Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this oral evidence session of the Welsh Affairs Committee. My name is Ruth Jones, and I am the Chair of the Committee. I am delighted to welcome the four witnesses. We will be hearing about housing and homelessness this afternoon. It is lovely to have Katie Dalton and Dr Steffan Evans back before the Committee. Katie Dalton is from Cymorth Cymru, and Dr Steffan Evans is from the Bevan Foundation. It is also really good to welcome Debbie Thomas from Crisis and Lauren Caley from Shelter. Thank you all for taking the time to appear before us in person. It is really helpful to have you here face-to-face. Thank you very much. Before we begin, I am going to ask members whether they have any declarations of interest to make before the Committee starts.

Yes, I have a declaration. I am a private landlord. I am registered with Rent Smart Wales in west Wales. Thank you.

I also need to declare that I am a member of the Bevan Foundation, just to be clear. Let us make a start. Thank you very much, as I say, to all four witnesses for appearing before us today. First of all, let me ask about the definitions and the impact of the housing crisis and homelessness. The Welsh Government said that in May 2025 there were just over 11,000 individuals housed in temporary accommodation. That was a while ago now. Can you set out for us the scale of the issue going forward? Is it better, worse or the same? What are the main reasons for people finding themselves in insecure housing or having difficulties staying in housing? I will ask all four of you. If somebody says something, you do not have to repeat it. We take it as read. It is already noted for the record. Shall I start off with Lauren?

The number of people in temporary accommodation has come down ever so slightly. It is about 10,500 people. It has stayed within that area very persistently since the end of the pandemic and the introduction of the new priority need category to prevent street homelessness. People may or may not be aware that the Welsh Government introduced a new priority need category so that anyone who would otherwise be street homeless would be offered emergency accommodation. That is not a priority need category that exists in England, but it does exist in Wales. In terms of the drivers of homelessness, for Shelter Cymru very persistently about 40% or 50% of our casework is people who are struggling in the private rented sector. Private rents in Wales are increasing faster than anywhere else in Great Britain. I was checking the data this morning. In the last year, private rents in Wales have gone up by 6% on average. In England and Scotland, it is close to the 3% mark. It is quite a significant shift there. There are challenges around the number of social homes that are being delivered. There has been a real shift. Absolutely full credit to the Welsh Government for what they have achieved, particularly in the last year. There has been a real prioritisation of social rented homes specifically. That will be my little intro, and I will leave others to continue.

Can I just check? You talked about priority need. My understanding is that the recent Bill in the Senedd ended it, and that it is moving to a more universal approach.

Over time, yes. We do not yet have a date for when priority need or intentionality tests will be going. There is a commitment in what was the Bill, which has passed through the Senedd, that they will be phased out over time, but probably not before 2030 or 2031. Eventually we will get there.

That is helpful. Thank you for clarifying that.

We want those things taken out as soon as possible. I know all of us have worked together to push for that to come out as soon as possible. In terms of setting the scene on homelessness in Wales, I completely agree with what Lauren has said. It is also worth noting that, although the level has dipped ever so slightly in the last year, it is still incredibly high. At Crisis we publish our homelessness monitor every three years, and it looks at and assesses homelessness. It shows that there has been a steeper rise in Wales than anywhere else in GB, and a bigger reliance on unsuitable temporary accommodation than elsewhere. Certainly, a lot of our members are stuck in temporary accommodation for months on end. They describe it as like being left in limbo. They do not know when it is going to come to an end. That means they struggle to access employment and even to develop relationships within their family. I was speaking to a member who has two young kids. He cannot really have them overnight because he is not allowed to have anyone in his temporary accommodation overnight, and he has to vacate the temporary accommodation during the day. He is in a position where he is taking his kids to the park in the rain just to spend time with them. There are some really sad stories about people who are stuck in temporary accommodation. We really need that drive to boost our housing supply. As Lauren says, the private rented sector is really difficult. There is a waiting list of 90,000 for social homes in Wales. A lot of our members want a social home, but they are struggling to get access to them. They are turning to the private rented sector, but the situation of the PRS in Wales is pretty dire. We are the most adversely affected across GB in terms of LHA. Only 1% of private rented homes on the market are affordable for people who rely on LHA and housing benefit. Across some of your constituencies, it dips as low as 0.3%. It is a pretty dire situation. It is not all bleak. We have this Bill, which went through a couple of weeks ago. I know all of us on the panel are massive advocates and really supportive of it. It does a lot of great things, but the devil will be in the implementation. We really need to make sure it is implemented well. The other thing that we really need to do, which is why I am so grateful to be invited today, is look at the levers in Westminster. Our research, our homelessness monitor, shows that if we really want to end homelessness, there is great progress being made in terms of policies in Wales, but that needs to be supplemented and backed up with the levers that can be pulled in Westminster, particularly around immigration and benefits.

We will come on to the bigger picture in the UK in a minute. When you talk about GB, just to be clear for the record, are you excluding Northern Ireland?

Yes, the research is specific to England, Wales and Scotland.

That is helpful. Thank you very much. Dr Steffan Evans, is there anything you want to add?

I would echo what both have already said. There are two bits that I was going to add. First, we published some work in September demonstrating the impact on children of living in temporary accommodation for a long period of time. Debbie has already mentioned familial connections, but it also has a big impact on their education and health. If we want to make sure that children have an opportunity to thrive in Wales, this is the greatest inequity, arguably, within our society on that front. The long-term impact on those children is another key factor. In terms of the factors that cause this, both have covered most of the points. I know we will come on to some of them in a short while. The broader pressures that people face around income and costs are part of this. We have had the announcement today on a new energy price cap. That is part of the equation. It is not just about local housing allowance. There are issues around the bedroom tax, the broader way that the benefit system works and how it interacts with people’s incomes. There is also some stuff that might be having an effect in terms of how stuff like VAT works to incentivise people to develop and bring properties to market. All of these are adding to the issues that both have already mentioned.

Initially, one of the big drivers for the high numbers in temporary accommodation was the Welsh Government’s admirable approach to Everyone In during the pandemic. We saw a real shift on hidden homelessness, which is something that both we, as key stakeholders, and the Welsh Government had been unable to quantify at all before that point by the very nature of people being hidden. Some of it was people who were just getting by in other places of shelter, such as cars and unused buildings. Some of it was because people felt they were not going to be accepted by the council for help because of things such as priority need and intentionality. They may have spent 15 or 20 years being told by the local authority, “You do not qualify for help”, so they then stopped going there. A big factor in that huge increase during the covid pandemic was hidden homelessness. As we saw the pandemic continue, relationship breakdown also became a major factor, particularly when people were forced to be inside their homes and were not allowed out, were isolating and all the rest of it. That put huge pressure on families and spousal relationships. A lot of young people really struggled. Family dynamics meant that young people were then asked to leave the family home and ended up in temporary accommodation. That is an important factor when considering where we are now. That is where some of that started. That was for very good reasons in terms of Welsh Government policy. We fully support that approach of Everyone In. We really hope the abolition of priority need and intentionality happens much sooner than is currently planned. For us, this is a key part of the Homelessness Bill. It is one of the biggest barriers to people getting the help they need. It is unacceptable that it may well only happen in 2030-31. In our view, it needs to happen much quicker. The other thing I would say is that the length of time that people are in temporary accommodation is just as bad, in many cases, as the numbers who are in temporary accommodation. In our mind, temporary accommodation was only ever something that should be for up to a six-month maximum. It should be a transitional placement while people look for another type of secure housing. We know of people who have been there for 18 months or two years, sometimes with children as well. That can be devastating for a person’s ability to live and thrive, as some of my colleagues have pointed out. The other thing I would say about the drivers of people being stuck in temporary accommodation for lengthy periods—I know we will go on to talk about the welfare system—is that, for me, local housing allowance is one of the key factors that keeps people in temporary accommodation. They are simply unable to leave. It traps far too many people. This is particularly significant for young people, who are entitled only to the shared accommodation rate if they are under 35. In addition to temporary accommodation, I would also highlight supported accommodation. This is commissioned supported accommodation, which is a different category. You might well expect to stay there for up to two years or so in order to regain skills and confidence to move on to independent living. There are also people who are stuck in supported accommodation far longer than is necessary because they cannot access any affordable housing. That means the waiting list for supported accommodation may well include people in temporary accommodation who are unable to get into that supported accommodation because people are not able to move out of it. There are limited spaces within those situations.

