Shelter Cymru response to the Senedd Cymru, Local Government and Housing Committee consultation – Priorities for the Local Government and Housing Committee
About Shelter Cymru
We exist to defend the right to a safe home, because home is everything. We help thousands of people across all of Wales every year who have been affected by the housing emergency by offering free, confidential and independent advice. When necessary, we constructively challenge on behalf of people to ensure that they are properly assisted and to improve practice and learning.
We work with people who use our services as equals. We provide information, advice and support to help people identify the best options to prevent homelessness, to find and keep a home and to help them take back control of their own lives.
We fight the devastating impact of the housing emergency has on our people and communities with campaigning, advice and support – and we never give up.
Our Response
1. Wales is experiencing a housing emergency, impacting on over a million people[1] across our nation. No one government, local authority or organisation can tackle the housing emergency on its own. Nor will one policy intervention resolve the housing emergency. Only through close collaboration, ambition and listening to the people affected, will we be able to begin tackling this issue which affects 1 in 3 people across the length and breadth of Wales.
2. Home is everything. Without it, people are unable to lead happy, healthy and productive lives. That is why it is vital that this Sixth Senedd puts home at the centre of the agenda, at the heart of our shared recovery from Covid-19 and at the front of the Welsh Government’s pledge to build back better and fairer in Wales.[2]
3. Over the course of the next 12 months, we believe the committee should focus its work in the following areas:
a. Ending priority need and intentional homelessness. We were pleased to hear the Minister for Climate Change reaffirm the Welsh Government’s commitment to ending priority need and intentional homelessness. In 2018, the Equality, Local Government and Communities committee in the then-Assembly called for a phased abolition of priority need.[3] Shelter Cymru has long campaigned for this, given that our experience shows that priority need often acts as a barrier between people and homes. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that when working together, it is possible for the vast majority of people who need temporary accommodation to be housed temporarily and to begin the move-on process into long term homes. If the Welsh Government is committed to “no return to the streets” and to ending rough sleeping, then abolition of priority need is an integral step. We believe that the committee has a crucial role to play in driving and scrutinising the successful reform of homelessness services at local and devolved level.
b. Moving people on from temporary accommodation and into long term homes. The efforts by Welsh Government, local government and housing sector organisations to provide temporary accommodation for people pushed into homelessness throughout the pandemic was the right move and undoubtedly saved lives during the public health emergency. It is right, that people who are pushed into homelessness are supported into temporary accommodation, however, for a number of people across Wales, temporary accommodation is wholly unsuitable in the long term. Unfortunately, hotels and hostels are not homes. Yet throughout 2021 we have seen the numbers of people in temporary accommodation increase[4], meaning more people are stuck in limbo, before they can be supported into long term homes. As of June 2021, there were over 6400 people living in temporary accommodation in Wales, including over 1500 children and dependents. Unfortunately, this illustrates a situation which demonstrates the gap between the Welsh Government’s ambitious plans to make homelessness rare, brief and non-repeated[5] and the reality of the situation we face.
c. Without a safe and stable place to call home, it is impossible to lead healthy, happy and productive lives. That is why we believe the committee should be focussed on scrutinising the gap between the ambition and the reality, and the reasons why, despite the best efforts of local agencies, so many people are still unable to move into long term homes.
d. Developing more consensus on allocations policies in Wales and driving Welsh Government and local governments to lead in this space. The 2018 Assembly committee report[6] on preventing and tackling rough sleeping mentions notes the comparatively low level of social housing allocations to homeless households. Shelter Cymru worked with Swansea Council and RSLs in the area to look further into some of the issues with allocations, reaching 8 recommendations[7] on a range of areas. We know that allocations policies differ across Wales and even within regions of Wales depending on organisations. Through our casework we have witnessed how interpretation of the legislation on allocations has drifted over time, in some cases unreasonably blocking people from social housing so that they can only access private rented housing, even if it’s unsuitable for their needs. Evidence suggests more can be done to open up social housing allocations to people who are facing or experiencing homelessness.[8]. We believe there are a range of changes that should be made to improve this process for people, centring on former tenancy issues, data gathering and the critical Move-On strategy. We believe that the committee should play a leading role in catalysing this work and scrutinising its development.
e. Scrutiny of the Welsh Government’s ‘3 pronged approach’ to tackling second homes. The Welsh Government recently announced its three-pronged approach[9] to address the second homes issues affecting parts of Wales. While the second homes crisis is one part of a wider housing emergency in need of addressing, we believe that the committee should play a central role in assessing the impact of the Welsh Government’s intervention in this space. Given the particular impact that increased numbers of second homes has on Welsh speaking communities, we recommend that the committee works with the Culture, Communications, Welsh Language, Sport and International Relations Committee to ensure join-up and mitigate against silos.
f. Exploring student housing and accommodation in Wales, to make a fairer and more transparent system for all. We are working with the National Union of Students in Wales to survey students’ experiences of their homes across Wales. Our initial findings show that only 4 in 10 students believe their homes to be “good” or “very good” value for money, that over 60% of students have experienced a negative effect on their mental health as a result of issues with their home and that 40% of students had felt pressured into signing contracts for their home without understanding it, or having time to consider their options.
g. We believe that this committee should seek to work with the Children, Young People and Education Committee to hold a short inquiry into student housing in Wales.
