Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 26 November 2019.

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Photo of Mark Reckless Mark Reckless Conservative 1:55, 26 November 2019

First Minister, given you only built 57 council houses last year, people can judge the plausibility of that, or otherwise, for themselves. You have said that you are going to—and I quote your manifesto here in 2016:

'We will deliver an extra 20,000 affordable homes in the next term'.

Yet that implies 4,000 a year. You've been averaging only 2,500 a year. Is it really plausible that you are going to overcome that deficit in the next two years?

Now, the UK Labour commitment is for 100,000 council houses per year in England, yet since 2009-10 in Wales—and let's look at the record, rather than your claims for the following year—only 153 council houses were built in all those years. In six of those years, local authorities did not build any council houses at all. Given Wales only managed 57 last year, this compares to 5,600 that should have been built if you were to match your party's pie-in-the-sky promise for England. What preparations has the Welsh Government made, if any, for a near hundredfold increase in council house building?