That makes sense. Debbie, you alluded to the fact that you have data for three of the four countries. Each country seems to produce data slightly differently. There are some UK-wide policies and levers, as you already talked about. Would it be helpful if we had UK comparable data? That would mean we could compare apples with apples—at the moment, we seem to be comparing apples with pears.

There are two elements to it. It would be useful to have some data points that you could compare across the nations, but I would not want it to get to a point where it trumps all else, if that makes sense. You want to have some things that enable us to compare, but, if different levels of government have slightly different priorities or slightly different approaches to legislation, you might want to have some different data to allow them to take those into account. Secondly, having some consistency within the data that we have in Wales is also important, so that we can compare whether things are getting better or worse in Wales over time. You would not want to lose all that. You would not want to have UK-wide common data points but lose the ability to track some of the stuff that has happened historically. Yes, but with enough space for some variation as well.

That makes sense. Katie, do you want to add anything?

I fully agree with that. It is helpful to be able to compare across nations. However, it is important to recognise the distinctive approach that has been taken to homelessness in Wales. I am sure colleagues in Scotland would argue the same. Within Wales, we have done a lot of work on the ending homelessness outcomes framework. That was a really collaborative approach taken with Welsh Government and key stakeholders, involving people with lived experience to contribute to that and to think about the things that matter most to people. That is not always the same as in other nations of the UK. We have a particularly proud history of pursuing a trauma and psychology-informed approach in Wales. That has helped to shape some of our legislation and policy around things such as equalities, dignity and respect. The EHOF involves collecting all the data you would expect to be collected on the numbers of people accessing services and the length of time that people are in accommodation, but it also includes some of those things that we know are really important to a person-centred approach. If there were a call for standardised data across the UK, I would worry that we would lose some of that in Wales. The approach that Steffan has outlined is absolutely the right one.

I agree with what has been said. We are moving to very different legislation in Wales. It is going to be really important that we have Wales-specific data to track its progress. However, it is really important that we have some key elements that are comparable across the UK, as Steffan has said. In particular, that is something Crisis has found really difficult, having stats that we can compare across GB and across the nations. Through our work with Heriot-Watt University and the homelessness monitor, we have developed a concept of core homelessness so that we can make those comparisons across the nations. That is a lot of work. It is a lot of triangulation. If there was something that we could do to get those high-level comparable stats without, as Steffan and Katie have said, trampling on the importance of monitoring how things are in the nations, that would be really helpful. At the moment, we do not have clear data on people who are homeless and who are not accessing the statutory system. We also have a real lack of data on people who have no recourse to public funding, which comes up all the time in meetings that we all attend in Wales. If there were efforts to push on those, it would be really helpful. I would also say that I am aware that, a few years ago, the Government Statistical Service did some work looking at the harmonisation of homelessness data across the nations. It made just three recommendations about how that data could be worked on to collaborate more easily. Crisis would support those recommendations and look to take them forward.

I would echo support for what my colleagues have said, but I would make one brief cautionary point. In any kind of standardisation, I would not want the UK Government approach to be the blanket approach. There are definitely areas where the data for England is better than the data that we have for Wales. Debbie alluded to the fact that over 90,000 households are waiting for a social home. That figure has come through FOI requests that Shelter Cymru led on. That is not a Welsh Government or local authority-led data collection exercise, which does happen in England. In Wales, we have very up-to-the-moment data about temporary accommodation. You were quoting the figures. It is a monthly update. We know the types of accommodation people are in. If the use of B&Bs and hotels is going up in certain areas, we can have those conversations. If more children are appearing in those unsuitable temporary accommodation options, we can have those conversations. Yes, there should be standardisation to the best for all rather than picking one.

Thank you all for your answers. You have been detailed. Diolch yn fawr iawn. I will start with Katie, if I may, from Cymorth Cymru. You touched on it in the first question, so perhaps this is an opportunity to fill in a little more of the detail. How has housing insecurity and homelessness in Wales changed over the past decade? I know you mentioned covid, but did you see a change even before covid came along?

If we go to a decade ago, we are probably around the implementation of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, which at the time was a groundbreaking, internationally recognised piece of legislation that brought in prevention duties for the first time. That was a real change in approach from local authorities, predominantly, which then had to help to prevent homelessness for people who presented to them as being threatened with homelessness within 56 days. That required a real shift in culture as well as a shift in working practices. Over time, there has been a fairly consistent rate of prevention that is applied. It has ranged slightly over time. It was around 66% in the early years. The last statistics showed it to be about 57%, but it is certainly around that 60% point. Prior to the implementation of the 2014 Act, that prevention work was not happening. Although we would all like it to be 100%, preventing homelessness for those numbers of people has a significant impact on their lives, on the lives of their families and their ability to engage in health services, work, education and all the rest of it. That is a really important part of the journey that we have seen change over the first part of that decade. As I have said, the impact of the covid pandemic was significant. In Wales, we saw some really strong ministerial leadership around that. The Minister at the time, Julie James, was very quick off the mark to say that Wales was going to take the Everyone In approach, announcing £10 million initially to get people into temporary accommodation. That is when we saw huge numbers starting to come into temporary accommodation. They also briefed local authorities that they should disregard intentionality, priority need and no recourse to public funds and make sure that truly everyone was able to get in and get safe. That has really shaped the picture now as we have gone forward since the start of the pandemic. People have tried to learn lessons from that and have changed policy and legislation over time as a result. Initially, there were probably far more people sleeping in places such as night shelters and sharing floor space, particularly during the winter months. There was a move during covid to try to make sure that as many people as possible had self-contained accommodation. Initially, that was for the purpose of infection control, but the focus on dignity for people within temporary accommodation then started to shape how temporary accommodation looked in Wales. Far too many people are still in hotels and B&Bs, but there has been a lot of capital investment from the Welsh Government that has looked to transform and improve some temporary accommodation. That happened initially in May 2020. When I was going back over covid notes, I was sure it was later on, but time was so condensed then. The Welsh Government announced their phase 2 approach, which was about trying to get people out of temporary accommodation and into settled homes, and it was focused on rapid rehousing. That is another shift in the approach in Wales. The premise of rapid rehousing is that people should spend as little time as possible in temporary accommodation. We should move them as rapidly as possible into a settled home. That move has probably happened at the most difficult time, with 11,000 people in temporary accommodation. There has been a clear focus on supporting local authorities to move towards that. There have been some really impressive shifts in some local areas, but there is still a long way to go. Coming out of the pandemic, there was a sense that we did not want to send people back on to the streets. The addition of an additional priority need category for people who were street homeless then came into force. All those people who, for decades, had never been able to access temporary accommodation were all of a sudden entitled to it. As we move forward to the Homelessness Bill, there has been a real shift in how we think about tackling homelessness, not just from a housing perspective but from a public service perspective. The Bill has some fantastic new duties on things such as health services, social services, probation and the criminal justice system to try to take a whole-system prevention approach. Within that, we have been dealing with the consequences of decades of underfunding of social house building. The combination of a lack of investment and social house building, combined with things like the right to buy, when it was in existence in Wales, has meant that we are now suffering the consequences of a storm that was decades in the making. You mentioned the Welsh Government’s ambition in this Senedd term to build 20,000 homes, which should be achieved slightly late but by the end of this calendar year. That is just the first step. That is never going to undo those several decades. Over the last 10 years, there has been a real shift in approaches, a change in culture and a change in policy and legislation. It has been flexible and responsive. It has become far more trauma-informed and person-centred, but that has not come without the struggles around things such as the lack of social housing and the welfare system, which have constrained that move in Wales. I hope that paints a helpful picture.

