Housing Debate – 10 July 2018
Housing is a basic need and a basic right. I think that is
something that we really do need at the forefront of our minds every time
we discuss housing. No week is complete without the need for more
affordable housing being made clear to me by my constituents—in the last seven
days, a family of four, including a disabled child, living in a
one-bedroomed flat; someone who is effectively homeless, sofa surfing, using
sofas in friends’ houses, as they currently have no fixed abode, where the next
stop could be the street; a newly divorced woman who is finding it
increasingly hard to pay the rent being charged by a private
landlord. This is the reality of living in twenty-first century Wales. Each
one is a personal tragedy. The sad thing is, if I was making this speech next
week, I would be talking about three or four different cases of people with
exactly the same housing need. How did we get here?385
Thirty years ago, finding affordable housing was not a problem. You
might not have got either a council house or a housing association house in
your area of first choice, but accommodation was available. A number of things
have happened, some of which we've had control over and some which we haven't.
There has been a decrease in the size of households. There's been an increase
in population. Both have put pressure on needing more accommodation.386
We had a boom in the early 2000s, where people were being given 110 per
cent mortgages, where we had steady economic growth. People thought
everything was going to fine forever, until we reached the problem of the
banking collapse. Within Britain, the average price of a house was £100,000 in
the year 2000 and £225,000 in 2007, before the financial crash brought the boom
to an end. This was unsustainable
Will you give way?388
Certainly.389
Wrth gwrs.
Do you regret that the Welsh Government at the time ignored the warnings
by the housing sector joined together campaign throughout the early 2000s that
there would be a housing supply crisis if the Welsh Government didn't
reverse its 70 per cent affordable housing cuts? That was long before the
credit crunch and they ignored that—hence where we are today
It was also before my time here. What I will say is that
councils were continuing to sell council houses under the right to buy—and
I'm sure Mark Isherwood regrets the sale of council houses. Until
recently, councils were not building. Low-cost owner-occupier properties have
become buy-to-rent properties. That's a real thing that's affected very many of
my constituents—very many people who are on median earnings, who are
working, cannot now afford to buy a house, when 25 or 30 years ago they'd have
had no difficulty, because these have been mopped up by people who are buying
to rent. 391
It is in the interest of large house builders to build less than demand,
because the opposite means that they will be left with unsold properties.
Help to Buy increases the demand side, but does nothing for the supply
side. The shortage of houses is not at the scale of the immediate post-war
period. In 1945, we had houses lost to bombing, and we had large-scale slum
clearance in the 1940s and 1950s. I'm not going to repeat what David Melding
said, but I think he was making a really important point that building lots of
houses and building a lot of public sector houses is not unique and it's not
difficult. It's been done in the past. It was done by Labour and Conservative
Governments, and in Britain as a whole council housing peaked under the
Conservative Government of the 1950s. The 1959 Conservative manifesto was
talking about how many council houses the Conservative Government were going to
build. 392
There was a lot of expansion. I was brought up in a council house on the
outskirts of Swansea. Lots of council housing was built on what were then the
outskirts of many towns and cities, which have probably been 'outskirted', if
such a word exists, since then. We've had house price booms and busts, but
these were post the 1960s. In the 1960s, 400,000 properties were built in
Britain. Wales's equivalent would have been around 19,000 or 20,000. On
quality, the standard that is usually talked about is the Parker Morris
standard, which set what the size of houses should be. It said that it's better
to build flats and houses that are too large, rather than too small. Imagine a
builder saying that today. 393
Affordable housing to meet the needs of the people of Wales needs more
land released to small builders in plots below the local development plan
threshold, including infill sites, and councils to be funded and empowered to
build council houses again. Unless we start building council houses, there is
no way I can possibly see us reaching the number of houses in the affordable
sector that we need in Wales. More needs to be done to bring empty
properties back into use. If doubling the council tax doesn't work, try
quadrupling it. There must be some point on the council tax amount that they
pay where people will actually put those houses back into use. Finally, I
think that the key has got to be making sure that our policies are aimed
at the supply side, not the demand side. Putting money into the demand side
only pushes up prices.
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