5. Statement by the Minister for Housing and Local Government: Housing, Poverty and Communities

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:35 pm on 15 September 2020.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 5:35, 15 September 2020

The next phase is to make sure that we have the adequate housing necessary to enable people to enforce the right to adequate housing. There's no point in giving people the right to adequate housing if, actually, in the end there isn't enough adequate housing to go around. So, jumping to your bit about the social housing, very much part of our part 2 homelessness plan is to move people from the temporary and emergency accommodation into good-quality, permanent social housing, and a very large part of the capital bids that came forward that we've been able to approve from local authorities and partners is to build social housing, especially modern methods of construction social housing, which is carbon neutral or carbon passive—a number of things. 

So, I'm very, very pleased with that. We're able to up our social stock immediately as a result of that. We're also looking at plans to enable councils and RSLs to buy off land from the private sector—we're still looking at that—because by doing that, we can encourage our private sector builders, especially our small and medium-sized enterprises, to build to social housing standards, so that if there is a recession, then we can continue to build that social housing stock. And, of course, we've got the private sector scheme in place where a private sector landlord who is worried about being able to continue their income in uncertain times, and all the rest of it, can actually hand their house over to a social landlord for five years and have the guaranteed local housing allowance, and also a guarantee that their house will be returned to them at social housing standard. So, a very good deal and I'd encourage all private sector landlords to look into, because that's a way to ensure that you do get that income and you don't have the worry of having to deal with it yourself. It means that we can give secure tenancies to people, which is obviously much better. And then we of course have very ambitious plans. We're cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to significantly increase the amount of social housing, even in what's left of this Welsh Parliament and then certainly in the parliamentary term following. And I'm sure whichever Government is in place will want to do that; there seems to be a broad consensus across the Chamber that that should be done. So, I'm very pleased with that, and there's cautious optimism that we'll be able to really ramp it up. You've heard me speaking about building it at pace and scale. We're in a good place to say that we're doing that. 

On the tenancy saver loans, so just to say I absolutely agree with you this isn't the time to increase people's debt. So, that's why we've managed to negotiate this 1 per cent annual percentage rate. It wasn't possible to do it at nothing, for a variety of reasons I don't have time to go into here, or the Llywydd will be losing patience with me, but 1 per cent is a very, very small margin for people to look at. And just to say that, of course, we're not increasing their debt other than by that tiny margin. This is a debt that's incurred because they haven't been able to pay their rent through no fault of their own et cetera, through difficult circumstances. I'm going to take this opportunity to say that we encourage people to pay their rent where they can, because the arrears can be very, very difficult. But the loan is then paid to the landlord because then the rent is paid, so that person can't be evicted for not paying their rent because they will have paid their rent. So, that's the whole point about it. It short-circuits that. And so, from our point of view as a Government, it's a very good thing as well, because what we want is we want people to stay in their homes—these are their homes. We don't want them to be insecure and eventually have to leave, and then present themselves at the local authority housing options saying, 'Please find me somewhere else to go.' This is a very important investment by the Government to ensure that people can do that and, obviously, we've had to look carefully at what we think the rate of repayment will be and so on. But the Government has decided that that's a good investment to make in those people. Most people want to pay their rent, they want to stay in their house, so I'm really pleased we've done that, but I just wanted to clear up that that's what we're doing, because I agree with you about not increasing people's rents. It's certainly not a bail-out to the landlord because, of course, the landlord is entitled to their rent. So, it's that way round. 

Further down the line, I will want to look as well at mortgage rescue. I'm not in a position to talk about that yet, but if the recession deepens as we expect, then there will be a number of people who'll get themselves into difficulties in mortgage repayments. And we will be looking to see what we can do to help them out by way of allowing them to convert their mortgage into rent payments, and take those homes into social ownership. That was done in the last recession as well. I'm not there yet, but I'm certainly looking to investigate things like that. And the reason I mention that, Llywydd, is because if any Members have any other brilliant ideas of that sort, I'd be really glad to hear them, because we are not the fount of all knowledge, and people across the Chamber have had good ideas in this space, so I'd really like people to come forward and share them with us, if at all possible.

And then the last thing is on the planning system. You'll know we've changed the policy on Welsh Government-owned land so that we have 50 per cent affordable housing on all schemes on Welsh Government land. We're encouraging that for other public sector land across Wales. We're in conversation with local authorities about maximising that. And then, of course, local authorities—it's up to local authorities, not the planning inspectors. It's up to local authorities to make sure that their local development plan specifies a very large amount of social housing for their land. So, that's the way forward, and I'm really proud of Wales's plan-led system. Shortly, Llywydd, we'll be introducing the national development framework alongside Planning Policy Wales. It's certainly one of the most progressive frameworks anywhere in the United Kingdom and, actually, pretty good even for western Europe. So, we're very proud of it. But the planning inspector can only do what's in front of them. So, if the LDP doesn't specify that, they can't do anything about it. So, we need to make sure that the plan is in and that local people have a big say in what that plan looks like in building that housing. Thank you, Llywydd.