That is fine. I cannot believe that six years have gone since the pandemic. It has just gone, and we are still living with the effects of what happened. Dr Evans, I know the Bevan Foundation has done a lot of work in this field. What is the effect of homelessness on children and families, and on their life chances?

The report that we published in September last year painted a pretty devastating picture in terms of the impact on children. That goes from super-practical things such as not having space to do homework or the distances that children might have to travel to get to school because they are now placed in a B&B or hotel in a different town of a local authority, particularly in rural areas where the distances that people might have to travel are much greater, to the impact emotionally, health-wise and all of that. We know it has a long impact throughout their lives. Building on something that Katie said, over the last 20 years, although the number of people living in poverty in Wales has not increased, the depth of that poverty has increased significantly. Nearly half of people living in poverty in Wales now live in deep or very deep poverty. That means people have less money to draw on to balance some of the other challenges they face, and it has made it even worse for children in temporary accommodation because they do not have places to go to have the opportunities that other children take for granted.

Lauren, bearing in mind my declaration of interest—be kind to the private rented sector—how would you assess the quality and variety of housing stock in Wales and the impact it has on housing insecurity and homelessness?

Very quickly, I will just answer the question you asked Steffan. The peer researchers at Shelter Cymru supported the work of the Bevan Foundation and spoke to families who were in temporary accommodation, or who had been in temporary accommodation recently. What really came across in those conversations is how much children are aware of, and at an age that is so much younger than any of us would expect. There are six and seven-year-olds out there who are afraid of the post coming or of the mobile phone ringing because they know what all this means. One of the volunteers with Shelter Cymru—she is a grown-up now and has just qualified to be a social worker—was in temporary accommodation in Wales as a child 15 years ago. She speaks very eloquently about its lifelong impact on her. It was a shared home with a shared bathroom. She still really struggles to sleep through the night. The noises that might be expected in a home signify for her this very deep-rooted fear from childhood that it is not a safe space because she had been in temporary accommodation. We do not have the longitudinal research to understand it, but from the work that we all do, the anecdotal evidence is massive that the impact is lifelong. I would do her a disservice if I did not quickly mention that.

By all means share, because it is so important for us to understand this.

On the private rented sector, in terms of quality of homes, it is really difficult. We do not hold our private landlords to the same standards that we hold our social landlords—far from it. We have the Welsh housing quality standard for social homes, which is a high standard and rightly so. These are people’s homes. This is the foundation of every other thing they do in their life, is it not? For private renting, it is not much above fitness for human habitation. There are lots of landlords out there who are absolutely fantastic and are providing homes that are far above that. If we do not have the regulations in place to set a bar, there will be people who abuse the system and who offer homes significantly below that. We have been working with a school in Newport that has quite a lot of multi-generational families who are privately renting. The condition of some of these homes—there are whole families across three generations in one room with damp and mould—is so far beyond what you would ever expect to see. There are good landlords out there, but unless we are holding all our landlords to the same standard, we will have that wild variation. In terms of affordability, we are going to have a report coming out in April. I like to make things difficult for myself and colleagues at Shelter Cymru. We are producing what we believe is a more accurate definition of affordability, which takes into account not just the monthly rental costs, the housing costs that Steffan was talking about, the council tax that people face and potentially even wi-fi. The extent to which that is essential for work and education these days has really shifted with the pandemic, has it not? With the modelling that we are doing on that, I will have a more concrete answer very soon, but it is slim pickings. The growth of the private renter sector in the last 10 or 20 years has been absolutely huge. With that growth, the proportion of homeowners and social renters has reduced. That is just the way it works. With that growth has come a shift in who the PRS is for. It is no longer a tenure of choice. It is quite often a tenure of last resort for lots of people because we are not giving them the other options they might have had 20 or 30 years ago.

I would love to talk about the Welsh Government, but I know I am not allowed. Perhaps we will catch up afterwards. Just to finalise, Debbie, if it is okay to ask you this question, we all have in our mailboxes situations where people have separated later on in life or young people who are looking for accommodation, but there seems to be, certainly in my mailbox in Caerfyrddin, a whole range of people who are now in the situation of looking for accommodation. What do we need? What type of housing do we need? Are we looking more at families or single people? What is needed to be built or changed? I am thinking of the work that Carmarthenshire County Council have done in changing an office block into single-person accommodation, because that is what we needed in Caerfyrddin. That is where the gap is. They are doing a similar project in Ammanford. What do we need?

That is a good question. It links in with some of what Katie was saying and this directional shift, which is absolutely the right shift, in the national plan to end homelessness through a rapid housing approach. As Lauren says, a home is someone’s everything. We need to make sure that we can move people into homes straightaway. It is not as simple as throwing out a number and making sure we build that number of homes. It is about making sure that we are building the right homes that match the needs. There has been quite a lot of work, through the Ending Homelessness National Advisory Board, which our CEO chaired and which recently came to an end because the Senedd term is coming to an end, to do a deep-dive exercise across different local authorities and to think about how information on the needs of people experiencing homelessness tracks through into supply planning. There are a lot of recommendations from that work, and much more work is going to need to happen to make that a reality and to make sure we are building more social and affordable homes that match needs and match the requirements of people coming through. As you pointed to, people come to homelessness for all kinds of reasons and from all kinds of backgrounds. Relationship breakdown is probably one of the most prevalent reasons that we see within our South Wales Skylight service, but the general cost of living is so difficult that, if someone loses their job or their rent increases, it can be a trigger into homelessness. People leaving prison really struggle to access employment. They can often easily fall into homelessness as well. It is all sorts of different people. From a UK Government perspective, I would highlight one thing that would really help. So many of the people we support at Crisis really struggle because of the shared accommodation rate being so limited for people up to 35 years of age. We have a situation where rents in Wales, talking about things that have changed over the last decade, have definitely increased whereas rates of LHA have not been restored to cover those rents. People are really struggling anyway, but people who are under 35 are particularly struggling to afford something in the private sector. That is something that definitely needs to change.

I was going to say that we have just started a piece of work, funded by the Oak Foundation, that is looking at, in particular, how you develop more one-beds and properties for larger families and disabled people. The reason we have focused on them is that those are the groups that either seem to be disproportionately represented in TA or are there for a very long time. Anecdotally, what we have heard is that developers like to build two, three and four-beds because they have a model that works for getting those houses built. We need those houses built because we need them as well, but there is a risk that we overlook those three groups. That is a piece of work that we are going to be doing.

