7. Debate: The Affordable Housing Supply Review

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:56 pm on 10 July 2018.

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Photo of David Melding David Melding Conservative 4:56, 10 July 2018

Yes, they are for Wales, as we are the Welsh Assembly, thank you. The question, I suppose, because of the scale that these show, is a good one to put, because of the numbers we have been routinely talking about in recent years—under both Labour and Conservative Governments, it has to be acknowledged. But it just shows you how much we need to raise our ambition.

Housing, affordable housing, ambition for housing provision: these are all areas of policy where we are simply failing in Wales at the moment and in the rest of the UK. I believe it would be a shameful blight on the record of all of us if we allow this to continue.

So, I do welcome to some extent the establishment of the affordable housing review. It could do useful work and get us to move on and approach the level of ambition that we need. I don't want to go over this old ground too much, but the target of 20,000 new affordable homes in a five-year programme is a fairly modest one. It may be a reasonable first step, but we need to have much more ambition during the 2020s—a time that we can reasonably now prepare for—than we've had in the past 20 years or more. So, I do think that we have to look at this in a very radical, profound way.

The best place to start is the late Professor Holmans report—commissioned by the Welsh Government and published in 2015—to which, as far as I know, the Welsh Government has never replied. So, I think one good thing for the review to start with would be your reply to the Holmans report, and I do hope that we can do that. The main reason I say that is, in the list of work streams and the scope of the review, the first work stream has the title, 'Understanding Housing Need.' This work stream states:

'The review will consider how we can improve our understanding of exactly how many homes are needed across Wales, in which areas, and which tenures are appropriate.'

I do wonder why you haven't looked at the Holmans report. I simply don't understand why we're going over such old ground again. We already have an excellent piece of work by the then world-leading expert in housing need, and that should be where we should start.

That report, let me remind you, argued clearly and directly that if future need and demand for housing in Wales is to be met, there needs to be a return to the rates of house building not seen for almost 20 years, and an increase in the rate of growth of affordable housing. The main estimate suggests a need to return to the kind of building rates that we last had in the early 1990s. That is to meet existing Welsh Government targets. That's not to meet the new ones, in terms of need. We're not building 7,000. We fall well short of 7,000 at the moment, whereas the actual target is 8,700. The alternative estimate, in Professor Holmans' work, implies that 12,000 additional units are needed a year. We've seen nothing on that scale since the 1970s. Again, that includes Conservative as well as Labour periods of Government.

Of course, the affordable housing supply review could provide a stimulus to improve public policy, perhaps by realistically looking at possible funding streams, and the need to build perhaps within the council sector again, and expanded in the rest of the social sector, as well as stimulating private house building. I see I'm already out of time, and this is a subject that really does animate me, because—. Let me just finish on this—I can't quite get through the rest of my speech; there's so much more data. But we should remember that, in the 1950s, they saw housing and the right to good housing as a basic right for all. It was up there with the right to decent healthcare. That's what we need again. As Community Housing Cymru have said,

'good housing is a basic right for all', and I do commend them for their increased ambition. I hope we can go even further than the 75,000 affordable homes they want to see built by 2036 in the sector.

Quite simply, our ambition—and this should unite us all; there's no need for partisanship here—our ambition should be homes for all. Thank you, Llywydd.