Empty Homes

Part of 3. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:56 pm on 14 March 2023.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:56, 14 March 2023

You started with a phrase that wasn’t accurate, because local housing allowance isn’t devolved—[Interruption.] It isn’t devolved. Whether you like it or not, it isn’t devolved. Therefore, we are hamstrung in what we can do, and that policy drives homelessness, because people cannot stay in their rented accommodation because they cannot afford it because the local housing allowance is not high enough. It's below where the poor laws were. You have to take some responsibility for this.

Now, we’ve done a lot of things. We’ve done a lot of things here in Wales, and, once the Tories had finally seen sense and taken the caps off housing revenue accounts, and taken the restrictions off HRAs, which is only a few years ago—and it took 40 years for you to actually wake up and smell the coffee—we have ramped it up since then. There’s no getting away from this history lesson. You don’t like it. You asked me the question, this is the answer. You don’t like it because you don’t like accuracy in answers. So, the answer is: we have done everything that’s been possible to do within our devolved powers, but we are, as always, hamstrung by a blinkered and quite heartless Tory Government.