7. Welsh Conservatives Debate: Housing

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:37 pm on 9 January 2019.

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Photo of Suzy Davies Suzy Davies Conservative 5:37, 9 January 2019

When we talk about housing generically in debates like this, I think it's quite easy to avoid the specifics of the types of housing that we need, where it's needed, and maybe even thinking about where we don't need it any more; we might want to change the use of some of our existing stock. 

I think it's also helpful to move away from this kind of whiff of goodies and baddies, which are sometimes characterised in some of our housing debates, because what we're after here, as David Melding said right at the beginning, is consensus on a direction that we can take. Because, despite the quality public housing that, actually, Mike Hedges was talking about earlier, built between the wars in Swansea, some of them are still in places of persistent deprivation, and I think we can all point to other housing estates, council estates—built in various places that I've lived and worked in anyway—built in the 1960s and 1970s, that I think would even shock us now, despite the quality standards and so forth and despite being taken over by housing associations, simply because of the way they were designed in the first place. These are things that we need to avoid from now on. 

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