From our perspective, what we hear from support providers in our membership and local authorities is that there is a need for single-bedroom properties. That is the area that has been underdeveloped over the last few decades. One of the biggest challenges, though, is how you configure that because we probably do not want to see loads of blocks of one-bedroom properties where people who have been through the homelessness system and who are carrying trauma are all housed in blocks together, where there might be stigma and things like that. We would like to see much more mixed communities, but that requires different parts of national and local government to be talking to each other. I recently visited a new estate up in Caernarfon. There were properties that were developed specifically for disabled families that had very specific needs. There was also a property for a Housing First client who had experienced long-term homelessness. That was built into the planning and development of the estate. The quantity of single-bedroom properties that we need makes this really difficult, but wherever possible, we want to have mixed communities and mixed estates where people are able to have a fresh start without stigma and to thrive as part of a broader community.

Just on that very specific point, Ms Dalton, are you finding any evidence as yet of accommodation being created or renovated above the high street? For example, in Aberystwyth we are now starting to see people deciding that what used to be the second floor of a shop is no longer viable and they are renovating it. I am just interested in, first, whether that is something you are seeing elsewhere in Wales and, secondly, whether it is a good model for providing the mixed community that you mentioned.

My view on this is always that building large quantities of social housing is the endgame. That is the thing that is going to have the greatest impact, but that takes time. There are other solutions, which include changing commercial properties into homes, bringing long-term voids back into use or other changes to existing buildings. One of the funds in Wales, the transitional accommodation capital programme, has enabled local authorities to work on that with partners. That has been a far more flexible capital funding pot that has enabled local authorities to purchase buildings outright, to change commercial properties into homes and to bring long-term voids back into use. That is really important. We have to make use of whatever we have in Wales. We cannot simply wait for the developments to be built. That will take too long and we have too many individuals and families who need it now. All those solutions should be on the table.

We will have a report out next month looking at some of the barriers to doing more of that. We will share that with the Committee, because I am sure it would be of interest.

Following the discussion on one-bed properties, I have a question specifically for Dr Steffan Evans. You have said that the social security system is creating demand for more one-bed properties. I think I know where you are going with that but, for the record, can you give us some detail as to your rationale?

Yes, absolutely. The social security system is doing it in two ways. The first way is for those in social housing. The bedroom tax deducts how much of the housing element of UC you have if you are deemed to have a spare bedroom. For context, about 30,000 households in Wales are affected by that policy. About 20,000 of those are recipients of universal credit. This is only for people in the social housing sector. About 20% of all people living in social housing who receive universal credit are affected by the policy. That is a decade and a half on from the policy coming into force. The policy has not delivered what was intended, which is to move people into properties better suited to their needs, largely because, as we have already touched on, we do not necessarily have those smaller properties to meet people’s needs. That is one major part of it. It also has other implications. Our concern on the Welsh level is that, if you look at the data, we have not built more one-bed social housing proportionally than we had before. The sector stopped campaigning against the bedroom tax. We have ended up not doing one thing or the other, which has trapped people in the system. That is a source of concern. We have already heard a fair bit about the local housing allowance. In particular, for young people, you are limited to having only enough to have space in a shared property. In large parts of Wales, those shared properties do not exist. That is creating a challenge for people.

If I can quickly come in, when we were talking about one-beds, I was thinking, “Should I chip in?” As Steffan was saying, I would personally consider the demand for one-beds to be an artificial demand that is created by policy. People are not coming to us saying, “I want a studio flat” or “I want a one-bed flat”. It comes back to what homes are for. Are we providing homes for people for the long haul, homes that they will grow into, that they will start a family in and that will last them? When their teenagers leave their social home, we are then introducing the bedroom tax. There is then not a home for those young adults to come back to, as they have to downsize. With the research we have done around the social home waiting list, single-income households are disproportionately represented on those lists, whether they are single people living alone or lone-parent families. This demand for one-bed homes is stemming from these policy decisions. Local authorities across Wales tell us that, as Steffan was saying, there is a real bottleneck effect where single people are trapped in temporary accommodation because there is a lack of options. There is some real creativity by some local authorities to see whether there are ways for people to share tenancies and navigate around that, but we are putting people into shared living situations that they may not have opted for. There is a lot to unpick here, which really comes back to, “What is a home for? What do we want our homes to achieve?” Is there a way to move out of this thinking, which is led by a lack of stock and a lack of resource? How do we manage this limited resource? It goes back to the Bevanite tradition of what a home is.

This is a general point, but it connects with what both Steffan and Lauren are saying. Ahead of the UK Government drafting their action plan to end homelessness, the sector in Wales, particularly through the Ending Homelessness National Advisory Board but also through the Homes For All Cymru sector alliance, which Shelter helps to steer, wrote to the UK Government to urge that the plan looked at levers that would help in Wales. One of those things was talking about benefits more broadly. Steffan, Lauren and I have touched on particular issues, but there are so many issues within the benefits system that really drive homelessness. I will not repeat things that we have discussed, but the benefits cap is a particular issue. It is so hard to navigate the system. All our members always tell us how difficult it is to navigate the system, and the timing of it means that, when they are waiting for their first payment to come in, they are often sleeping on the streets or begging in the interim because they do not have an income in between. There are so many difficulties with it and with PIP. A lot of people who experience homelessness experience and develop physical issues with their health as a result of being homeless, and they then become eligible for PIP, but there are loads of difficulties in terms of the barriers to getting medical evidence, particularly for the people we work with who might not necessarily be registered with a GP or might not be able to afford to pay for doctor’s notes. There are so many difficult issues across the benefit system that one of the things that the sector asked for was whether there could be a review of how benefits are working to drive homelessness and what changes overall, across all those areas, the UK Government could look to make that would really help to prevent homelessness across all the nations.

I am conscious of time, and we have a lot of other UK levers that we want to talk about. You are giving us really comprehensive answers, but if we could shorten them, that would be really helpful. Henry Tufnell is going to ensure that happens.

I want to continue on the Welsh Government. Katie gave a detailed answer in respect of the 2014 Act, covid and the most recent legislation that has come out. We have touched on that quite a lot. The context to my question is the lack of availability and affordability in the private rented sector, which comes on top of a 90,000-person waiting list for social housing. That does not surprise me, given the number of people who are waiting for housing in my constituency in Pembrokeshire. The Chair alluded to the number of people in temporary accommodation. Did the Housing (Wales) Act 2014 push people into temporary accommodation to some extent? Is this the legacy of that Act? You have a bulging of temporary accommodation. The duty still sits with the local authority, but that is when the pinch point comes because of the lack of availability.

As Katie alluded to earlier, the No One Left Out approach during covid has driven higher numbers in temporary accommodation, but I would say—

Is that a compound effect?

It is much better for people to be in temporary accommodation than sleeping rough on the streets.

I am not disputing that.

I know you are not. The 2014 Act was helpful, as Katie said. It moved us forward, but it did not move us forward enough. One of the issues was that it brought in prevention duties, but only for 56 days. The new Bill is going to shift that to six months, which will help to reduce the number of people coming through the system into temporary accommodation. We also need to look at the other prevention levers. One of the other great things that the Bill does, which I hope will drive down our use of temporary accommodation, is look at the public sector duties to help prevent, identify and reduce homelessness and to stop people having to lose their homes and go through the temporary accommodation system. One thing that I really wanted to make sure I drew to the Committee’s attention was the list of bodies included within the Bill. We were hoping it would include the police, the wider DWP and the Home Office, because there are clear things they can do to help prevent homelessness, but our understanding is that the Welsh Government could not get the consent of the UK Government in time to include those bodies on the face of the Bill before it passed. We are really keen to see that the list of bodies covered under our new duties to ask, act and co-operate in Wales is reviewed after the Bill has been in place for two years. We really want to be in a position then to have consent from the UK Government to add more bodies to that list. Sorry, I know I have drifted off the point, but it does link in, because there is so much more that we can do in terms of prevention to reduce the numbers in temporary accommodation. Yes, you have the housing supply side, which we have talked about quite a lot, but you also have the other side, which is preventing people from going into it in the first place. We need to look at both sides.

