Housing is a basic need and a basic right. I think that is something that we really do need at the forefront of our minds every time we discuss housing. No week is complete without the need for more affordable housing being made clear to me by my constituents—in the last seven days, a family of four, including a disabled child, living in a one-bedroomed flat; someone who is effectively homeless, sofa surfing, using sofas in friends’ houses, as they currently have no fixed abode, where the next stop could be the street; a newly divorced woman who is finding it increasingly hard to pay the rent being charged by a private landlord. This is the reality of living in twenty-first century Wales. Each one is a personal tragedy. The sad thing is, if I was making this speech next week, I would be talking about three or four different cases of people with exactly the same housing need. How did we get here?

Thirty years ago, finding affordable housing was not a problem. You might not have got either a council house or a housing association house in your area of first choice, but accommodation was available. A number of things have happened, some of which we've had control over and some which we haven't. There has been a decrease in the size of households. There's been an increase in population. Both have put pressure on needing more accommodation.

We had a boom in the early 2000s, where people were being given 110 per cent mortgages, where we had steady economic growth. People thought everything was going to fine forever, until we reached the problem of the banking collapse. Within Britain, the average price of a house was £100,000 in the year 2000 and £225,000 in 2007, before the financial crash brought the boom to an end. This was unsustainable.