Social Housing

Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Housing and Local Government – in the Senedd at 2:58 pm on 10 March 2021.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:58, 10 March 2021

Yes. I absolutely agree with that, David Melding. We have been very keen to extend, for example, the Help to Buy schemes. We're very keen not only to help younger people, from my perspective, who are in their 30s and so on, just with their families, to access good-quality homes, but we're very keen to help our building industry build them in circumstances where they occasionally need Government help to do so. I'm also very keen, though, to use the leverage that that Government funding brings to build the right kind of homes in the right kind of places and to the right kind of standard. I've been very straightforward with the house building industry here in Wales that we want to see the houses built for the future that people continue to be proud to live in, they don't experience fuel poverty in, they are carbon-passive or carbon-neutral where at all possible, they have the space standards necessary for people to be able to adapt to the changing conditions of their life in those houses. I know you agree with that agenda as well. I'm working very hard to ensure that we will have a continued Help to Buy system in Wales, that we continue to have a rent-to-own scheme in Wales, which has been very successful in very large parts of Wales and which allows people who perhaps don't have a deposit nevertheless to get a foot on the housing ladder, and to have a range of shared equity, shared ownership, co-operative ownership and community land trust-type schemes around Wales, as well as, of course, building the necessary amount of social housing so that people can access social housing should they need to and not be driven into perhaps sub-standard private rented sector accommodation.