4. Statement by the Minister for Climate Change: Welsh Housing Quality Standard 2

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:47 pm on 10 May 2022.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:47, 10 May 2022

Thank you, Mike. I know you share my enthusiasm for social housing. We were brought up not too far away from each other, as it happens, and I've always admired your zeal and enthusiasm for really good social housing. Absolutely, this is an anti-poverty agenda; it's also a decarbonisation agenda. Those things go hand in hand, of course. The more energy efficient you make a house, the less carbon it emits, the less your bill is for energy, and the better the anti-poverty circle that you get out of that. So, I completely agree with that. 

In terms of the PRS, we are implementing the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016, which will help with that, but also we have a range of schemes intended to incentivise private sector landlords to allow us to help them bring their house to standard. As you know, for a landlord that gives their house over to us for a minimum of five years, we will help them bring the house to standard, we will guarantee the social rent for that period, we're able to give better security of tenure to the tenant for that period, the landlord gets the house back in better condition, the housing stock improves—it's a complete win-win situation. The better we can get the knowledge of that out into the private rented sector, the more of those landlords we can encourage to come into that scheme, the better the housing stock will get.

What we don't want to have is saying that the private rented sector has to bring their house up to EPC E, as the UK Government has recently done, without any grants or loans or anything else to do it, because we fear that those landlords will simply come out of the PRS and sell the housing. In particular, with the big multigeneration houses we get in inner city constituencies, such as my own and Jenny Rathbone's, for example, we're very afraid that those landlords would be disincentivised by that. So, what we need is incentive schemes to ensure that people stay in the private rented sector, get a decent return on their capital, but actually are rewarded for giving better homes to their tenants.

Part of that is the renting homes Act agenda—we're in the process of implementing that Act—and part of that is the incentivisation we give to private sector landlords to bring those homes up to standard. And of course, by driving the standard of social housing, we make the contrast, don't we? We give people that choice. And by building more social housing, we give people that choice as well. All of that is designed to put pressure on PRS landlords who perhaps might be considering not bringing the house to standard.