7. Welsh Conservatives Debate: Tackling Homelessness

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:30 pm on 23 October 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 6:30, 23 October 2019

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I want to start off by welcoming David Melding's first remarks about working across the Chamber, and to echo the First Minister's welcome of good ideas from any source, and echo them. So, I think there is much to be commended in the Conservatives' plan, and also, actually, in Plaid Cymru's plan. And I think we do have some shared agendas across the Chamber, and I'd very much like to work with people to discover how we can take our shared agenda forward. But I do also want to say that I am always quite astonished by people's complete lack of comprehension about the problems created by poverty and, in particular, by universal credit roll-out and other things.

So, let me just tell you one of them, so if you're really concerned, you can join Crisis's campaign on this. The local housing allowance has been zero rated since 2016—for four years. So, the result of that is that if you're in the private rented sector and you're on universal credit, you are paying the difference between the local housing allowance and the rent in that sector. That is driving homelessness. That is a direct Conservative Party policy. I don't know what's going to happen next year, but if you have any influence on that, please try to bring it to bear, because we have written repeatedly to say that, clearly, this is driving people out of the private rented sector—and you're absolutely right, we need to build more social housing and you're absolutely right, we're going as fast as possible since the Conservative Government saw sense and took the caps off, only at the end of last year. All this talk about 20 years—we have not been allowed to do it until last year. Now we are allowed to do it, we are doing it at pace and scale. You're helping us with that—you share that agenda, I know. But we also need to make sure that people in the private rented sector can afford their rents, and at the moment they cannot. So, if you want to do something, do that.