That is what I was trying to get to. Lauren talked about implementation being the critical part of the new legislation that is coming through. It is really helpful to hear you outline which public bodies and measures might be in place in two years.

I would not say that the 2014 Act has driven people into temporary accommodation. The 2014 Act brought in the prevention duties, which have stopped as many people going into temporary accommodation as would have before the Act. Other external factors have driven the numbers in temporary accommodation. I would not say it was the 2014 Act.

If you have an Act that has an emphasis on rehousing and you have covid on top of that, it would have played a part in pushing numbers into temporary accommodation. If you are not building enough homes, you exacerbate the problem with respect to the PRS. That is on top of the inability of local authorities to build more housing.

My view is that the 2014 Act does not include anything that would have specifically driven people into temporary accommodation. It did not change, as the new Bill does, the entitlement to temporary accommodation. The new Bill expands the number of people who will be able to get temporary accommodation by getting rid of priority need and intentionality. The 2014 Act retained those barriers. The 2014 Act stopped people being able to get help, and it left people on the streets. When we got to covid and it turned into the Everyone In approach, that is when all those people who could not get help because of the 2014 Act came forward all of a sudden, because they were entitled to help. The 2014 Act has not led to an increase in people in temporary accommodation, but as you said, some of the actions taken during covid, which were admirable, have led to that. The stuff in the background is the housing market, the private rented sector and the lack of social housing.

The under-investment in social homes significantly predates devolution in Wales. We are going back to the 1980s, and it is a UK-wide problem, not a Wales-specific problem. There is a lot to celebrate about what the Welsh Government have achieved in the last year and the affordable homes that they have delivered. Close to 90% are social rent homes specifically. They are not intermediate rent, shared ownership or homes in the social sector; they are social rent homes. Those come with the affordability, security and support that people actually need. Meanwhile, areas such as London are reducing their targets because it is difficult to build right now. This is a much bigger problem than just Wales.

Lauren, could you expand a bit on your implementation point with respect to the legislation that was most recently implemented by the Welsh Government? You talked about the key being implementation. I was wondering whether you could expand on that a little.

It might have been Debbie, but I also have an opinion.

You said it right at the beginning of the evidence session. Debbie has expanded a bit on some of the aspects and some of the levers within the legislation that will help, but I was wondering whether there was anything you wanted to add on top of that.

Absolutely, yes. We have been very transparent at Shelter Cymru that we support the aims of the new Homelessness Bill, but we are very concerned about how it will be delivered in practice. The local authority teams have been saying, “We support the values and the ethos of this, but we do not know how we are going to do it”. The Welsh Government have set out a really clear invest-to-save model and how the Bill would be able to provide savings over time that will bring more money in, but the challenge for the Welsh Government is how they are funded with this block grant. They do not have the borrowing powers that the UK Government have. Any sort of invest-to-save approach relies on up-front investment because business carries on as usual while we are trying to implement change. I gave evidence to the Local Government and Housing Committee in the Senedd saying the same thing. We have not figured out how to get through this teething period when it is business as usual and we are introducing change in order to see the savings and benefits for people in the longer term. The UK Government have a role to play in finding a way to support the Welsh Government to achieve that. Perhaps it could be a little testing ground for how some of the things might work to support other areas in the UK.

Dr Evans, I appreciate that you are the one person who has not commented on this little section. I was wondering whether you want to add anything before I hand back to the Chair.

Our concern with the latest legislation is that it still relies a lot on secondary legislation to make stuff happen. There are things where the legislation, on the face of it, stops short of requiring temporary accommodation to meet the minimum fitness for human habitation standards. It has left that to secondary legislation to do. We think there is an opportunity to bring more on to the face of the Bill to make sure that these in-principle points are not left to those issues around local authority implementation and we set out, “These are the minimum standards and we are going to place them on the face of the Bill to get some things moving”.

On implementation, Steffan is absolutely right. There are a number of things that have been left to regulations or statutory guidance. There is a whole piece of work to be done with the sector and local authority colleagues to make sure that the intent of the legislation is followed through in practice. Interpretation is always a difficulty with legislation. The 22 local authorities in Wales can sometimes interpret legislation very differently. We had shared figures in the past that showed that some local authorities were still using priority need and intentionality and others were not using them at all. There were very different applications. It will be about implementation in terms of funding and resourcing, and thinking about how UK Government might, as Lauren said, support the Welsh Government to access more funding levers to support implementation. It is also about how the regulations and guidance are written to make sure the intent is followed through in practice.

We now want to look more at the UK Government legislation side of the issues. Dr Evans, when you wrote to the Committee, you noted that, of all households who get the housing element of universal credit that live in the private rented sector, six in 10 of them do not have their rent covered in full. What analysis or information do you have on how those people are covering the shortfall, and on the impact that has?

When we did some extensive work on this a few years ago—I know Debbie has done some more up-to-date work—there were a few things that people were doing. They were using money from their universal credit, which was ostensibly to pay for other things, to pay for their housing. That meant people were going to food banks, et cetera, because the money that was meant to cover their food bills was being used to cover their rent. People were moving into parts of the market that they knew were not going to be particularly great for them. They were also making choices that were making things worse. They were not putting the heating on to save money, and therefore they were making mould and damp worse. It is not good for the landlord or the tenant when that is happening. It is also creating a vicious circle. If, for whatever reason, you get an eviction notice and you do not have enough money to find somewhere else to rent, you are moved into temporary accommodation, but councils cannot magic up these private rented sector properties. You are still trapped and facing the same problem in getting hold of those properties. It deepens the poverty of those who have a home, and it pushes others into homelessness and keeps them there.

That answer is great. There are more questions to come on that, but I will hand back to the Chair.

Yes, keep your powder dry.

I would like to talk now about local housing allowance. What would aligning current rates of LHA with inflation—by that, I mean matching it against increases in average rents or raising it to the 30th percentile—do to reduce homelessness in Wales?

The Welsh Government’s position is for local housing allowance to be returned to the median rate, which is the 50% mark, as it was when it was first introduced by a Labour Government. Given the scale of casework we have that involves people struggling to afford renting privately—I will give an anecdotal answer before passing over to Debbie, because Crisis and Heriot-Watt did the future modelling for this—“significant” is probably the closest answer I could give. Yes, absolutely. People who have been evicted from a rented property make up a significant portion of the homelessness presentation. In theory, it would mean people staying in the homes they already have. In terms of longer-term impact, we know that if someone has faced homelessness once, they are more likely to enter homelessness again later in life. If we can keep people in the home they are in, we are offering them that longer-term and potentially lifelong protection. If it is okay with you, Steve, I will pass over to Debbie for the statistical answer.

