4. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: Supporting Local Housing Authorities to secure long term housing options in the Private Rented Sector

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:14 pm on 5 November 2019.

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Photo of Mike Hedges Mike Hedges Labour 4:14, 5 November 2019

I very much welcome this statement. Far too many children move home between once and twice a year. It's obviously disruptive to education that they move from school to school. High-quality housing, secure and affordable, will improve the health and life outcomes for very many of my constituents. There are two separate private rented markets: there's the high-quality and expensive market that is providing very good quality homes to very many people, all of whom are incredibly happy with the housing provided; there's also the lower cost, but not low cost, rented sector. I welcome the requirement to meet the Welsh housing quality standard to be part of the scheme—I know people living in houses that do not meet the wind and waterproof conditions, never mind anything else. And offering five-year assured tenancies would actually mean a child moving in at the age of 11 would still be in the same house going to the same school when they took their GCSEs five years later. What a tremendous advantage to those children, rather than perhaps going from two or three different comprehensive schools, having to make new friends, having to settle in, and having discovered that the school has done things in a different order, so they do some things twice and some things not at all. I think these are really important. As you know, I believe very strongly in council housing, and I hope you will join me in condemning remarks made by Jacob Rees-Mogg regarding the Grenfell Tower disaster.

I've got three questions for you. How much interest do you expect from landlords in areas such as Cardiff and Swansea, where there is substantial, often unmet, housing demand? I can see, in other areas where demand and supply aren't far off equilibrium, or even parts of some areas where demand isn't far off equilibrium, where you may well get landlords saying, 'This is guaranteed income.' Isn't it the long-term solution just building or buying sufficient council houses, where we actually have control over the quality of houses people are moving into? It will also release a lot of these properties for first-time buyers. The people who lose out most, because of the private landlords buying up housing, are potential first-time buyers who don't, in those immortal words, get their foot on the first rung of the ladder because they've already been bought up for private renting. The third question is: how does the offer of this new scheme to helping to renovate houses differ or is an improvement on the scheme that currently exists for bringing houses back into use that are currently empty?