Waiting Lists for Social Housing

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:28 pm on 4 March 2020.

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Photo of Mark Isherwood Mark Isherwood Conservative 2:28, 4 March 2020

After social housing waiting list figures for 2018 were published, showing more than 16,500 households on social housing waiting lists in Wales, Shelter Cymru referred to the situation as a housing crisis. But, of course, it was during the second Assembly, when the Homes for All Cymru campaign, including Shelter, warned that there would be a housing crisis if the Welsh Government didn't reverse its new social housing cuts—in fact, cut by over 70 per cent in the first three terms of the Assembly.

Reducing pressure on social housing waiting lists includes—and I agree with you on this—greater supply of broader affordable housing, whether that's intermediate rent or low-cost home ownership. Why, therefore, do you think it is that the NHBC's new homes registered figures published a month ago, for 2019, show that, although new homes registered in England and Scotland went up, they fell in Wales from 5,448 to 4,769?