Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:06 pm on 16 July 2019.
Well, Llywydd, I want to thank John Griffiths for an important question. He's right to say that there is no more visible sign of the impact of a decade of austerity than the on-the-street homelessness that we see today, and which, in my earlier lifetime, was never seen at all. It's why we are putting £20 million more into housing homelessness services in this year alone. It's why the housing Minister has commissioned the chief officer of the charity Crisis to chair a group that is looking at the services that we will provide in Wales as we move into the second half of this year. Our ambition, as the Member knows, is that, where homelessness takes place, it should be rare, it should be brief, and it should be non-recurrent, and Housing First is a very important part of that. It's why we put £1.6 million specifically into that initiative during this financial year, and, as John Griffiths said in his supplementary question, the Housing First model requires two things. Of course, it requires accommodation, and accommodation is under severe pressure right across Wales, but it needs services as well. The people who are placed, in the Housing First model, directly into accommodation, are often people who will need support to make sure that they can settle and then sustain the tenancies that will be available to them, and that is the model that we are developing here in Wales.