Housing Speech 19 June 2021

Mike Hedges MS 16:11:53

Can I say how glad I am that housing is being discussed so early in this Assembly term? To many of my constituents, housing is incredibly important. Many are inadequately housed, in temporary accommodation or homeless. We also know that household size has decreased, with more people in single-person households, and it’s a trend likely to continue.346

Far too many houses are empty, not enough council housing is being built, we have seen the return of leasehold and high maintenance charges, and we are seeing estates built with their roads and pavements not up to adoptable standard. According to data obtained by ITN news in 2018, there were 43,000 empty homes in Wales, with at least 18,000 empty for more than six months. These include all sorts of properties, including some in the most sought-after areas. I have no reason to believe that this number has reduced over the last three years.347

Empty homes are a wasted resource at a time of substantial housing demand. They can also cause a range of social and environmental problems. They can lead to vandalism, crime, anti-social behaviour, drug abuse, as well as other issues, such as overgrown gardens, unsteady boundary fences and damp. They also represent, more importantly, a potential housing resource that is currently underutilised. Bringing empty homes back into use can help address a number of housing and social issues by increasing supply in areas where there are housing shortages.348

There are two ways of increasing the building of new houses in Wales. One is to abandon all planning controls and let the market decide where houses can be built, which is effectively what happened before the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. This will lead to building in areas that are currently protected. The second way is to have large-scale council house building, as we did in the post-war years prior to 1979. Both strategies worked previously; there’s no reason why these strategies would not work again. I just think the second strategy is a far, far better strategy than the first.349

We need more social housing. Affordable housing should mean council housing and housing association housing. Rather than an all-Wales target, we need to have targets for each local authority area so that local needs can be met. The only time since the second world war when sufficient housing was being built was when large council housing estates were being built the length and breadth of Wales. We must build enough affordable homes to meet Wales’s projected housing needs over the next five years. This should be achieved through the empowerment of local councils to make full use of their borrowing powers and borrowing capacity to build homes and bring back empty homes into use for social rent.350
Housing associations and councils that do not have stock transfer should have a common waiting list and also have a transfer system between them. This would help people move from large houses to smaller houses as they get older, without having the problem of their not being able to transfer and having to reapply. This really is something that would work. Lots of people—the family home is there, the family have left, it’s one person left in it, it’s a three- or four-bedroomed house, it’s totally unsuitable, they want to move, but finding somewhere for them to move is very difficult and, consequently, we end up with a situation where we have families living in very poor accommodation and people who want to move out unable to move into smaller accommodation. 351

We need to cap social rent at the consumer price index of inflation, so that rents do not outpace wages or benefits. And it’s important to make the point that housing policy and a building skills policy must be better linked in Wales, otherwise there will be nobody available to build or assemble the homes we want or to retrofit the ones we already have. There’s a lot of work to be done in housing. We need the skills to do it. We need a coherent integrated policy for housing, ensuring we have skilled workers to build the houses.352

The commitment of councils to build houses: funding for council house development, including using prudential borrowing and borrowing against the value of council stock. Developing co-operative housing: I’ve written about this in great detail, but we are well behind the rest of the world in producing co-operative housing. More importantly, the political will to tackle the housing shortage. Everyone deserves a decent home; it’s up to us to ensure that everyone has a decent home, and I would urge the Welsh Government to set about a strategy that gets people into houses. And the building of council houses has one other effect: it does bring back some of the houses that are privately rented into owner-occupation. So, it’s a win-win for everybody