Yes, it is massive. Our latest homelessness monitor—I can send the Committee copies of it—was published last year. One of the things it does is some really clever statistical modelling that Heriot-Watt University does to look at the different policy levers that would make a real difference to the levels of homelessness in Wales. Restoring LHA to cover the cost of rent came up as the thing that would make the biggest difference in dropping homelessness levels. There is a really impressive graph that shows the difference it would make. I will send that on. Just to reflect on what I said earlier, LHA is an issue for people across Great Britain. In Wales, it is a particular issue. Across the nation—this is research we did with Zoopla—1% of homes on the property market are affordable to people who rely on housing benefit. Across some of your constituencies, it drops massively. In Brecon, you are looking at 0.3%. In Ceredigion, you are looking at 0.4%. It is worse than in London. It is a massive driver not just of homelessness in general but of keeping people in homelessness. So many of our members are so frustrated that there are such long waiting lists for social housing that they are trying to turn to the rental sector, but the sums just do not add up. Yes, restoring it to cover the true cost of rent is one of the things that would make a huge difference. I would also add that we should be looking at the benefit cap.

It has an impact in a couple of other ways. From the work that we did on this, it drives behavioural change among property owners as well. We compared the average LHA property with properties that were being advertised on Airbnb. We found that in all Welsh local authorities bar Torfaen you would make more money in 10 weeks on Airbnb than you would in a whole year renting to someone on LHA. There is an incentive. There will be different nuances, but why would you upgrade your property to new standards when you could make more money using that approach? You are also seeing similar things with the Welsh Government’s Leasing Scheme Wales, which is meant to support private sector landlords who want to rent at a slightly cheaper rate to people coming out of the homelessness system. A message we heard anecdotally over and over again was, “Covering the property while it is empty is not really much of an incentive when I can have the property empty for three months, but I am making more money in the other nine months than I would all year with your scheme”. It also has that behavioural impact that compounds the affordability issues that people face.

Speaking from the perspective of frontline workers in the homelessness sector—we run Frontline Network Wales—we repeatedly hear from them that one of the greatest barriers is LHA rates. The impact on their morale as workers is significant because they are doing incredibly difficult jobs, encountering trauma every day of their working lives, hearing people’s accounts of abuse and trauma. It is a really challenging job, and they are providing incredible support to people. It is highly skilled and highly knowledgeable support. They can deliver the best support in the world, but not being able to get someone a place to live is the thing that really harms their morale. That really makes them question what they are doing in their role. Increasing LHA would make a massive difference to individuals, as everyone has said, but it would also mean that those workers could have the achievement of supporting people out of the system and into a situation where they can thrive. On housing-related benefits, I wanted to make a point about the impact of the welfare system on people in supported accommodation who would like to enter work. This is something that is raised with me consistently by supported accommodation providers. It is not just a Welsh issue; it is a UK issue. It results in people who want to enter work, which is the aim of both the UK Government and the Welsh Government, not being able to do so because the impact on their universal credit when they enter work is such that they cannot afford the supported accommodation that they are living in. That is because the cost of providing supported accommodation is higher than general needs. That is for all the reasons you would expect around communal areas, high levels of housing management and support, and sometimes security systems. Many a review has said that those costs are justifiable but, because it is such a higher cost, when they experience the tapering of universal credit, the amount of money they have to pay in rent is substantially below what those rental costs are. People are faced with a choice. Do they not enter work and stay within supported accommodation? That runs the risk of people becoming institutionalised and not being able to go out, thrive, earn a wage and then move on to independent living. Do we ask people to make two simultaneous transitions, which are traumatic enough for any of us, by moving out of supported accommodation, where they feel safe, and starting a new job at the same time? That is what the welfare system is effectively asking them to do. There has been a pilot in the West Midlands Combined Authority area that looked at whether additional payments to young people in supported accommodation could ease this transition and mean they are able to stay within the safety and support of supported accommodation while at the same time not losing out because of the welfare system. I believe it was top-up payments to their rent. That enabled them to enter work. Starting a new job is really stressful for any of us. If you have come from a traumatic youth homelessness background, it is triply traumatic. It enabled them to come back to supported accommodation and have the support around them while making that transition into work without having to give that up. If there is one thing that the Committee could look at around enabling the most traumatised people in supported accommodation to go on, thrive and achieve their full potential, looking at how that system traps people in supported accommodation and does not enable them to access work would be a really interesting thing to look at. It is in line with UK Government priorities around getting the country back into work. We have a bunch of people who would love to do that. The system at the moment stops them doing it.

I have a follow-up question. Debbie, Shelter Cymru supports increasing LHA from the 30th percentile of local rents to the 50th percentile. Have you made any assessment of the cost to the public purse of such a change?

I could come back to you with more information. From a Crisis perspective, we have always called for 30%, but we are supportive of the call for 50%. We would say that, alongside that, looking at the benefit cap is really important to make sure it has the impact that is needed. I can come back to you with more information on costings.

In terms of freezing or keeping LHA at 30%, the report from the peer research team at Shelter Cymru set out the extent to which it is an artificial saving. The DWP give local authorities money for discretionary housing payments. The vast bulk of that money is used to backfill shortages and gaps created by welfare policy decisions, whether it is bedroom tax, LHA rates or the household benefit cap, primarily. Similarly, the extent to which LHA pushes families and households into homelessness is massively affecting the temporary accommodation budget, which I appreciate is local authority spending rather than UK Government spending, but it is not the cost saving that we think it is on paper. The costs and pressures are going elsewhere.

I have one final question on this broader topic. We touched on this already when Katie spoke about that trial in the West Midlands Combined Authority. I want to get the panel’s take on whether there are any other policy levers that the UK Government could use to reduce the cost of rent in the private sector, such as rent controls. I have never made any secret of the fact that I am a great supporter of rent controls, personally. Are there any other incentives for bringing more properties on to the market for private rental? I would love to hear.

We should use any possible levers to bring more houses into the system. As I said before, many of us on this panel, if not all of us, would agree that large-scale social house building is one of the most important things. It is also important that we have a patchwork of different approaches to bring different homes back into use. I know we have gone on about this issue so much, but LHA is fundamentally the most important thing that would change people’s ability to access other homes. It would change how people access the private rented sector. It would therefore likely change the pressure on waiting lists for the social housing sector. For lots of people, their desire for a social house is because it feels more safe, secure and affordable compared with the private rented sector. I mentioned the transitional accommodation capital programme. That is the Welsh Government using capital in a different way to purchase properties, bring empty homes back into use and change the use of buildings. As someone else on this panel said earlier, the funding settlement that the Welsh Government get from the UK Government is inherently challenging when it is an annual budget and there are restrictions that are much different from other devolved Administrations in terms of borrowing and things like that. The UK Government need to provide more flexibility, more assurances and more trust in the Welsh Government to access those levers and make those decisions in Wales.

I will add a couple of things that are different from what we have already discussed. First, the UK Government hold the ability to set standards around energy efficiency in the private rented sector. If you are saving £100 on your rent but are having to pay another £200 on your energy, you are not better off. If we want to bring down the cost as a whole, that is something that would be worth looking at. Another thing that is quite niche but fundamental to what Ben talked about earlier, about flats above shops and stuff like that, is the bizarre way that VAT works. You do not pay VAT on work materials for new builds, but the system is very different when it comes to renovating existing properties. It depends on how long that property has been empty for and who is doing the work. There is a fair bit about that in the report that we have coming out. Having a more uniform approach to the way the VAT system works would enable housing associations, say, to buy a few empty shops and convert them into housing in a much more rapid way. Our view is that building the number of homes that we need is going to take a long time. We can only get here if we buy back some of the empty properties that we have and make better use of them. The VAT system is adding extra costs that possibly do not merit being added.

