5. What discussions has the Minister had with local authorities following the Welsh Government's publication of the independent review into housing? OAQ53863

The independent review panel for affordable housing supply published their report on 1 May. I'm actually attending the Welsh Local Government Association’s housing cabinet meeting tomorrow, where the panel’s report will be the first topic for discussion. I'm engaging across the housing sector as I consider my response to the recommendations.

Thank you for that answer, Minister. Recent figures have shown that some families are spending three years in temporary accommodation, so the average time to wait in some areas is months and not days. People are waiting a long time for proper accommodation, and I'm sure you empathise with those people. Under the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, local authorities have a duty to find accommodation for people who are, or are at risk of being, homeless, but there's no limit on how long that should take. What more can you do to reduce the time families are in temporary accommodation, and should the housing Act be amended to include a time limit on how long an authority can take to find a family a much needed home?

Dealing with the last point first, wouldn't it be lovely if that were an easy solution? But, of course, it isn't, because, if you put a time limit on it and there isn't a permanent home available, what is the local authority to do? We don't want people moved away from their communities in pursuit of something that would have, it seems to me, quite a lot of unintended consequences. The only actual way to deal with problem that the Member outlines, which is a real one, is to increase housing supply. The Member's heard me talking at great length today already about increasing that housing supply, using all of the levers in our control, but, more specifically, to get scale and pace into the building of social housing once more, which is the only permanent solution to that problem.

Mike Hedges suggested that there were some issues for private developers bringing housing forward, but what's really interesting is that if you look historically at the pattern of house building, more private house building has taken place in the years where the most social housing was built than in other eras as the market is forced to deal with the competition from the social house building. So, it's a really interesting counterintuitive spike, which I've been most interested to see, as it forces house builders to consider that theirs isn't the only game in town. So, we're really keen to get the market to move in that way, both by building the social housing and by getting developers to bring their plots into use.

Obviously, there's quite a difference in rural housing and the supply of rural housing, which very often falls foul of some of the sustainability goals, such as bus services, for example, that regrettably have been withdrawn over recent years, and we can have a debate and discussion about that. But, very often when people put forward applications for new housing in rural areas, they fall down on the sustainability test because very often it's a car that's required to access services and such. That's just by the very nature. Do you accept that argument, Minister, and do you think that there is cause to look at some of the rules and regulations because of the unique circumstances that the rural environment presents to get more rural development so that more housing stock can be made available?

So, it's a complex picture. I mean, he's right to say that sustainability has to be one of the issues. What we don't want to have—and I take the point he's making entirely—but what we don't want is to build houses, put people in them and then find, actually, they're suffering from serious fuel poverty or other things because their transport costs are so high, and so on. So, it's a rounded picture that needs to be taken, and, as I said in response to Llyr, one of the things we need to look at is the variety of housing that's being enabled in rural communities, because it's not always just private housing that's required.

I live, as he will know, in a small village on Gower in my friend Rebecca Evans's constituency. That used to have a small amount of social housing, which was mostly occupied by the children of the people living in the village, but it's all been sold. So, we need more of that so that the children who grew up in those villages can access housing that they can readily utilise to stay in their communities. So, it's a mixed picture. So, I think we do need to look at some of the rules and regulations around this, but there are good reasons for the sustainability arguments, not just to stop the housebuilding, but to prevent the people in them falling into unintended areas of fuel poverty, for example, and other issues.