I'd like to thank Plaid Cymru for putting forward this important debate in advance of the veritable tsunami that will hit us this winter as a result of the Tory cost-of-living crisis—the cost-of-living crisis devised and delivered by the UK Tory Government. I agree with everything that Mike Hedges says. We need to do something urgently to tackle the actual cost of living in a home—not just the rent, but also the heating, which I'm sure we'll come back and debate another day.

I'd like to just focus on this whole business of the local housing allowance, because I think that although the rate is set at the lowest 30 per cent of properties being what is supposed to be affordable, what in reality is the case is that it's actually less that 4 per cent of properties are affordable—4 per cent. Just imagine it in wherever your constituency is. If only 4 per cent of the properties are available to something like 25 to 35 per cent of the people who live there, there's clearly a massive problem. And it's very well highlighted by the Welsh Government page on the local housing allowance. The frequently asked question states that if your rent is higher than the local housing allowance rate, then you will have to pay the difference, and if you cannot afford to pay, you will need to find accommodation within the allowance rate. Good idea, but there isn't that rate there.

Cardiff has the highest rent levels by a million miles in the whole of Wales, and that is not unrelated to the fact that it is my constituency that has the highest number of students across the UK. Obviously, the existence of this student housing market encourages landlords to ratchet up the rents for students, knowing that (a) they're not eligible for the local housing allowance, but (b) they're having to acquire so much debt anyway by virtue of going to university, that they are encouraged to just take the hit. I almost never get students coming to complain about the deplorable quality of the housing that these landlords are charging really eye-watering sums for.

Just to go back to the ordinary families who aren't students but who are having to scurry around, looking for that 4 per cent of properties that are available and affordable, a constituent of mine I've been dealing with in the last week or two—going back to what Janet Finch-Saunders had to say—thought they had a home of their own. They'd been living there for the last nine years, this family of five. It's abysmally maintained by the landlord, but they had been doing the work themselves in order to avoid either being evicted because they've asked for the repairs to be done, or their family having some sort of accident as a result of the level of disrepair.

They're in a very cheap property at the moment by Cardiff standards—a three-bed property for £850. But that still means they're having to put over £75 a month of their own money, from this one person's low wage, into subsidising the housing, and that is money that they're supposed to be using for food and housing costs and other costs. This family that have been living nine years in this property are now going to be homeless any minute now, because the court order to evict them has already been allowed. They could be sent absolutely anywhere in Cardiff, and meanwhile, one of the children is in year 6 in primary school, and she faces either several miles to get to school or having to move at this late stage in her school career. This is completely devastating, and this is one of the primary reasons why private rented housing is not suitable for people with children, because it gives you none of the security that you need in order to ensure that your children can continue to go to the same school.

Quite apart from that, the levels of shortfall in housing in Cardiff are really quite devastating. For two-bed housing, the shortfall on the housing allowance is between £100 and £350 a month, with most of them being in the upper limits. For a three-bed property, like the family I've just been telling you about, the majority of people will have to put in £1,100 to £1,400 of their own money. This is a family where I imagine this individual is not even earning that much money—