1. What measures will the Welsh Government introduce to support homeless people in 2020, please? OAQ54817

This Government will continue to deliver against our commitment to tackle and prevent all forms of homelessness. Our recently published strategy sets out our prevention and public service focus. This involves supporting those currently homeless into accommodation, whilst ensuring that we invest in earlier interventions to prevent people falling into homelessness.

Thank you for the answer, Minister, but the Vagrancy Act 1824 goes back to 1824 and makes it a crime to sleep rough or beg in England and Wales. This Act does nothing to resolve the root causes of homelessness, and in fact, is more likely to push someone further from the vital services that help them off the streets. Minister, do you agree with me that no-one should be criminalised for being homeless or destitute? And what action will you take to repeal the vagrancy Act in Wales?

Yes, I completely agree with you. The vagrancy Act isn't devolved to Wales—it's the Tory Government in Westminster who should have repealed it. [Interruption.] It's the Tory Government in Westminster's duty, Janet Finch-Saunders. They need to repeal it. If I could, I would. We can't.

Minister, Welsh Women's Aid have found that 77 per cent of children who experience domestic abuse did not receive support from a specialist service. Now, we know that domestic abuse is one of the factors that can cause homelessness, and Welsh Women's Aid have found that 512 survivors, many of whom will obviously be accompanied by children, couldn’t be accommodated in refuges due to a lack of space. That's 512 survivors and their dependents being forced to fend for themselves after fleeing a dangerous environment. Do you accept that this is not good enough and will you give us a cast iron pledge that this Welsh Government will ensure that everyone who seeks help in a shelter in the future gets it? And in order to achieve this, will you consider expanding the eligibility to children under 16 residing in refuges and look at what housing support grant funding can be aligned with community and children grant funding to ensure that all children impacted by domestic abuse are adequately supported? 

Yes, I agree with her entirely that domestic abuse is one of the drivers of these kinds of—well, of the need for refuges in the first place, and also of housing instability. There are a whole range of issues that we need to look at to ensure that people are able, for example, to keep hold of their tenancy, so if they are obliged to leave a house in which they would ordinarily have the right to live, then it's not the abuser who ends up staying in the house and the victim isn't driven out. So, there are an enormous number of things—I do agree with you.

One of the things I said in my statement on child poverty yesterday was that we were reviewing a number of systems that we currently have in place to make sure that we don't have people falling in between the cracks, and the area that she's just outlined is one of them. It's not directly in my portfolio, it's actually in the portfolio of the Deputy Minister and Chief Whip, but she and I are working together as part of the gender review and a number of other initiatives to do that, and I'm more than happy to include the Member in those arrangements.

The Welsh Government is providing a lot of support for people who are homeless, but, as we all know, there are far too many people who are sleeping on the streets and far too many people who don't know where they're going to sleep tonight, and they're hoping a friend or relative will put them up. That is a bad state for us to be in in twenty-first century Wales. Does the Minister agree that the only long-term solution to homelessness is to build council houses on the scale of the 1950s and 1960s, which includes Conservative Governments? I understand from reading some local papers recently that Harold Macmillan seems to have been described as a Marxist. 

Well, it's not my understanding of the definition of Marxist, I must say. I do entirely agree with the Member that we need to build the right combination of housing of the right type in the right place that is affordable for people. And that's obviously got to be coupled with support to ensure people can sustain a tenancy. So, it's not only about building the affordable homes; we're also being crystal clear that our ambition is to build social housing at scale and pace, and that includes council housing, and actually a large number of our registered social landlords in Wales build social housing in big numbers. It's why this Government has protected grant funding to ensure flexible tenancy support through our housing support grant as well, and it's why our Supporting People programmes are very important to ensure that not only do people get a place to live but they're able to support themselves in that tenancy.

Mohammad Asghar, in opening this, asked the Minister to look at the issues of the root causes of homelessness, and I would extend that to rough-sleeping as well. Shelter, in a study earlier this month said, despite, I have to say, despite the measures that were being taken in places like Wales and in Scotland, that there will be as many as 4,000 or more children who will be made homeless by 25 December. Would the Minister care to expand on what she understands are the root causes that, despite our best interventions, homelessness and rough-sleeping, including amongst children and young people, is now on an inexorable rise?

Yes, it's absolutely plain that one of the root causes of homelessness is the inability of people to access the right kind of social housing, because we haven't been building enough as a result of the Tory caps on the housing revenue accounts, and the way that that system worked, which was absolutely anti the building of social housing. There are also a number of issues around universal credit; the way that the local housing allowance has been capped for four years making people destitute; the rise in high levels of personal debt leading to family breakdown; and domestic violence issues, like Leanne Wood just highlighted, coming out of some of those issues. There are a range of complex issues, all based around poverty and the inability of people to earn enough money to sustain their housing. And the reason for that is because housing costs are very high in the private rented sector and the universal credit just simply doesn't cover them off, and that's absolutely the root cause of that.