Diolch, Mabon. I completely agree with the basic premise of your contribution. Rough-sleeping is the scourge, the visible and most appalling form of homelessness, but there are many other sorts of homelessness, and if the pandemic has shown us anything, it's shown us the extent of that across Wales. In previous spot counts of rough-sleeping, we knew it was under counting people who were rough-sleeping. We knew particularly women weren't picked up. Women typically sleep in the day and stay awake all night for safety reasons, and so on, if they're rough-sleeping. So, we knew it was under counting, but we had no idea of the extent of that, and what the pandemic has done is shown us the true extent of that. 

The system in Wales has responded magnificently to that. If you had told me before the pandemic that we could house the number of people we've housed, temporarily or otherwise, across Wales, I would have thought that was impossible. Fortunately, at that point, we had commissioned the homelessness action group to work with us, and they had, just a few weeks before the pandemic struck, given us the first of their action plans, and they and us envisaged that that would take us three to five years to put those things in place. We put them in place in 16 weeks because everybody in Wales just was incredible. I'm just in awe of the way that they worked. But, of course, that was just temporary accommodation for most of them. Some of them were lucky enough to get permanent accommodation, but most people got temporary accommodation.

And then, what you're talking about is the churn that we've had ever since. So, as the local authorities move 500 or 600 people out each month into their permanent home, another 1,000 present across Wales, so we've got like a tap running. So, clearly, what we need to do is get upstream of that and put the preventative measures in place. But you identified in your comments about Boris Johnson's Government, one of the prime problems that we have, because one of the causes of this is poverty and debt stress. So, we have relationship breakdowns—the pandemic exacerbated that—so we'll have to put a lot of money—and that's our intention—into assisting families to stay together, and there's a swathe of things across all public services to do that, all the child and family services and social services and so on. There's specific debt and income advice that we put in place to help people maximise their income, and there are a large number of schemes—. Deputy Llywydd will be very impatient with me if I start to list them in my answer, but there are a large number of schemes there, and what we're doing is training people to access those for the families.

There are very specific mental health and substance abuse problems that people have as they fall out of housing, not necessarily at the beginning, but they fall into it, and in particular there's a pathway for people in the prison system, so we've been running a successful pilot with Cardiff prison, where we targeted people who were effectively coming round and round to make sure that we had a pathway into permanent housing for them. And yesterday I met a very, very inspirational young man called Jonathan in Mike Hedges's constituency, who'd had that kind of terrible chaotic lifestyle and is now an inspirational human being because he's got his permanent home, he had the support put around him and he's got himself onto his feet. He's proof, if we needed it, that this isn't about the individual. It's just about the terrible start they have in life and the luck they didn't have that perhaps you and I did have. So, that made me even more determined to make sure that people have that second chance to put their life back on track.

So, we do need a housing-first approach, but that's only part of a rapid rehousing approach. Housing first is a very specific set of things that we do for people with a lot of support requirements, but a rapid rehousing approach can be used for people who don't really have that and have just fallen out of housing. They don't necessarily need all the wraparound support. But that rapid rehousing is the thing. No more will we have the earned place on a ladder, where you get a reward and fall back and so on. I just don't understand how anyone ever thought that would work. It clearly doesn't work, and so we're going to come away from that.

The lease scheme that we're announcing is just our attempt to make sure that we maximise the number of houses available, and in particular we're worried about the private rented sector and the requirements for them to bring their properties up to standard from the UK Government—so, energy performance certificate E at the moment, about to go to EPC C—and our worry that the private rented sector won't be able to step up to that and will take their properties out of the private rented sector. So, this scheme is a way to guarantee them an income and give them a grant to make sure their property stays in the private rented sector and to give better security of tenure and support to the tenants there. So, it's directly aimed at that, although we would welcome any landlord that wanted to come in as part of the scheme. So, it's about—. It's got a climate change bit, if you like, because it brings those properties up, makes them better insulated, it helps fuel poverty and it gives people security of tenure. And so the amount of money available will differ depending on the property type and the condition and where we want to get it to, but this is all about maximising the number of houses available to us to make sure that people get that permanent house.