MIKE HEDGES AM QUESTIONS MINISTER ON HOUSING SHORTAGES AND HOMELESSNESS

MIKE HEDGES AM QUESTIONS MINISTER ON HOUSING SHORTAGES AND HOMELESSNESS

Speaking after the plenary session at the Assembly, Swansea East AM said….. ‘The scourge of homelessness and people sleeping rough in our towns and cities affects each and every one of us if you believe as I do, that we all have a responsibility to help those less fortunate. It is heart breaking to walk through any town and see people sleeping in doorways or in tents. I believe that we have to promote the building of council housing so the number of houses available to rent increases and that we must provide support for people to make the change from homelessness to living in accommodation. We must also end the problem of no fault eviction so landlords can’t just evict good tenants.

I am pleased that the Minister shares my prescription for remedying the issues of homelessness and rough sleeping. I look forward to working with her in the coming months and years to deal with this issue.’

Mike Hedges AM - First, can I welcome the ministerial statement? Can I also welcome some of the comments made by colleagues earlier? I especially welcome distinguishing between homelessness and rough-sleeping. Homelessness includes those of no fixed abode who sofa-surf thanks to the kindness of friends and family, but in many cases they are just one night away from sleeping rough. There are also those who are inadequately housed in overcrowded accommodation, often staying with family or friends, and are neither homeless nor rough-sleepers but need different accommodation. And that, sadly, includes children.139

There are a number of hostels that do a good job but some individuals would prefer the street to the hostels for all sorts of personal reasons, which I know the Minister is well aware of. Does the Minister agree with me that the only way we are going to reduce homelessness and rough-sleeping is by building council houses in sufficient numbers to meet demand, providing support to get the homeless and rough-sleepers into permanent accommodation, ending no-fault evictions, and developing co-operative housing initiatives?140

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Julie James AM - The very short answer to that is 'yes'. I do entirely agree with the Member. We absolutely are determined both to deliver our affordable homes target, but much more importantly build homes for social rent at scale. Now that the UK Government has come back to the 1945 consensus, if I can put it that way, and removed the housing revenue account caps and so on, it means that our authorities are freed up to build the housing that we so very much need.141

The big thing will be for us to build the right sort of housing in the right places. So, some of it will just be standard social homes for rent, but some of it will be supported accommodation, and that will be both for people coming back in off the streets, and the right sorts of support and so on—and as I said, one size certainly doesn't fit all there—and it will also be step-down accommodation, so freeing up our NHS, for example, in allowing assisted placements out into the community. It will also mean building sustainable communities once more. Now, this is a point where David Melding and I don't agree, I have to say. I bitterly regret what happened with the right to buy and what happened in the council estates where I grew up, which have turned from sustainable mixed communities into communities where we have one socioeconomic group isolated away from everyone else. I think that is the wrong thing to have done, it did not work, and I would very much like to drive sustainable mixed communities back into those estates by building and adapting those houses so that a number of different uses can be put back there, so that, without wanting to seem nostalgic for my childhood, it resembles much more the estate that I grew up on than the isolated social groups that we currently see. Mike Hedges set out beautifully, actually, the things we need to do in order to achieve that, and we're very determined to do them.