Tom Spare introduces Community Housing Cymru’s campaign for housing over the next decade.
Some 3,643 affordable homes were built in Wales in the 12 months following April 2024. That number represents the largest increase in new social homes since 2008, and housing associations were responsible for building 75 per cent of them. That’s over 3,500 more opportunities for people to make a house their home.
Too many without a home
But despite that record number of additional homes, we are treading water.
Too many people are still facing a housing crisis: nearly 11,000 people are stuck in temporary accommodation and 2,500 of them are children. New people are continuing to enter temporary accommodation at a significant rate – on average, nearly 12 per cent of the total number of individuals in temporary accommodation have been new entrants over the last 23 months
Ultimately, the current pace of providing additional affordable homes preserves the system pressure rather than alleviating it.
To end reliance on temporary accommodation we have to go beyond incremental change.
Our Homes: For Every Future campaign calls for 60,000 more affordable homes to be built over the next decade. If we achieved that, 20 per cent of all homes in Wales would be affordable.
So how do we get there?
A long-term plan
We need a bold, deliverable plan to end Wales’ housing emergency. Not just more homes, but better homes that create healthier and fairer places to live. A long-term plan would offer much needed certainty to housing associations and local government to build at pace and scale.
The housing sector needs a long-term capital investment strategy, with 2025/26 funding treated as a floor rather than a ceiling. It would allow social landlords to plan ahead, take on more complex sites, invest in supply chains, grow their workforce and build the organisational capacity to go further and faster.
When we invest in housing, we invest in the economy. For every 20,000 affordable homes built, Wales gains over 14,000 jobs, 2,000 apprenticeships, and up to £2.1 billion in public sector savings. Housing is not a cost. It is an investment in our future.
Building 60,000 homes over ten years is ambitious, but it is grounded in what we know the sector can do when the conditions are right.
Closing the gap between ambition and delivery also means designing the system that gets us there: streamlining planning and approval processes; creating a national development corporation with genuine land assembly powers; introducing pragmatic standards for bringing empty homes back into use. These are the structural enablers that turn a target into a reality.
Joining the dots
The most durable long-term plans treat housing as prevention infrastructure, the bedrock of health, education, employment and community wellbeing.
Every pound invested in the Housing Support Grant returns £1.40 to the public purse. Every delayed hospital discharge caused by an unsuitable home is a cost that ripples across the system.
A genuine cross-government hospital to home mission, ensuring people can leave hospital to a safe supported home, would signal that Wales understands this connection and is willing to act on it.
Prioritisation
The Welsh Government’s housing quality standards, WHQS 2023, are well-intentioned, but prohibitively expensive and do not necessarily correspond to what tenants actually care about: warmth, affordability, safety, and speedy repairs.
A plan that is serious about the future has to be honest about the gap between ambition and reality. We have to prioritise accordingly. Bringing homes up to a good energy efficiency standard, from D to C, saves tenants around £770 a year on bills, and saves the NHS an estimated £85 million annually in cold-related illness costs. These are the outcomes a plan should be built around, not targets that look bold on paper but cannot be delivered.
A better future is possible
Imagine a Wales where children growing up in temporary accommodation is a story of the past. Where people return from hospital faster because their home is ready and their support is in place. Where a generation of young people enters a trade through apprenticeships and training programmes that are sustained, not stop-start. Where the homes we build and improve are shaped with the communities they belong to, a source of pride for the people who live in them.
That Wales is within reach. But the political choices made in the coming months will determine whether Wales continues to manage the symptoms or put an end to the housing emergency for good.
Read about CHC’s long-term plan here.
Tom Spare is communications advisor at Community Housing Cymru