There's no need to rerehearse the central argument in detail here, with around 27,000 empty homes in Wales, bringing these back into use could make a substantial difference to our housing supply, particularly if we could enable social housing providers to buy them, refurbish them, and use them to house low-income families. While houses remain empty in communities, they potentially represent a blight on those communities. And these arguments have been pretty much accepted throughout the Chamber, and they've been accepted for quite a few years now.

So, why then has the problem of empty homes not been sorted? Well, partly this is because the homes that are empty today are not the same homes that were empty a year ago. Just as one gets brought back into use, another one becomes vacant. But it's also because the various layers of Government are not using the powers that they have to make a serious dent in the problem. Some local authorities are not using their powers to impose punitive council tax rates on the owners of empty properties. For this financial year, a staggering 14 local authorities are still giving a discount to owners of empty homes, and there are loopholes in the law that mean that those local authorities who want to charge extra for empty homes have been frustrated.

There is also some confusion. One Plaid Cymru councillor reported to me that, in a council debate on removing this discount, officers in that particular local authority, which I'm not going to name, seemed unaware that local authorities had the power not only to remove the discount but also to impose a punitive rate. And this shows that there is a clear communication problem between Welsh Government and local authorities.

Furthermore, we know that not all local authorities have dedicated empty homes officers, which our committee evidence demonstrated is pretty essential on this. When empty homes officers are in place, not all of them are then able to access legal support and, sometimes, using enforcement powers can carry uncertain risk.

Other barriers highlighted by our report relate to the difficulties within local authorities of sharing data, as well as the resources that are taken up by investigating attempts to avoid the council tax premiums. There are a number of recommendations made here to address these barriers, although we could argue that a crucial one is missing, and that is that continued austerity for local government is incompatible with many of the objectives on this agenda that most of us want to see.

I hope that this is a useful debate for the Minister, if only to establish that some more basic infrastructure is needed to deliver on the policies that we've all supported and that we all want to see actioned.