My first speech I made in this Chamber in 2016 was on housing, and I fear I'm going to make exactly the same speech again. But I'm not, actually—that's not quite true. I've checked the Record, and it is going to be different, although I often check the Record to find out what I've just said when I speak in the Chamber anyway. One of the things that a veteran Member came up to me and said after that speech was, 'Please make sure you're not making the same speech in the next Senedd term should you be re-elected.' That was David Melding. I felt David Melding often brought a lot of common sense to this debate, and perhaps a less partisan approach than is being taken by Janet Finch-Saunders today, who is brilliant in her way, but is not afraid to engage in those kinds of party political attacks.

Let's take that comparison with England, then. Oliver Letwin, the Conservative MP, undertook a piece of work for the UK Government into house building, which he published in 2019. He said in his report that house builders protect profits by constructing homes at a pace that matches the market's capacity to absorb these homes at prices determined by reference to the local second-hand market. That means that as prices rise, so house building slows. That is one of the problems, and this is why Oliver Letwin said house building happens at a stately pace. It's not to do with not allowing the free market to function, as has been suggested by some of the Conservative Members; it is to do with the fact that the free market is flawed. That is where the problem lies—the fact that the free market must have very strong interventions in order to deliver the housing that we need.

What I spoke about in 2016 was the fact that Caerphilly had had a local development plan that was published and ready to go and then was flatly rejected by the community who lived in the north of Caerphilly. I had 35 per cent of the share of the vote at my election in 2016. I'm glad to say it went up by 10 per cent this time around. But one of the reasons I did so badly is that I was attacked by all parties, including Conservatives, because of the local development plan that Caerphilly had produced to meet housing demand. The problem with the local development plan is it focused all the development, all the housing, in the south of the constituency bordering Cardiff North. What that housing did is it took pressure off Cardiff and brought the housing that would be relatively cheap to Cardiff citizens to the south of Caerphilly. It was deeply unpopular. It met housing demand for Cardiff; it didn’t meet housing demand for Caerphilly. Nothing in that plan you could say was affordable. If you let the free market do its job, you get more of that. You get more of that. You get the Redrows, the Persimmons, the Barratts throwing up their houses and getting out of there as fast as they can.