Well, Llywydd, Mike Hedges reminds us of some important ways in which council house building was possible in the past on a bipartisan basis. People forget that Aneurin Bevan was the Minister for housing as well as the Minister for health, and he put more housing legislation on the statute book than he passed health legislation. And the housing Minister who presided over the largest number of council houses ever built was Harold Macmillan, in a Conservative Government. And that's because there was a bipartisan consensus as to how council housing was important and how it could be funded, and all that came to an end with the Thatcher Governments of the 1980s.

Here in Wales, we have been reversing a number of those inhibitions to building council housing in order to do as Mike Hedges has said, Llywydd, and that is to accelerate the ability of those councils that retain council house stock to add to the number of houses available for rent. So, the borrowing cap imposed on the Welsh housing revenue accounts during the Thatcher era was lifted, and that has removed the constraint over borrowing for council rebuilding. Councils are now able to borrow prudentially against the expected rental income from the houses that they will build. And while that still has to be prudential borrowing, it does mean that councils across Wales now have a source of funding of the sort that Mike Hedges referred to that will allow them to accelerate their own ability to build council housing in the future. 

There are head winds in their way, however, Llywydd. A year ago, in June of last year, the Public Works Loan Board borrowing rate was 1 per cent. Today, as a result of the disastrous period of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, that borrowing rate stands at 4.2 per cent, and that inevitably means that, in a prudential borrowing system, the ability of councils to service the debt they take on to build council housing is becoming more challenging.