6. Will the Minister make a statement on the building of council homes in Wales? OAQ55181

9. How many council dwellings does the Welsh Government expect to be built in the financial year 2020/21? OAQ55147

Deputy Presiding Officer, I understand you've given permission for questions 6 and 9 to be grouped.

I'm pleased to say that all councils in Wales that have retained their social housing stock plan to build new council homes. Their ambition is to deliver around 1,790 new homes by the end of this term of Government, and we are working with them to deliver even more.

A question has arisen as to how many councils in Wales are going to be able to take advantage of opportunities in this area, because they've lost their council house stock since they transferred those to social landlords over a decade ago. Other things have changed, and there is an emphasis on councils building their own homes once again. The question is: how do councils that don't hold stock be part of that effort? So, can I ask what alternative methods the Welsh Government is going to provide to councils that don't have housing stock directly within their own ownership to be involved in creating more social housing that is truly affordable?

Yes, it's a very good point. We are, of course, supporting the 11 councils in Wales who have retained their stock of council homes, but we're also working very hard with the non-stockholding councils who did stock transfers. We do provide what's called 'dowry' to the large stock voluntary transfers—basically, they're registered social landlords, but they used to be the council housing. So, we are working very hard with them and the local council to make sure that, together, we can get an investment programme going. Of course, we put social housing plant into those and, as I said, we provide what's called 'dowry' to them as well. So, we are working very hard to make sure that people who live—. You ought not to be able to notice whether you live in a stockholding council or a non-stockholding council. What we build are social homes, and some of those will be run by our registered social landlords and some will be run by the council, and it ought not to matter to the tenant what difference that makes. 

Again, in response to the affordable housing review, we will be looking at the way that we use that grant to lever some changes in for the tenant. We want to make sure that tenant satisfaction ratings are up high, that we have the right kind of tenant participation in decision making and so on. That will affect council housing as well as the registered social landlord sector. I've also said many times in this Chamber that I'm looking at a governance review for the tenant satisfaction part of being a council house runner, not the governance and finance part, because obviously that's controlled through the local government settlement. 

I believe the only way that you're going to be able to deal with the housing shortage is to build council houses in the numbers built between 1945 and 1979, and that went across both Conservative and Labour Governments during that time, who were committed to building more and more council houses, which did deal with the problem caused after the second world war of huge numbers of people needing housing, and adequate housing. Slums were cleared. 

Authorities like Swansea, which is doing a phenomenally good job, have kept their own stock and are building houses. Those who went through stock transfer—I think perhaps some of them must be regretting it now, but you get an opportunity to regret with time—are they able to start building again, council houses? If the money's available to build council houses, are they available? I would say that I would like to give the people who made the decision to transfer to a registered social landlord the opportunity to transfer back to the local authority. I think that that would solve a lot of problems. I think it was a huge mistake people transferring out. I campaigned against it in Swansea and I'm very pleased Swansea kept their council housing. 

Well, I have to say I agree with the second bit. I also was at Swansea at the time, and Mike Hedges will certainly remember that I was on that side of the argument as well. However, the stock transfers were done in order to be able to secure the finance necessary to bring the houses up to the Welsh housing quality standard. That was then and life has very much changed now. So, I think the short answer to your question is that councils that have closed their housing revenue accounts could, if they wanted to, open the HRA account again and start up, but for small numbers of houses, that's quite an expensive route to it, and so most of them—in fact all of them, I'm pretty sure—are choosing not to do that. Gwynedd Council is building four new low-carbon homes to improve the quality of homelessness provision in the borough, but there are some complications, basically, with the way that the housing revenue account has to work as soon as you have council tenants once more, which we are exploring with them. 

What we are expecting, though, as I just said in answer to Llyr, is that in the 11 areas of Wales where councils have transferred their housing stock to a large-scale voluntary transfer housing association, we expect them to work with that LSVT housing association and other registered social landlords in their area to build social housing. I keep making the point that it's not about council housing, it's about social housing. Most people don't care much who their landlord is as long as they get good service charges, good tenant relations, good repairs, good whatever. So, what we want to do is make sure that the sector, wherever you are in Wales, steps up to that plate and we have good tenant satisfaction and good services across the social house sector. 

I'm very pleased, Minister, that in my constituency I have a number of well-established small and medium-sized construction companies very eager to undertake the building of council homes for the local authority, and the local authority is also keen that those companies also undertake the work. At the moment, the process does seem very over-complicated, and I wonder how the Welsh Government can work with local authorities to make the tendering process easier and simpler. Because I think, actually, we all want to see more indigenous local Welsh businesses actually undertake this kind of work in Wales. How can we achieve that and make the process much easier than it is at the moment?  

We are very happy as a Government to work with any authority that's struggling to resource tendering out work for itself on its own land, for example. So, if you have specific instances you want to tell me about, I'd be very happy to take them up. But, as I say, this morning I met with the Home Builders Federation, alongside my colleague Lee Waters, to discuss exactly that: how could we ease the process of builders both bringing forward their own schemes in Wales, but also acting as 'contractors' to the local authority or, indeed, the local registered social landlord that are bringing forward housing developments. We're very keen to work with the sector to ensure that a large number of SMEs are able to get their foot in that door, because that gives them some cashflow certainty when they're doing developments of their own elsewhere, because we have a number of things in place—for example, project bank accounts and so on—that are capable of easing the cashflow crisis that many small and medium firms have when they're applying for planning, for example.

And the other thing I'd just like to mention is schemes like our new self-build programme, where the local authority is expected to bring the land forward with planning on it, as long as you build one of the patterns that's available. And we are expecting that—. Although the title is 'self-build', we are expecting the people who come forward to buy these plots to employ local builders to actually build the houses; we think it's going to be a very rare instance in which a person actually physically builds it. So, the local authority is assisting with the tendering process for those as well, with a view to bringing in those little SMEs to make sure that they get a foot in that door as well. But, if you have specific issues, I'd be more than happy to discuss them with you.   

I just wanted to ask you, Minister, about, when we're talking about affordable housing in particular, whether council houses and social houses provided by social landlords are going to be affected by your plans for non-traditional construction methods, can I say? Obviously, their borrowing facility is going to be dependent on the valuation of the body of assets and, obviously, we had problems with properties that were built between the wars and in the early 1960s through concrete block construction. Can you tell us what conversations you've had with lenders about whether they're going to be concerned about this, as these are really good ideas and we don't want it to be stymied by, actually, an inability to borrow? Thank you.  

Suzy Davies raises a very good point, and we have been having those exact discussions. We're also having discussions with the various warranty and accreditation arrangements—so, the International Organization for Standardization and so on—because some of them are very old indeed and were thought up in the 1970s when lots of the new materials didn't exist. So, for example, it's often the case that they ask for reinforced concrete in various bits, which—there's no need to have that anymore. So, we have been working very hard to make sure that what we bring forward can get the right warranties, and, once it's got the right warranties, then the lenders are very happy to go ahead, but they do like to have the warranties and the ISOs in place. So, we have—. I assure you that very much part of the innovative housing programme has been testing the claims that the manufacturers make about the various types of house building, with a view to us assisting them to get the warranties in place necessary to get the houses properly financed.