Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:48 pm on 16 June 2021.
Thank you very much. I just wanted to pick up on a couple of things. One is that I absolutely agree with the Minister that everybody needs to have a decent place that they can call home, and that is so much more refreshing than the language used by, for example, James Evans, talking about the housing ladder. I was even more astonished to see it in the Shelter Cymru briefing, talking about the property ladder.
One of the biggest problems we have in our economy is the perverse incentives to invest spare capital into bricks and mortar, rather than productive activity. We need to, somehow, change the way in which homes are regarded. One way is to look at abolishing capital gains tax relief on first homes, but that might, obviously, have other perverse incentives. But, we certainly need to look at homes, rather than housing as an investment.