I agree with what Steffan said about looking at empty homes and bringing them back. As Katie said—I know we have talked about it a lot—LHA is such a big deal. This links into what Steffan said earlier about it preventing other levers. The Welsh Government’s Leasing Scheme Wales is a brilliant opportunity on paper, but, because the LHA rates are so low and do not cover the true cost of rent, it is not as attractive a package to landlords as it should and could be. That is affecting the availability of social homes and affordable homes. I agree with what others have said, really.

Shelter Cymru is a big advocate of further rent stabilisation measures in Wales. With the Renting Homes (Wales) Act, you can increase rents only once within a 12-month period within a tenancy, but if there is a shift in tenant, between tenancies, you can also increase. As an interim measure, we would like to see it expanded so that you can increase the rent only once within a 12-month period, regardless of any tenancy changes, just to see what impact that might have. When we are talking about making the PRS more affordable, it is to some extent just an acknowledgement of the lack of social rent homes that we have. It is important to remember that social rent homes are not just more affordable rental homes. There is security and support that comes with a social rent home, which we do not offer to private renters. We have a really healthy relationship with the NRLA. We do not always agree, but we have a really good relationship with them. Steve Bletsoe spoke at our last conference about the issues that landlords are seeing in terms of the support needs of their tenants. As the PRS has grown, there are private renters who need a higher level of support and better access and referral measures than we could ever ask a private landlord to provide. Yes, we should stabilise rent so that people can afford the homes they are in, but I would be concerned about conflating affordable private rented homes with social rent homes.

Steffan, you have talked about the plans in respect of consulting on the vacant land tax. What are your thoughts on what that might do for the plans to build new houses in Wales?

Yes, that is certainly something positive. We have done some work recently looking at how councils are using their powers to charge council tax premiums on empty properties. Some local authorities in Wales are now bringing in quite significant amounts of funding, which is enabling them to do more in this space. Anything else that either shifts behaviour or allows local authorities or the Welsh Government to get some extra income in to mitigate those effects is a positive thing.

Just moving the discussion on to discretionary housing payments, what role do they have in addressing housing insecurity and keeping people in their accommodation? Linked to that, what changes, if any, would you like to see in the way they are administered?

Ten years ago, which we were talking about, I was an outreach worker working with people using substances and facing homelessness in Cardiff. At that time, as a support worker, you knew that you should put in an application for discretionary housing payments in March because there will be some underspend and you will be more likely to get it through. What our caseworkers are telling us now is that, if you put in an application in mid to late March, local authority teams are advising you to put the date as 1 April because there is no money left in the pot and it will not be accepted. Clearly, there is a demand there. Because of LHA and the bedroom tax, all of these things that are not changing, people are being protected from homelessness for a 12-month period through a DHP, and then they are being told they cannot access a second payment because they have already been helped by this pot. We are not offering them an opportunity to change anything else. We are not offering more funds through that kind of stable and reliable welfare pipeline. There are no opportunities to reduce their energy costs or gain further employment. There are lots of people out there being supported to get their third job just to keep these things going. The DHP pot is very useful, but it is a sticking plaster. We need to go further upstream to keep it as the emergency pot that it probably should be.

I was just going to say that it is an incredibly valuable resource. Our homelessness monitor surveys local authorities across Wales, and they all say how universally important DHPs are. They are important for our members as well. We have seen them being used to help our members. I would echo what Lauren said, but the funding for them needs to be maintained and increased. We have seen increased levels of homelessness in Wales. We have seen the cost of living crisis. We have seen rents rise. We need to make sure that the pot of money is adequate to do what it is supposed to do and cover all the things that we need it to cover.

We have come across numerous examples of local authorities issuing rolling DHPs. That is basically saying that we have moved from rights-based social security to a discretionary-based system. It is still worthwhile investment, we think, because it is better for the person and the local authority for that person not to end up in the homelessness system, but that means the money is not there, as the others mentioned, to use DHP for what it is there to do, which is to pay the removal fees of someone moving into secure accommodation for the first time. We have heard that the ability to use DHPs in that way is essentially gone. It is just being used to plug gaps in the rights-based system because of the issues that we have already touched on.

It is a really valuable resource, but it absolutely should not be used in the way it is, as a sticking plaster for gaps in the system. As Lauren outlined, people are not able to access it when they need to because it is covering up failures elsewhere. That should not be what it is used for. The system itself needs to be fixed.

To follow up on that, if DHPs were not required to help with regular rental costs, as you have outlined and as many of them are now, what more could local authorities do to address the broader homelessness challenges in their local areas?

The purpose of DHPs was to help people move into long-term accommodation because, if someone has been in supported housing or TA for a long time, they might not have the stuff they need to start life in a new place and stay there. It is the ability to use it in that space that we have really lost. As Lauren said, people who have been in the homelessness system once are much more likely to end up back there. These are some of the factors that drive that phenomenon. That is the opportunity that is being lost.

There is an important distinction between a house and a home. When people have stuff, when people have belongings that mean something to them, that makes them feel it is a safe place to call home, not just an empty room without any furniture or white goods in it. That makes a difference to people’s wellbeing, their ability to thrive and to continue within that tenancy. Aside from LHA, some of the biggest barriers to getting into the private rented sector faced by people coming out of the homelessness system are things such as guarantors and rent in advance. For the majority of people coming out of the homelessness system, they simply do not have the funds to cover those things. In particular, young people, who may be estranged from their families for various reasons, would not have a guarantor in the same way that someone from a secure middle-class background might. Those are some of the barriers that prevent them from even getting through the door into a private rented property. Those are some of the things that could support people into homes, if DHPs were not being used to plug the gaps within the system.

Can I ask for your assessment of the Government’s proposed welfare reforms and their impact on those facing housing insecurity?

We have some concerns around the proposals that were outlined on reducing welfare and encouraging people into work. Our reflection would be that most of the people our member organisations support are in acute crisis. They are people in domestic abuse refuges; people who have experienced youth homelessness; and people who are recovering from mental health crises or substance use issues. More often than not, at that particular point in time, they are not able to move into work in the way that the Government would like. It is really important that they are given the space and the support to be able to recover from those challenges and trauma, and to move into work when the time feels right for them. I have already outlined the challenges of being in supported accommodation. It is an existing policy from the UK Government that is entirely at odds with the ambition to move people into work. If the UK Government were able to address that, it would be immensely positive. As many other charities have raised, you need to tread this path really carefully. The announcements around changing the approach to welfare give us a chance to explore some of the issues, such as the supported accommodation issue, but for too many people the fear is there. Over the last couple of decades, welfare reform has been about trying to save money. For the most vulnerable people, that means that they lose out on support. The feedback from lots of our member organisations is that it is becoming more and more difficult to get additional support, particularly when people are trying to access things such as PIP. I have had reports that trying to get the evidence that people need from GPs is becoming increasingly difficult. That is probably a reflection of the pressure on primary care practices, but it is really difficult. That delays people being able to get that support, and it can sometimes affect their ability to evidence it. For too long, too many of my member organisations have talked about having to support people in tribunals and argue the case against a judgment that is unfair. Those decisions get overturned too often. The comment that often comes from some of our member organisations is, “We were there to fight on behalf of that person and get that decision overturned. What about all those people who do not have a support worker or someone to advocate on their behalf?” You will probably understand the concern that comes from organisations working in this area. Any changes to the welfare system are driven by cost reductions, are not trauma-informed, are not person-centred and do not understand the complexities of the challenges that people within the homelessness system experience. As I said, there are always opportunities to fix bits of the system when these things are under the microscope, but many of us would have trepidation about what this could lead to.

