Homelessness

Part of 4. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:31 pm on 24 June 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:31, 24 June 2020

Yes, Mike, I'm absolutely delighted to agree with you on that. We've been working very hard, across all sectors in Wales, to ensure that, as I say, more than 800 people have been housed during the initial stages of the pandemic. We also have very high presentations of people arriving at local authority doors every week since the pandemic started, and accelerating slightly at the moment, as the lockdown starts to ease. I cannot thank enough local authority partners, third sector partners, everyone, really, on the ground, who have all pulled together in a collaborative way, which we should be really proud of.

Only yesterday I met with all of the cabinet members for housing from across Wales. We had a really good discussion about where we are so far, what measures have been put in place to ensure that people are all in—as the crisis slogan has it—and then what we can do to move to phase 2, to ensure that people have the right kind of accommodation going forward, and, much more importantly, actually, are surrounded by the right kinds of services. Because what this crisis has done is it's allowed us to reach people who were otherwise unreachable, with services that they badly needed, to get them in touch with those services, and to get them to trust the people who are delivering the services. So, it's given us an opportunity to contact people who would otherwise have taken months and months and months to get into those services. And so we're determined to build on that, and build on the hub approach to those services, and the collaborative way that local authorities, health boards and third sector partners have worked together.

This is, though, easy to say and very hard to deliver. So, we're working really hard with local authorities on their phase 2 approach, which is a real mixture of things, including new build, taking private sector rented accommodation into the social sector, investments schemes, making sure that void turnover is as fast as humanly possible, and just using every avenue that we have in front of us to ensure that we don't have a return to the streets.