5. Will the First Minister provide an update on the provision of social housing in Wales? OQ58811

Llywydd, we're committed to delivering 20,000 new low-carbon homes for rent in the social sector and have allocated record levels of funding, including more than doubling Swansea's funding since 2020-21. The first statistical release demonstrating progress towards this target is expected early next year.

I thank the First Minister for that response, but there is still a shortage of houses for rent and there's a serious problem with homelessness, including people who are inadequately housed. The only time that we have had, since the second world war, housing that reached the scale that we needed was between 1945 and 1979, when we had large-scale council house building across Wales. This was based upon councils borrowing over 60 years to build houses. This did not cost the Treasury any money, but was based upon the councils' ability to borrow and be able to pay back from the rents they received. How do we return to this method of funding council housing so that we can deal with the serious problem we have with inadequate housing and a shortage of housing?

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. 

Question 6 [OQ58822] is withdrawn. Question 7, Luke Fletcher.