North Wales Assembly Member Mark Isherwood has described Labour’s betrayal over the housing crisis in Wales as “the greatest social injustice inflicted on the people of Wales.”
Concluding yesterday’s Welsh Conservative Debate on Future Housing Needs, Mr Isherwood criticised the Welsh Government for continually ignoring warnings of a housing crisis and spoke of the need to focus on housing standards and making housing more affordable.
He said:
“In 1999, when Labour first came to power, there was no housing supply crisis in Wales, but they slashed the housing budgets and in their first three terms cut the supply of new affordable housing by 71 per cent. That is why we have a housing supply crisis.
“For a generation successive Welsh Governments have failed to tackle the housing crisis in Wales, pursuing mirages rather than addressing housing need.
“It was the second Assembly when the housing sector came together to start warning the Welsh Government there would be a housing crisis if they didn’t listen. What the Welsh Government did when I brought forward motions supporting the sector’s voice on that was put down amendments to remove the words ‘housing crisis’ rather than to address the warnings from the sector.
“By 2031, unless the Welsh Government change tack, there will be a 66,000 shortage of homes in Wales.
“Since 2010, more than twice as many council homes have been built in England than in all the 13 years combined with the previous Labour Government, when English waiting lists nearly doubled as the number of social homes for rent in England were cut by 421,000.
“In 2013, Wales was the only part of the UK to see a fall in new home registrations. In 2015, Wales was the only nation in the UK to decrease new home registrations. Even last year, Wales was the only UK nation to see new home completions go backwards.
“In addition to the Holman report, we had two reports in 2015 from the house building industry. We had the 2015 report from the Chartered Institute of Housing, we’ve had the 2015 report from the Bevan Foundation, a report from the Federation of Master Builders, all saying that we needed somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 houses a year, including 5,000 social homes, which this supposedly caring, supposedly socially just Welsh Government ignored.
“Instead, we’ve got their cynical 20,000 target amounting to just 4,000 affordable homes during the whole Assembly term and that’s inflated by adding intermediate rent and low-cost home ownership to their targets.
“The evidence shows that behind the rhetoric, Labour’s betrayal over housing in Wales for the last 17, 18years has been perhaps the greatest social injustice inflicted on the people of Wales since they took control in 1999.
“It’s about time they stopped shaking their heads, they stopped denying the truth, they stopped passing the buck - which they were doing long before the credit crunch, long before the 2010 change of Government - and they started admitting they got it wrong and perhaps, belatedly, trying to do something about it.”