I see a lot of heads nodding in agreement. Is there anything that anybody would like to add before we move on?

I have two quick points. The one positive is the change to the two-child limit. That is clearly going to be beneficial, and 75,000 children will benefit. That will ease some pressure. It is worth noting that about 10% of those children will not benefit in full because of the benefit cap, which is something we have come back to a few times. We did some work with Policy in Practice last summer—we shared it with the Committee at the time, but we can share it again—to model the impact of some of the reforms. It showed quite a substantial increase in poverty. Given what we were discussing earlier about LHA and people taking money from another place to cover it, if they have less money there as well, there will be even less money to cover those costs. That was the concern with the original proposals. We will keep a watching brief on how this review progresses.

I will try to be quick. To come back to that point about Homes For All Cymru writing to the UK Government and asking for any benefits review to think about it from the perspective of preventing homelessness, I would really emphasise that point. There are so many levers and aspects within this. In advance of coming today, I spoke to a lot of our members about welfare benefits and the difficulties they face. All of them said how difficult the system is in terms of understanding, navigating and accessing it, which I know Katie touched on as well. I know there is the Timms review of PIP at the moment. I have already mentioned that a lot of our members rely on PIP. A lot of our members have health issues. A lot of our members have developed health issues as a result of being homeless for a longer period of time. There are so many difficult barriers for our group, even accessing medical evidence. One of our members was asked to pay £40 for a doctor’s certificate, which is just not feasible for them. PIP does not really take account of people who have needs that oscillate, change and fluctuate over time. If the Timms review could include a specific lens on homelessness and that cohort, and even include people with lived experience of homelessness, that would be really helpful.

You have already touched on the removal of the two-child limit from April. I am just wondering what impact this will have in Wales. I know you have already touched on it, particularly for families facing housing insecurity.

Steffan has already covered it, really. It will have a massive impact for lots of families, but it will not impact every family because the household benefit cap is still in place. Some of the households that should be feeling the benefit of it will not. Because local housing allowance has been frozen yet again, those who are able to benefit from the two-child benefit limit being lifted might find themselves using those funds to keep a roof over their children’s heads rather than to better their children’s lives in the way that we might have hoped.

We very much welcome it, as everyone on the panel does. I will not reiterate the points that have been made. I would just say that—again, it comes back to this point—it is great, but it is one small aspect. We need to look at all these other aspects. I know we mentioned it earlier, but a massive thing is the shared accommodation rate for under-35s. That is huge. That cohort of people are really struggling.

I do not have anything to add to the comments I have already made.

Steve Witherden is going to merge at least two questions into one.

It was two things, really. I am interested in the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 and its provisions in England that you might like to see in Wales. I also wanted to ask about the issue of no recourse to public funds and its impact on housing insecurity and homelessness for the migrant community in Wales. I know they are slightly different issues, but those are the two things I wanted to ask about.

On the Renters’ Rights Act, we are keeping a close watch as things develop in England because there is a lot that we would perhaps like to see brought through into Wales, particularly the Private Rented Sector Ombudsman. Right now, social renters can seek recourse through the Public Services Ombudsman. There is nothing for private renters that mimics that. We will be really interested to see how that pans out. Wales is about to be the only country that still has no-fault or no-reason evictions once the Renters’ Rights Act comes through and those are abolished. Those are two key things that we are going to be keeping a really watchful eye on and encouraging some learning and sharing. I will leave NRPF to others.

In the interests of time, I will focus on the NRPF point and immigration. It is one of the levers that we really need the UK Government to pull to help us in Wales. In particular, we have significant concerns about some of the proposals coming through in the earned settlement consultation. We feel it would drive up the number of people who have no recourse to public funds. These people are really going to struggle to find a secure place to call home. The proposal to ask people to reapply is going to affect people’s housing security. There is a concern that, if you are a landlord and you are looking for someone to rent a property to, someone who has to reapply for settled status looks like a less secure tenant. We are really concerned about the insecurity that some of those proposals could create. I alluded to it at the start, but all of us go to lots of similar meetings across the sector and people always talk about how difficult the situation is for people with no recourse to public funds, what support is out there for them and how little we know about it, how little data there is on this group. They are a really vulnerable group. In addition, I want to bring in people who are granted settled status but are then asked to leave their accommodation within 28 days. Of course, we had this pilot looking at 56 days. That was massively welcomed. When you went to any meeting across Wales, everyone was so excited about it. I cannot understand why it has been retracted and not been made permanent. That is massive. What can anyone do to secure housing in such a short period of time, particularly when you have language barriers, et cetera? There are a few things that we would call on. We would look again at the 56 days move-on period and make that permanent, because it will make a massive difference to lots of different people. We would also look at a cohesive support plan to help people who have immigrated over here to integrate and to prevent homelessness. We would be really careful about some of those proposals coming through the settlement consultation because we really think they could drive homelessness further and drive a lot of insecurity for people.

I echo what the others have said. I have one thing to add quickly in the interests of time. It also heightens the need for people to have access to the right advice and legal advice. We have recently done some work that shows only about four or five firms in the whole of Wales take legal aid work on immigration issues. The advice is just not there for the most vulnerable group facing challenges within the system as well. Compounded with what we have heard about today, that comes into play as well.

I would strongly support the comments about the 56 days for people to move out of Home Office accommodation. Very few people will be able to find a property within 28 days, regardless of immigration status. It is unfeasible for people to be able to do that. The trauma that many people are carrying makes this an unforgivable decision. I would urge MPs of all parties to make representations on that to the UK Government. Some of the anti-immigration rhetoric that is circling around politics at the moment—I am not pointing a finger at any one party because there are people in a whole range of political parties that are making comments about people who come to this country—makes it really scary for people to seek help, and makes it really uncomfortable for people within communities. That gives people permission, they think, to speak out with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Political leaders have a really important job to do in making sure they are responsible in how they communicate. In particular, I would also like to mention women fleeing abuse and violence. When they have an insecure immigration status, that can be used as a tool to keep them in an abusive relationship by the perpetrator. If they feel they are not able to access help anywhere, if that is used as a threat to keep them in abusive relationships, we all know how that can end. Too often, it ends in death for those women. The abuse angle is a really important angle to consider when we are talking about no recourse to public funds and the safety of women and children. Steffan mentioned the funding for specialist advice services, but we also need specialist violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence services for women who are experiencing no recourse to public funds. There is a real issue around making sure that services are culturally appropriate and that they have the trust of different communities. Making sure that those services are available in communities across Wales so that women who have no recourse to public funds are able to access them if they experience abuse is really important. Both the UK Government and Welsh Government should work together to ensure that that is achieved.

I am going to call the session to an end there. Thank you very much to all four witnesses for coming before us today. Lauren Caley from Shelter, Debbie Thomas from Crisis, Dr Steffan Evans from the Bevan Foundation and Katie Dalton from Cymorth Cymru, thank you for such comprehensive answers on an incredibly complex topic, which is far‑ranging and very complicated. There is a lot to unpick. Thank you to Committee members as well for your patience and time on this. I will now bring the session to order. Before I do, we will follow up in writing, if it is okay. We did not cover a couple of questions, so we will follow up in writing. Dr Evans, you mentioned that there are some studies and reports you may want to share. If you want to share anything with us, you would be more than welcome to do so. Thank you very much.