Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:23 pm on 15 September 2020.
Thank you, Mark, for that series of questions and comments.
Starting with the Audit Wales report, that report came out just before the pandemic, and as I said when I was talking about the anti-poverty strategy in my statement, life shifted. It's like a Sliding Doors moment, isn't it? Life shifted out of all perspective, and what we've managed to do during the pandemic has been incredible. I take the opportunity, once again, to pay tribute to the enormous number of people in the local authority sector, the third sector, the registered social landlord sector, the private landlords and everybody else who have pulled together to make us able to get 2,200 people into temporary or emergency accommodation and ensure that they were able to access provision that would allow them to self-isolate and have the right hygiene facilities and so on.
What that's also enabled us to do is it's enabled us to take what I've always said should be a full public service approach to housing, where we wrap the right level of support around people, because it's not and never has been just about four walls and a roof. It's always been about making sure that somebody can sustain their housing, that they have the right levels of support, that they're in supportive communities, that they have good mental health support or substance abuse support or relationship breakdown support, or whatever it is—domestic abuse support—that they need in order to be able to sustain that tenancy.
Also, I personally was very, very, very firm on local authority housing option providers, saying, 'Just do the right thing. Sort the person out in front of you. Don't worry about where they're from and we'll sort the plumbing out afterwards.' People really stepped up to that plate. I am really proud of them, and I'm really proud of us. Wales is a shining light in terms of its housing provision over this pandemic, and we should all be rightly proud of that. I'm really grateful to our partners for having done that.