Mark Isherwood
Shadow Housing Minister Mark Isherwood AM has welcomed the Housing Minister’s Statement on increasing the housing supply in Wales, but remains concerned he hasn’t acknowledged the scale of the housing crisis facing the country.
Responding to the Statement in the Chamber, Mr Isherwood questioned the Minister on a number of matters and asked him to respond to concerns raised with him by housing sector organisations, including the complete absence of rural housing supply from the Housing Supply Taskforce report and that housing standards are being promoted to the detriment of housing supply.
Mr Isherwood concluded his response with specific questions from house builders.
He said: “I am quoting exactly here. They say: “In fairness, there’s a lot of good stuff being said by various parties in Welsh Government, but the real problem is that when it comes to the delivering of housing no-one in the public sector really seems to get the message or be bothered whether schemes go ahead or not. Wales seems to have a very no-can-do attitude when it comes to getting us building, as the various statistics show, compared to the rest of the UK.”
Speaking afterwards, Mr Isherwood said: “Although I welcome this Statement, it fails to acknowledge the scale of the housing supply crisis facing wales.
“In Labour-run Wales, the number of new social homes in Wales was cut by 71% as waiting lists and overcrowding ballooned. An estimated 90,000 households are stuck on waiting lists, The number of social housing units increased during the 1990s, but they had fallen 29,000 by 2011 under Welsh Labour.
“The latest National House Building figures show that although New-home registrations in the UK rose by 28% in 2013 to 133,670, the highest number since 2007, Wales was the only part of the UK to see a fall in the number of new homes being registered last year.
“As, the 2012 UK Housing Review stated “it was the Welsh Government itself that gave housing lower priority in its overall budgets, so that by 2009/10 it had by far the lowest proportional level of housing expenditure of any of the four UK countries”.
“The Housing Minister still appears not to understand that the Housing Recovery Plan must be designed and delivered with all parts of the housing sector.
“He will waste resources unless he funds cost benefit analyses and recognises that a new approach is required to deliver rural housing supply, that the concerns I highlighted are shared widely by housebuilders or even that co-operative housing is not necessarily ‘affordable housing.”
