Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:25 pm on 30 November 2021.
Yes, it's a thread, isn't it, that runs through the action plan. So, in the preamble, we talk—. The action plan isn't my action plan; it's the homelessness action group's plan presented to us, but we're very happy to accept it and I think it's an excellent plan of action. But, for us, it's the golden thread that runs through it that each person must have their needs met. So, until you see that person in front of you, you don't know what those needs are.
Now, for somebody who's recently fallen out of housing, their primary need probably is just another place to have a permanent home. But some people are very far from that—they need help with income support; they need mental health and substance abuse support; they need help with actually being able to manage their life so that they can sustain a tenancy, they can pay their bills, understand their rent and all of the rest of it. So, there's an enormous spectrum of things that you need.
As I was saying in response to Mabon, Housing First, for example, will be part of that, but that will be for people with a large amount of needs who are very far from being able to self-sustain; for others, it is just the ability to access another decent, secure tenancy. So, I suppose it's hard to say, 'Action 5 requires—'. It's a thread running through it that each action will be appropriate to the person in front of you and that you're meeting that person's—or that family's, quite often—needs. And the family may have more complex needs as a group.
Then I cannot emphasise enough the preventative part of the agenda—so, getting upstream of that, identifying people who are in those difficulties and making sure that they get the support to stay in their family unit, where at all possible, or be supported if that family unit is breaking up for some reason, so that we don't get them going into homelessness provision at all. That is a very important part of that.
The whole agenda that my colleague Lynne Neagle talks about a lot, about adverse childhood experiences and so on—and I know in a previous life you've been very involved in that—those things are very important. So, in talking to the young man I spoke to yesterday, it was clear that you could do a case study on what adverse childhood experiences had caused this young man to have a very chaotic early start in life, and yet he is clearly capable of being a very upstanding and valued member of the community.
So, what we need to do is to get ahead of some of those other issues, and that's what I mean by, 'It's not just about your house.' If you've got very poor parenting skills, then your child is much more likely to become homeless than if you don't, so helping the parents to parent those children in the first place, for example, would prevent quite a lot of the homelessness that we see.