Peter Black and South Wales West Liberal Democrats

Debate on Affordable Housing

Peter Black: I propose that the National Assembly for Wales:

1. notes the current lack of affordable housing in Wales;

2. calls on the Welsh Assembly Government to:

a) develop the homebuy scheme into a fully funded key workers' scheme;

b) begin a limited trial of urban housing enablers. (NDM4006)

I propose amendment 3 in the name of Kirsty Williams. Add as a new sub point at the end of the motion:

c) develop a fully-funded strategy to bring empty homes back into use.

I would just like to query your statement on amendment 3. It is an add-on to the motion as opposed to an amendment to the existing motion. I do not understand, therefore, why that amendment would be deselected if amendment 1 were passed. Perhaps you could get some advice on that, because it seems to me that if you are adding something to a motion, it should not be deselected.

The Deputy Presiding Officer: Order. I have already received advice, thank you.

Peter Black: I can see that the Deputy First Minister is laughing, but when there are so many empty properties around, it is not a laughing matter. I am sure that those people who have to put up with the blight of empty properties would want a proper discussion and a chance for Members to vote on whether we should have an empty property strategy to deal with a situation, which is a blight on many communities. I am sure that those people who have to put up with the situation do not find it funny.

In proposing this motion and the amendment, I wish to say that there is no great significance in the fact that we have sought to amend our own motion. The amendment is there because of an oversight in the drafting of the motion. I felt that the action to deal with empty properties was so important that we had to have a proper debate on that in particular. For all the criticism that I have made of the Welsh Assembly Government's housing policies and the action that it has taken to deal with the affordable housing crisis-and I stand by some of that criticism-I acknowledge that some of its policies and some of the actions that it has started to take are valid and will, I believe, have an impact on the situation that we are facing.

I refer in particular to the mortgage rescue scheme, which the Deputy First Minister-I am sorry, the Deputy Minister for Housing; there are too many deputies in this place-has announced. That will put some money into helping people to stay in their own homes, and, because it is based on a homebuy-type scheme, it will also enable people to pay their mortgage while retaining

some equity in their property. That is a commendable scheme, and one that I hope has a high take-up. I will be looking to the Deputy Minister for Housing to report to Plenary and to committee on the impact and effectiveness of that scheme, and we will be looking to see whether all the money that has been allocated to it is used, to see whether it is oversubscribed, and to see how it is advertised. The scheme has a great deal of promise, and I hope that those people who are in danger of losing their home will be able to access it and make use of it.

I referred earlier during questions to the 18,000 empty properties that have been identified around Wales by the Local Government Data Unit. Those figures were for 2006-07, and I understand that Shelter Cymru and the Empty Homes Agency estimate that there are in fact around 24,500 empty homes in Wales at present, which have been empty for more than six months.

Anyone who has an empty property in their community-and I live next to one, although it has not got into a bad condition yet-will know how communities can be blighted by those properties. I know of several properties in my area that have been empty for 20 years or more and which are causing damp problems and other structural problems to nearby properties. Although the council uses the powers that are available to it to try to put them right, it can be impossible to persuade or cajole the owners into doing anything about them.

The biggest tragedy is that you have 24,500 properties empty and over 86,000 people on a waiting list for affordable housing, and people are losing their homes every day. Not enough is being done to bring those properties back into use. I hope that we can have an empty homes strategy-and I note

the Deputy Minister for Housing's earlier comments about a fully funded empty homes strategy; if you are going to have a strategy it has to be properly funded-so that we can show that we are doing something about the situation. It seems that, of all the Assembly Government's housing policies, this is what is missing at present: a proper strategy to deal with empty properties.

In saying that we should have a fully funded strategy, I do not mean that the Assembly Government-or local government-should go out and buy up empty properties and spend huge amounts of money, because that is not practical, despite what the Deputy Minister for Housing implied earlier. What I

am talking about is giving local authorities the tools to deal with the problem, and giving them resources so that they can put those tools into effect. The empty dwelling management orders that the Deputy Minister for Housing referred to earlier and which were brought in in 2006 are available but, as she correctly stated, not one has yet been brought to completion. One is in the offing, through the City and County of Swansea Council, and that is the first such order to be brought in in Wales.

Local councils are not rushing to use these orders because of the list of perhaps a dozen exemptions that apply to them, and the amount of work that is required to trace the owners and to negotiate with them, and then to submit the application to the relevant tribunal to implement the order. Effectively, these orders only work if you have a property that is in a reasonable condition, which does not fall within the exemptions, and which can be brought back into use virtually straight away, without any huge capital expenditure on behalf of councils, because councils need to recoup any expenditure that they make on these proprieties and on this order within the seven-year period for which the order lasts. Therefore, although these are a useful tool, they are not the sole answer to the empty homes issue around Wales.

I referred earlier to a proposal that councils should perhaps have more latitude in the amount of council tax that they charge on empty properties, which is a way forward. The Deputy Minister said that no representations have been made to her on that, and I am happy to accept her assurance on that, but representations were made in the previous Assembly to Sue Essex in her role as Minister. I am also aware that officials from the Deputy Minister's department have been approached by a number of local councils about this issue. If local councils have the power to penalise owners who allow properties to fall into dereliction and disrepair over a period of time and to ratchet up that punitive action against those landowners, those landowners may allow their properties to come back into use. I am not asking the Deputy Minister to give a commitment now, but as part of the work that her department is doing on empty properties, I ask her seriously to consider changing the legislation to give councils that flexibility and those powers.

While she is at it, she might also look at how valuation tribunals deal with empty properties. Some valuation tribunals have a habit of taking empty properties off their list altogether when they consider that they are not fit for habitation. That may sound like a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you are a valuation tribunal, but that property is still sitting there in the community and it no longer features on the council tax list, so the owner is not even being taxed, nor is there the potential of his or her being taxed, for the failure to do anything with that property.

Those are some suggestions for things that could go into an empty property strategy, along with giving councils the power to do more with empty dwelling management orders and the resources to do that, or perhaps looking at what limited resources they could have to pursue owners in a more forthright and effective way.

In the other parts of this motion, we refer to the homebuy scheme, and the Deputy Minister said earlier that she is in the process of putting a homebuy scheme into operation, which I welcome. What is the timescale for that homebuy scheme being re-introduced? I accept her assurances and what she says about the homebuy scheme needing to be better targeted; we need to target the homebuy scheme at the people who need it most. However, there has not been a proper scheme in place for over a year. We do not seem to have anything that will help people, particularly those in urban areas, who might use such a scheme, for example key workers and those on low incomes. Local government and others need to have more tools at their disposal to deal with the problem of affordable housing in this country.

In conclusion, this is not an outright attack on the Government; we are trying to make a constructive contribution to the debate on affordable housing and put forward some ideas that I hope that the Government will take on board so that a more complete strategy to tackle the problem for the short, medium and long term can be delivered.