MIKE HEDGES AM WELCOMES WELSH GOVERNMENT COMMITMENT TO SUPPORT COUNCIL HOUSE BUILDING

MIKE HEDGES AM WELCOMES WELSH GOVERNMENT COMMITMENT TO SUPPORT COUNCIL HOUSE BUILDING

Speaking from his Senedd Office, Swansea East AM Mike Hedges said…. ‘Good quality housing is one of the basic necessities of life. I have long called for the building of council houses to remdy the housing shortage and homelessness crisis which we see all around us. I was brought up in a council house built as part of the post war council house building boom; my family and I benefitted from a council house building program supported by both Labour and Conservative Governments.

I think it is a shame that families in the last 30 years did not enjoy the same access to council houses that my family did.

Building more council houses is the right thing to do and I am so pleased that Swansea City Council has embarked on an ambitious council house building program with a focus on energy efficient homes being built in Penlan and Birchgrove.

I hope that other authorities follow Swansea’s lead and move to build council houses even if they were involved in stock transfers. The Minister confirmed that they are legally able to do so, I hope they take advantage of these circumstances.

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Mike Hedges –
I believe the only way that you’re going to be able to deal with the housing shortage is to build council houses in the numbers built between 1945 and 1979, and that went across both Conservative and Labour Governments during that time who were committed to building more and more council houses, which did deal with the problem after the second world war of huge numbers of people needing housing, and adequate housing. Slums were cleared. 161
Authorities like Swansea, which is doing a phenomenally good job, have kept their own stock and are building houses. Those who went through stock transfer—I think perhaps some of them must be regretting it now, but you get an opportunity to regret with time—are they able to start building again, council houses? If the money’s available to build council houses, are they available? I would say that I would like to give the people who made the decision to transfer to a registered social landlord the opportunity to transfer back to the local authority. I think that that would solve a lot of problems. I think it was a huge mistake people transferring out. I campaigned against it in Swansea and I’m very pleased Swansea kept their council housing. 162

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Julie James
Well, I have to say I agree with the second bit. I also was at Swansea at the time, and Mike Hedges will certainly remember that I was on that side of the argument as well. However, the stock transfers were done in order to be able to secure the finance necessary to bring the houses up to the Welsh housing quality standard. That was then and life has very much changed now. So I think the short answer to your question is that councils that have closed their housing revenue accounts could, if they wanted to, open the HRA account again and start up, but for small numbers of houses, that’s quite an expensive route to it, and so most of them—in fact all of them, I’m pretty sure—are choosing not to do that. Gwynedd Council is building four new low-carbon homes to improve the quality of homelessness provision in the borough, but there are some complications, basically, with the way that the housing revenue account has to work as soon as you have council tenants once more, which we are exploring with them. 163
What we are expecting, though, as I just said in answer to Llyr, is that in the 11 areas of Wales where councils have transferred their housing stock to a large scale voluntary transfer housing association, we expect them to work with that LSVT housing association and other registered social landlords in their area to build social housing. I keep making the point that it’s not about council housing, it’s about social housing. Most people don’t care much who their landlord is as long as they get good service charges, good tenant relations, good repairs, good whatever. So, what we want to do is make sure that the sector, wherever you are in Wales, steps up to that plate and we have good tenant satisfaction and good services across the social house sector.