It's a pleasure to follow Mike Hedges, and I think most of the points he's made about council housing and the importance of building for social rent are well made. I would, however, emphasise that, whatever the exact target we have—and, in our motion, we call for, I think, 10,000 houses a year; the Government has a different target and perhaps different proportions, but, in all those, it's likely that the majority of that housing is going to need to come from the private sector, and, as Mike rightly observes, house builders are there primarily to make profits for their shareholders.

Now, one thing we've seen in south-east Wales, where I'm going to focus my remarks, is, in some areas particularly, a significant rise in house prices. On the Office for National Statistics numbers from September to November, the last three months available, the year-on-year increase has been over 13 per cent in both Newport and Torfaen and close to 11 per cent in Monmouthshire. Now, I hear from many in Plaid, but also, to a degree, within Labour, a lot of emphasis on people being priced out of housing potentially, in consequence, and also some perhaps who could be more welcoming to people coming into Wales—complaints about, 'Why should we deal with Bristol overspill?', for instance. And I would just like to emphasise the positive elements of this. We have people with really quite higher salaries in Bristol who are coming to live in Wales and are spending money locally, and, from April, will be paying the Welsh rates of income tax, so potentially giving more money for us to spend on public services.

And it is also those house price rises that, in turn, are bringing back really a very significant increase in house building. David Melding referred to the importance of that for the economy as a whole: 8 per cent of our economy, 8 per cent of our employment, is in construction and it's one of the areas where you do see economies growing quickly, and we want the Welsh economy to grow quickly. It is construction, almost invariably, which accelerates far faster than the economy as a whole, and that is a good thing and something we should want to see, and are beginning to see, in parts of south-east Wales. To a degree, it is supported by Welsh Government policy in terms of the Help to Buy and the proportion of that money that is going into these fast-growing areas. In Torfaen, just as recently as 2015-16, we had only 130 housing starts. In 2016-17, that went to 215—a 50 per cent increase—a similar increase the next year to 284, in 2017-18. And, in just the first six months of 2018-19, that annual figure has been surpassed: 299 starts—so, that rate of house building doubling year on year after three years of substantial increase before. And, if we look at Newport, in 2017-18, there were over 1,000 housing starts in the Newport council area, and that compares to 6,000 in Wales as a whole—