4. Will the First Minister make a statement on support for rough sleepers in Flintshire? OAQ54805

Llywydd, the rise in rough-sleeping is one of the most visible signs of a decade of Tory austerity. In this year alone the Welsh Government will invest over £20 million in preventing and relieving homelessness. All Welsh local authorities, including Flintshire, have benefited from this new funding.

Diolch, First Minister. You mentioned in your response there the impact of austerity, and this is happening on every single high street now. This is not just a big-city issue anymore. Towns like Connah's Quay and Shotton have, for the first time in my memory, experienced people sleeping rough on the streets. Now, councils like Flintshire could well be overwhelmed this winter, so I have written to you, First Minister, to seek what urgent support you can offer as the Welsh Government to councils like Flintshire to ensure people are not left out in the cold this Christmas.

First Minister, if I may, I also want to seek your assurance that the housing support grant will also be strengthened, because as often, it is the only flexibility available to support those people in very, very difficult circumstances.

I thank Jack Sargeant for that, Llywydd. He is absolutely right to point to the fact that many of us in this Chamber have lived most of our lives when the sight of someone without somewhere to sleep would have been absolutely rare and shocking, and now we see this phenomenon, as Jack has said, not simply in our major urban areas, but in smaller towns across Wales, and it is authentically shocking that the fabric of our welfare state has been allowed to fray to the extent it has, that we see people in those numbers now forced into that position.

The homelessness action group that the Minister established and was chaired by Jon Sparkes of Crisis has reported with a series of immediate recommendations for things that we can do this winter to try to avoid the situation that Jack Sargeant has referred to. The Government has accepted all those recommendations and is working hard with local authority colleagues and with third sector organisations to implement those immediate measures. We have sustained the investment we make in Supporting People, which, as Jack said, is one of the flexible parts of the budget that local authorities and their partners are able to use to provide services to people, because while rapid rehousing is at the core of what we want to offer to people who find themselves sleeping rough, we also know that those individuals, because of the histories that they've been obliged to go through, often have needs beyond accommodation, and that's what the Supporting People grant is there to do, and that's why we've sustained it through the whole of this Assembly term, and intend to go on doing so.