4. Throughout the course of the 6th Senedd, we believe the committee should be focussed on the following:
a. Understanding the root causes of the housing emergency and driving the response to these issues in Wales. Our housing emergency in Wales is vast and growing. Nearly 70,000 households[10] are on waiting lists for a social home, over 6,400 people (including over 1,500 children) are in temporary accommodation and the number of people forced into sleeping rough has increased to over 100 people across Wales.[11] Across Wales, communities are being priced out of where they are rooted[12] by runaway house prices[13] and a generation of young people face a vanishing hope of being able to buy their own home, instead facing a future in an expensive rented sector.[14]
b. It doesn’t have to be this way. Working together with the Senedd, local authorities and stakeholders in the housing sector, we can tackle our shared housing emergency. But in order to do that, we need to address the issues driving the emergency, such as the relationship between land prices and how this drives house prices[15] and rent increases.
c. We recommend that the committee holds an inquiry into the housing emergency with a view to producing a report exploring Wales’ housing emergency setting out practical steps that the Welsh Government and Senedd should take to begin addressing this issue. Home is everything. Together, we can make sure that homelessness in Wales is truly rare, brief and unrepeated, we can ensure that rents remain truly affordable and that home ownership can change from being a dream to a reality.
d. Working together to end evictions into homelessness from social housing across Wales. As part of its five year rent settlement with social landlords for 2020-2025, the Welsh Government agreed with representative organisations that “social landlords will strengthen their approaches designed to minimise all evictions and eliminate evictions into homelessness’ from social housing.[16]
e. This aim was reinforced by the Homelessness Action Group report in July 2020[17] which also stated that homelessness is not just a housing issue and requires a multi-agency approach to end homelessness. Shelter Cymru has recently published research into how in Wales we can work together to end evictions into homelessness from social housing.[18]
f. We believe that the committee should undertake a review of the impact of the 2020-2025 rent settlement agreed between RSLs and the Welsh Government, specifically relating to evictions into homelessness from social housing.
5. Affordability of social rents. Linked to the above is a need to review how the rent settlement maps on to the actual affordability of social rents. The approach by which the Welsh Government sets rents was abandoned in Scotland some years ago in recognition of its limitations as a method for ensuring rents remain affordable. In some recent years our advice line has been inundated with calls from anxious tenants who have just received notification of a rent rise that they cannot afford. There is an urgent need to ensure the rent settlement maps on to actual affordability of rents in the context of tenants’ incomes and the cost of living, rather than a crude CPI+X per cent formula. In our view there is a real risk of a CPI+1 per cent rise being unaffordable in real terms, in the context of the financial pressures on tenants’ lives at this time. We also have concerns about some RSLs adopting ‘Living Rent’ models which peg rents to the lowest quartile of local wages. We are concerned that these models effectively price out people whose wages fall below the lowest quartile mark, and also that they introduce market-like patterns into social housing affordability that could ghettoise tenants on the lowest incomes by isolating them in areas where house prices are comparatively lower.
[1] https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2021-05-26/shocking-new-figures-demonstrate-scale-of-housing-crisis-in-wales-amidst-calls-for-immediate-welsh-government-action
[2] https://gov.wales/a-stronger-greener-fairer-wales-for-everyone
[3] https://senedd.wales/laid%20documents/cr-ld11517/cr-ld11517-e.pdf
[4] https://gov.wales/homelessness-accommodation-provision-and-rough-sleeping-june-2021
[5] https://gov.wales/working-prevent-homelessness-minister-accepts-principle-new-recommendations-end-homelessness-wales
[6] Ibid
[7] https://sheltercymru.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Allocation-of-Social-Housing-Report.pdf
[8] https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/homelessness-monitor-wales-2017
[9] https://gov.wales/welsh-government-announces-three-pronged-approach-address-second-homes-crisis
[10] https://sheltercymru.org.uk/what-is-social-housing-and-why-do-we-all-need-more-of-it/
[11] https://gov.wales/homelessness-accommodation-provision-and-rough-sleeping-june-2021
[12] https://www.thenational.wales/news/19464959.can-second-homes-crisis-wales-fixed/
[13] https://www.principality.co.uk/mortgages/house-price-index
[14] https://homelet.co.uk/homelet-rental-index/wales#:~:text=Wales'%20average%20rental%20values%20have,at%20%C2%A3723%20per%20month.
[15] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/land-prices-the-dog-thats-lost-its-bark/
[16] https://whq.org.uk/2019/12/19/five-year-social-housing-rent-settlement-revealed/
[17] https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2020-11/homelessness-action-group-report-july-2020.pdf
[18] https://sheltercymru.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Working-together-to-end-homelessness-from-social-housing_Report-1.pdf