Can I thank the Minister for this statement? A most important area of public policy, I'm sure we all agree. The housing support grant has been welcomed by many in this sector, and I note the intention to drive forward more effective public spending through more integrated and strategic approaches, and I look forward to a full assessment of this approach, because it obviously was quite controversial when it was originally proposed. But I do think that getting maximum value from the Welsh pound is a very, very important principle.

I note a recent report by Community Housing Cymru, Cymorth Cymru and Welsh Women's Aid, and it states that, by their calculation, over 60,000 people are helped at the moment through this grant to avoid homelessness, escape abuse, to live supported in their own homes and to thrive in their communities. That does give you, I think, an indication of how important this grant scheme is. However, those organisations have also stressed the level of demand and need, and call for increased expenditure indeed on the housing support grant to, and I quote,

'deliver person centred, trauma informed services'.

I was pleased to note that the Minister used that language about the trauma-informed approach when making this statement. I think the new guidance does emphasise the need for integration and collaboration to achieve a co-produced homelessness strategy. I know my colleague Mark Isherwood has pursued this issue that we've got to involve the whole sector in designing an effective strategy, and co-production is key to that. So, again, we do welcome that as part of the approach.

I do think the Welsh Government falls short of a full housing first approach to end homelessness; though, obviously, that model can be explored through the grant. But I think we do need that systematic examination of what we're going to do to end homelessness. Just last week we had, as a result of the latest survey, an indication that rough sleeping has increased. I welcome the fact that we're trying to improve the data, incidentally, because we didn't necessarily have a very clear picture before, but again I think we can all agree that we're a long way from really making the transformation that we want to see in terms of preventing homelessness.

So, we're giving a cautious welcome to the approach, but I do think that we need a homelessness tsar, and I think we need the local authorities, when they're producing their homelessness strategies, to set targets to end homelessness, and follow the example set by Manchester, where Andy Burnham, the mayor, has led with this approach, setting a realistic target—an ambitious target also, but not one that's tomorrow.

But I do think it's that concentration that we need to bring to this most pressing problem, because some of the most vulnerable people in society then end up, in addition to that vulnerability, being rough sleepers, and many more obviously are in very fragile housing conditions and are homeless. This really is not something we should tolerate in a modern society.