Build, build, build!

In a guest post, Mike Hedges, Senedd Member for Swansea East, says that social housing is the answer to the housing crisis and that the pace of building must be stepped up.

There is a shortage of affordable rented accommodation, especially in the cities of Wales. The private sector has filled some of the gap due to the shortage of social housing. We have come full circle from the 1950s and early 1960s where private rented accommodation was common, through the period of sufficient social housing and the private rented sector consisting substantially of students, short-term lets and family members, to return to the large-scale private rented market of today.

There are two ways of increasing the building of new houses in Wales to provide more accommodation. 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.

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-scale council house building was occurring.

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.

Housing associations and councils that still have housing stock should have a common waiting list and 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 not being able to transfer and having to reapply.

We need to cap social rent at the consumer price index of inflation, so that rents do not outpace wages or benefits. It’s important to make the point that housing policy and a building skills policy are 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.

The commitment of councils to build houses and the funding for council house development using prudential borrowing and borrowing against the value of council stock is needed. Most importantly, the political will to tackle the housing shortage is needed with the creation of social housing being a priority. Everyone deserves a decent home that they can afford. It’s up to us to make it a reality, and I would urge the Welsh Government to set about a strategy that gets people into houses. The building of council houses has one other effect, it brings back some of the houses that are privately rented into owner-occupation. So, it’s a win-win for everybody, with increased social housing and an increased number of people owning their own homes.