This is an important issue and I'm very pleased that we're getting the opportunity to discuss it today. Although the motion today talks about new-build properties, I wanted to raise the issue of leaseholders who have brought former council or social housing properties, and then faced very large bills to bring them up to standard. I have seen how much stress these bills can cause, especially as some of the bills in my constituency have been very large indeed—some as high as £26,000. 

It is of course absolutely right following housing stock transfer that Bron Afon Community Housing, the main social landlord in my constituency, should have worked hard to bring the whole housing stock up to the Welsh housing quality standard. However, we also have to recognise that they inherited a housing stock that had a very significant backlog of repairs due to the borrowing constraints placed on local authorities with council housing for many years.

I've raised concerns about leaseholders with successive housing Ministers going back over many years, and I'm particularly grateful to Lesley Griffiths for the interest and concern she's shown over this issue and her willingness to listen to my constituents about the impact such large bills were having on them. I well remember one constituent telling me and telling Lesley that it had reached a point where she dreaded getting another envelope from her social landlord for fear it was going to contain another large bill.

Now, of course there are challenges in tackling this issue of large bills for leaseholders, and there is a powerful argument that tenants should not be placed in a position where they have to subsidise works on the homes of those who have been able to buy their own home, but I do believe we have to do more to tackle this issue. In England, they passed something called Florrie's law, which places a cap on the level of charge that could be levied on local authority leaseholders, and this is something that I've raised with Ministers here. 

Another suggestion I've made is that Ministers legislate to create a mandatory reserve fund that all leaseholders have to pay into in order to spread the cost of large repairs over time. So, like Mick Antoniw, I very much look forward to the Welsh Government coming forward with proposals to tackle the challenges facing leaseholders. I was very pleased a couple of years ago to be asked by Welsh Government to launch the new guides they'd produced in partnership with the Leasehold Advisory Service. These were guides that were designed to make sure that leaseholders facing major works were fully aware of their rights and entitlement. But as Mick Antoniw has said, there is also, I think, a very pressing need to make sure that people have information before going into a situation where they become a leaseholder, and that is very much missing at the moment. I'm yet to meet a constituent of mine faced with one of these bills who actually understood what they were signing up for when they bought the property. So, I would suggest that one very easy win for the Welsh Government going forward is to try and make sure that everybody who is about to sign up to a leasehold arrangement is very clear what that will mean for them in the future, and I hope that that is something—as well as the other measures that have been mentioned—that the Welsh Government can look at going forward. Thank you.