Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I'd like to begin by thanking the Chairs and members of the External Affairs and Additional Legislation Committee, the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee and the Finance Committee for their detailed scrutiny of the Bill throughout Stage 1. I'd also like to thank the stakeholders who provided written and oral evidence.

The Regulation of Registered Social Landlords (Wales) Bill introduces changes to legislation required following the Office for National Statistics's reclassification of RSLs as public non-financial corporations in September 2016. When Carl Sargeant introduced the Bill last October, he made it clear that there is a real need to reverse the reclassification of RSLs in order to safeguard the supply of good-quality, secure affordable homes in Wales. In taking Wales forward, the Welsh Government committed to work in partnership to deliver an extra 20,000 affordable homes in this term. RSLs have committed to deliver at least 12,500 of those homes and, in order to do this, they will need to borrow around £1 billion from the private sector to augment Welsh Government funding.

The decision to reclassify RSLs as public non-financial corporations effectively brings RSL private borrowing into the public accounts, meaning we would need either to increase Welsh Government spend on social housing by around £1 billion this Assembly term, with serious effects on our existing spending commitments, or accept that the programme would be reduced by around 5,000 homes, as RSLs would not be able to borrow to invest.