Of course, it's not only rough-sleepers who are homeless. There's a number of people, probably not many miles from here today, who will be sofa surfing tonight—moving from friend's house to friend's house, and many of them end up on the streets when they run out of friends. I don't mean that unkindly, but that's what actually happens. They use the good wishes and goodwill of their friends for a certain period of time, that runs out, and then their ability to have a roof over their head runs out.

There's also a number of people who are inadequately housed, living in cold, damp and unhealthy conditions, and all these things have a huge effect on health. The 1945-51 Labour Government put health and housing together, because they knew how important housing was for people's health.

There are a lot of voluntary organisations involved. In Swansea, we have the Sisters of Mercy, the Wallich and Caer Las, all being involved, all doing a phenomenally good job, but we still have people who will be sleeping on the streets of Swansea tonight.

What causes homelessness? Debt, and universal credit can only make this worse, but also people on flexible contracts—or what I call exploitative contracts—where they're okay when they're working the hours they've worked regularly, but when they go back to their basic hours, which are somewhere between nought and six, all of a sudden they find themselves unable to pay their rent. Many of them, if they are unwell, will obviously go back to having no income at all, and trying to find their way through the benefits system, having been working irregular hours, means that eventually their landlord will evict them.

There's a drug and alcohol problem that is having an effect, and a number of people on the streets have drug and alcohol addiction. I think, in some ways, that's what the user needs to kill the pain of sleeping rough. I think that we can judge people for doing these things, but if we were actually sleeping rough at night, something to kill the pain may well be an advantage to us. Because we'll all go back to nice, warm houses with central heating, then perhaps thinking about those who don't have those advantages really is something we need to do. 

No-one should be sleeping rough. There's no reason why anybody should be sleeping out on the streets. There is, of course, a shortage of social housing, and this is where I disagree with Bethan Jenkins: increasing the demand side does not increase the supply side in housing. Giving more people a right to a house doesn't create one extra house. There's a desperate need for more council housing, and that is the answer to the housing crisis: council housing. Now we've done away with the right to buy, councils then don't have that sword of Damocles over their heads, that they build 10 houses, five get sold at a discount, and they end up making a loss on those houses. They can now build, and we need to be encouraging councils to build.

I've got two questions for the Minister. The first one is: what support is the Welsh Government giving to councils to build council houses, which I believe is the route out of dealing with homelessness? The second is a much more short-term problem: what financial support is the Welsh Government giving to build more night shelters, which should improve the lot, if not make right the problem, for people who are sleeping rough? These are capital rather than revenue costs, and we perhaps ought to be looking at using capital, even some of that loan capital we've had, in order to do some of these things, which will be of benefit and may actually raise money in order to pay it back.