Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:39 pm on 18 November 2020.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:39, 18 November 2020

[Inaudible.]—Delyth. I'm completely with you on everything you've just said. This is an enormous culture change for a lot of the local authorities, and we all know, from our own reaction to the pandemic, that, at first, it was terrifying and really worrying, but it was also a little bit exciting, it's new and different, we haven't done it before, and we all thought it might be a short, sharp thing that we could do to get the virus under control and so on. And what's happened with all of the services, of course, is it's become very plain that this is not a sprint, it's a marathon. And, so, people are tired. They've worked really hard all the way through all of this. They have limited resources still. Even though we've put £50 million more into it, it's still a limited resource for the people that we have presenting to us. We've also got an enormous never-ending stream of people who are experiencing the same problem. And we know that one of the big problems about further firebreaks and our continuing worry about the virus, and all of the kind of recessional-type stuff that's going in the economy, drives relationship breakdown, which drives the homelessness machine. So, we've got to get on top of the pandemic, and the economic consequences of that, in order to even begin the turn the tap off, so to speak. And I'm sorry to talk about people as if they're a flood because each one of them is a tragedy, but we have got a large number of people who are still in those kinds of circumstances.

We've also galvanised the biggest kind of support mechanism across mental health, substance abuse and relationship breakdown services. We've put enormous amounts of money into the advice services as well, to try and get people to maximise their income, because when they come into this housing, they need to be able to access what universal credit there is—and that's not always as straightforward as possible—but also an income stream in order to be able to sustain their housing and all of that. It's really complicated. And, then, of course, necessarily, because we've got such large numbers, we are putting people in unsuitable temporary accommodation. I absolutely accept that. The local authorities are doing their very best for that not to happen. Not everyone tells the full extent of their story when they first come into services. Many people are distrustful for very, very understandable reasons of official-type people trying to help and so on. And every single one of those failures is a real big problem.

However, there are also heartwarming stories of success. So, many authorities who have those problems have also got people who've come into services for the first time and been a resounding success. They happen to have got the right counsellor, the right support, and they've moved on into permanent accommodation. So, I don't want it all to be—. I'm not taking away from the ones that haven't got exactly what they want, and we need to redouble our efforts to do that, but I also think it's important to encourage the authorities, because they have also got successes. So, we need to encourage the successful work and discourage the unsuccessful work. We've been running a lot of webinars for authorities. This is, as I say, a huge culture change from where people were before with a sort of gate-keeping role. So, we've made it very plain that we're not going back, and that that culture change needs to embed. But, in all seriousness, there was never any way it was going to embed in only four months in the face of a pandemic. So, I've made it plain that we have not solved the problem; we have taken the first step to solving the problem. We will all need to pull together to make sure that we're able to carry on down that road.