Housing Supply and Homelessness
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes Excerpts(2 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, for bringing forward this important debate. My experiences, and those of people I know, of social housing, the private rental sector and the housing crisis in Wales drive my interest in this debate.
YouGov polling shows that young adults see housing as one of the most important issues facing the UK. This rings true, as housing is also a top concern raised by young people in schools and colleges time after time when I run sessions with them. They tell me that they fear they will never own their own home. Some also fear that they will not be able to move out of their family home due to soaring rents in the private rented sector. The situation for private renters is no cause for optimism either. According to the ONS, average rents in Wales rose by 8.5% in the past 12 months, and the median monthly rent in Wales for 2021-22 represented 23% of the median gross income of private renting households. However, for people on the lowest income, even the cheapest houses represented 31% of their income.
Most young people I know who have been able to move into rented accommodation cannot afford to save for a deposit to get on the housing ladder. The idea of owning a home is becoming increasingly unrealistic. According to analysis from the ONS, a full-time employee in Wales can expect to spend 6.1 times their earnings on purchasing a home in the local authority area in which they work. This is the reality of many young people across the UK, and it is not good enough.
I raised the issue in my maiden speech when I joined this House—that although housing is a devolved subject area, social security is not. The interplay of these two dimensions is of critical importance to the people of Wales. I share the view expressed earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that solving the housing crisis has to be achieved through poverty prevention. I also echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, that “homelessness is about people” and that we must not let people down.
The most recent statistics show that more than 11,000 people in Wales are in temporary accommodation —poor-quality accommodation, as was noted earlier. More than 2,000 of them are aged under 16, and there are more than 139,000 people on social housing waiting lists.
Plaid Cymru campaigned to end the scandal of the housing revenue account subsidy scheme, which saw local authorities send council house tenant rental income to Westminster rather than reinvesting within local housing. As a result, 11 local authorities now have the opportunity to build their own council housing once again, and they and housing associations should be supported to develop further housing as quickly as possible. These statistics and lived experiences speak for themselves. Therefore, how can His Majesty’s Government address this housing crisis?
Plaid Cymru believes that everybody has the right to a safe and affordable home in their community and that this should be the purpose of the housing system. We believe that introducing a right to adequate housing will underpin this. This right should be more than aspirational; it should be enforceable, providing citizens with a legally backed guarantee that their homes will meet acceptable standards for health and safety. Such a transformative approach is needed to truly address the needs of low-income households and struggling communities. This would reinforce the belief that housing is a fundamental human right.
To address the issue of soaring rents in the private rental sector, His Majesty’s Government could introduce rent controls, which could safeguard against unjustified rent increases and housing insecurity. Rent controls should be progressive and based on the residual income measure, ensuring that no rent leaves tenants unable to meet essential needs. This measure should apply to the cheapest 30% of rental properties, capping rents at local housing allowance rates; for the remaining 70% of rental properties, rent controls could be linked to housing quality, encouraging landlords to improve property standards. This could be modelled on systems in the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, also pointed to those countries as examples.
I add my support to the calls made by the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton, on changes to eligibility for housing allowance for under-35s. We could have a whole other debate on the impact that the current housing crisis will have in the long term, especially on declining birth rates. It will impact future generations.
To close, I ask the Minister to address in her remarks at the end of the debate her views on enshrining a right to adequate housing into law and on introducing rent controls. Have His Majesty’s Government looked outward to see what we can learn from other countries that have them in place? Our communities deserve real solutions that deliver safe, affordable homes. Diolch yn fawr.
Shared Prosperity Fund: Wales
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes Excerpts(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Baroness makes an important point. The short answer is yes: we will ensure that our counterparts in Wales have those discussions. I will pass the message on to my honourable friend in the other place so that the third sector is also a part of his discussions with the Welsh Government on how we can work closely together as central government, devolved government and the third sector.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, at present, Wales gets 23% of the shared prosperity fund. If the SPF is included in local government funding in England, this risks money being redirected through the Barnett formula. Will the Minister agree that a needs-based formula is better than a population-based formula for funding?
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
I understand the noble Baroness’s point. However, we have to recognise that there were no plans from the previous Government for the funding going to the devolved Governments. We have brought in a transitional year to prepare for post March 2026. All these conversations are yet to be had. I cannot make any particular comment on them, but I will come back to the noble Baroness once we finalise our proposals for after March 2026.
King’s Speech
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes Excerpts(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, I thank the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, for his service to this House. I warmly welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, to this Chamber, and I am pleased that the Welsh contingent here is growing. Croeso a llongyfarchiadau—welcome and congratulations.
I welcome the commitment to votes at 16 in the Government’s manifesto. I have long campaigned for votes at 16 and was involved in the establishment of the Welsh Youth Parliament during my time as NUS Wales deputy president. Votes at 16 and 17 would strengthen and renew democracy by enfranchising young people at a habit-forming age. This move would also see an end to the imbalance in which Scottish and Welsh 16 and 17 year-olds can participate in democracy but their English contemporaries cannot. Research suggests that when given the opportunity, 16 and 17 year-olds turn out more than those in the next age group. This pattern was seen during the Scottish independence referendum.
It was promising to hear a commitment to encouraging greater participation in the democratic process in the King’s Speech. This comes after a general election with the lowest turnout since 2001 and record low levels of trust in politics. This was also the first general election in which voters needed to prove their identity with strict voter ID rules. So I look forward to hearing more about the Government’s proposals for righting the democratic course we are on.
I turn now to the initial proposals on automatic voter registration, which I hope to see as part of the Government’s plans to encourage wider participation in the democratic process. The Electoral Commission has previously estimated that up to 8 million eligible voters are missing from the electoral rolls—either because they are not registered or because they are incorrectly registered. During the general election, 2.9 million registration applications were made via the online registration portal from the date the election was called until the deadline on 18 June. These figures suggest that while there has been a surge in applications, many people will have missed out on being able to vote because they were not registered in time.
I am pleased that following the passing of the Elections and Elected Bodies (Wales) Bill in the Senedd earlier this month, automatic voter registration will be piloted and introduced in Wales. I hope to see the UK follow soon.
I now turn to the proposals to reform this House. I begin with a reminder of my own view and that of Plaid Cymru—we do not believe that an unelected upper Chamber has a place in a modern democratic society. I therefore welcome the initial steps towards reform of this House with the removal of hereditary Peers. However, I am disappointed that this is happening in isolation, with other reforms being pushed to a further consultation.
As we look to receive this consultation from the Government on age caps—shortly, I hope—I encourage them to use the opportunity to think more broadly. In their first term at least, I urge them to consider term limits rather than simply an age limit. This would remove the “job for life” element, control the size of the House and bring in new ideas on a regular basis. Work has been diligently carried out in this area already, with the Lord Speaker’s Committee on the Size of the House also suggesting that term limits could work. This should be alongside wholesale reform. Term limits by themselves will not fix gender disparity; neither would they make the House more representative of the nations and regions, nor of socioeconomic background.
Gordon Brown made some interesting suggestions, such as replacing this Chamber with an assembly of the nations and regions. Do this Labour Government intend to progress with such recommendations? If so, when? We can begin a new chapter for our constitution and democracy, so let us not delay. I look forward to hearing more about the Government’s plans in the response from the noble Lord, Lord Khan. It has been 25 years since the first stage of Lords reform; I hope it will not take another 25 for the second to be completed. Diolch yn fawr iawn.