It was also before my time here. What I will say is that councils were continuing to sell council houses under the right to buy—and I'm sure Mark Isherwood regrets the sale of council houses. Until recently, councils were not building. Low-cost owner-occupier properties have become buy-to-rent properties. That's a real thing that's affected very many of my constituents—very many people who are on median earnings, who are working, cannot now afford to buy a house, when 25 or 30 years ago they'd have had no difficulty, because these have been mopped up by people who are buying to rent. 

It is in the interest of large house builders to build less than demand, because the opposite means that they will be left with unsold properties. Help to Buy increases the demand side, but does nothing for the supply side. The shortage of houses is not at the scale of the immediate post-war period. In 1945, we had houses lost to bombing, and we had large-scale slum clearance in the 1940s and 1950s. I'm not going to repeat what David Melding said, but I think he was making a really important point that building lots of houses and building a lot of public sector houses is not unique and it's not difficult. It's been done in the past. It was done by Labour and Conservative Governments, and in Britain as a whole council housing peaked under the Conservative Government of the 1950s. The 1959 Conservative manifesto was talking about how many council houses the Conservative Government were going to build.  

There was a lot of expansion. I was brought up in a council house on the outskirts of Swansea. Lots of council housing was built on what were then the outskirts of many towns and cities, which have probably been 'outskirted', if such a word exists, since then. We've had house price booms and busts, but these were post the 1960s. In the 1960s, 400,000 properties were built in Britain. Wales's equivalent would have been around 19,000 or 20,000. On quality, the standard that is usually talked about is the Parker Morris standard, which set what the size of houses should be. It said that it's better to build flats and houses that are too large, rather than too small. Imagine a builder saying that today.  

Affordable housing to meet the needs of the people of Wales needs more land released to small builders in plots below the local development plan threshold, including infill sites, and councils to be funded and empowered to build council houses again. Unless we start building council houses, there is no way I can possibly see us reaching the number of houses in the affordable sector that we need in Wales. More needs to be done to bring empty properties back into use. If doubling the council tax doesn't work, try quadrupling it. There must be some point on the council tax amount that they pay where people will actually put those houses back into use.  Finally, I think that the key has got to be making sure that our policies are aimed at the supply side, not the demand side. Putting money into the demand side only pushes up prices.