A view from housing: What would the draft Wales Bill mean in practice?

The draft Wales Bill, published last week, caused all the usual political rumblings. Amid all the talk of insults to Wales, Whitehall being a bad loser, and the looming threat of a constitutional crisis, there doesn’t seem to have been too much discussion about the practical implications of the proposals within the Bill.

A devolved legislature with extensive powers is now clearly the settled will of the people of Wales.

And while technical debates about constitutional mechanisms and legislation probably won’t be a topic of conversation as the people of Wales eat their tea tonight; job security, health, and housing probably will.

What will the draft Wales Bill mean to, for example, a social housing tenant in Bangor? Or a homeless woman in a hostel in Cardiff?

Housing is probably the area of devolved policy where we have seen Wales and England diverge most over the last 16 years.

Not only is devolved government the settled will of the people of Wales, but a vastly different approach to housing (amongst other things) is too.

In Wales, we have had successive governments committed to investment in social housing, through Social Housing Grant, which has allowed the housing association sector to provide an average of 2,000 additional homes each year. At the same time, Welsh Government supports a ‘Help to Buy’ product which allows better access to home ownership. Across the border, UK Government pursues home ownership as the be all and end all of housing policy, with funding for social housing sacrificed for a loosely defined ‘affordable’ home ownership offer.

Devolution has meant that the housing association sector in Wales has had an opportunity to define itself very differently from our friends across the border.

The Right to Buy for housing associations and the 1% cut to social rents will have a profound impact on affordable housing as we know it in England. In Wales, there are proposals afoot to abolish Right to Buy completely, and we hope that Welsh Government won’t follow the same path on rents – a path now roundly rejected by housing providers and tenants groups.

The draft Wales Bill threatens the ability to legislate for these policy differences – voted for by the people of Wales.

Welsh Government suggests that the Housing Act, which took action on the scourge of empty homes, created new models of co-operative housing and takes action to improve the private sector, would not have been within the competence of the Assembly. This is inexplicable.

It is not a leap to suggest that the proposals in their current form take us back to the dark days of the Legislative Competence Order (LCO). Those of us schooled in the history of LCOs, or indeed housing policy, will know that this didn’t work.

The Reserved Powers model this Bill seeks to enshrine should be about simplicity and clarity. For legislators and voters.

In its present form, the Bill adds to the confusion - not only threatening to slam the brakes on the devolution journey, but threatening to halt the significant progress Wales has made as a nation in a number of areas. For housing, devolution hasn’t just allowed us to do things differently; it has allowed us to better meet the needs, and the will, of the people of Wales.



Aaron Hill
Public Affairs Manager, Community Housing Cymru Group

This blog post was originally published on IWA's Click on Wales site. You can read it here. 

Legislation a chance to tackle fuel poverty

Shea Jones has blogged for IWA on the Well Being of Future Generations Bill... 

How do you picture how our planet will look in the future and how future generations will live on our planet in years to come? Some people might think about hoverboards, power laces and all the other exciting things that we see Marty McFly involved in during the classic ‘Back to the Future’ films. Admittedly, I do think about this when I think about the future but I also think about the bigger picture – how we treat the planet now and how we must do what we can to ensure that we do not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs. This includes using natural resources reasonably, ensuring that life is not negatively impacted by harmful modifications of the ecosystems and that scientific and technological progress in all fields do not harm life on Earth.

Fuel poverty (defined as households spending 10% or more of their income on energy costs) affected 30% of households in Wales in 2012 and is now likely to be significantly higher. Fuel poverty is a significant cause of excess winter deaths and in 2013/14, there were 1,100 excess winter deaths in Wales. The majority (73%) were over the age of 75 (we know that around 30% of these deaths can be attributed to cold homes). Low incomes, energy prices and the number of energy inefficient properties act as the main contributory factors to rising levels of fuel poor households and they make the eradication of fuel poverty a real challenge.

Despite much welcomed investment from energy efficiency programs such as Arbed, the current investment in Wales is insufficient given the scale of the problem. Estimates in a Bevan report on poverty states that it will take 78 years for the Welsh Government’s Nest programme to reach each and every home suffering from fuel poverty in Wales. More needs to be done to ensure that vulnerable households are paying the lowest possible price for their home energy needs.

Housing is responsible for around one fifth of Welsh greenhouse gas emissions. WWF Cymru’s report, ‘Cutting carbon emissions in Welsh homes’, showed that targeting home improvements at the poorest quality houses in Wales would slash energy bills, cut fuel poverty by 40%, reduce our impact on climate change and create thousands of jobs. This would take us well on our way to meeting our climate emission reduction targets of 40% by 2020. Reducing our energy usage and delivering energy efficiency programmes needs to happen alongside switching to renewable / low carbon energy sources, as outlined in WWF’s report ‘Warm Homes Not Warm Words’, although barriers to renewable energy (e.g. the planning system) need to be addressed and Wales needs further energy powers to be devolved for energy planning consents.

A large scale energy efficiency programme much bigger than what we currently have is essentially sustainable development in action. How could this be financed? There have been suggestions of using borrowing powers for energy efficiency programmes rather than funding controversial stretches of motorways, for example. Perhaps a less controversial way to boost investment would be to fund more energy efficiency retrofit works, as well as the amount of energy that we generate through renewable technologies via infrastructure investments through the Wales Infrastructure Investment Plan (WIIP). Of course, we need to maximise the positive impacts of investment and the Welsh Government’s Well-being of Future Generations Bill, if designed effectively, provides an ideal opportunity to achieve this. Infrastructure investments should be benchmarked for their environmental impact and WIIP provides a significant opportunity to ensure that large capital projects fulfil sustainable development criteria at every level from carbon impact to community benefit.

A strong and effective Well-being of FG Act should make sure that investment from public bodies has real positive impacts and ensures that all purchasing decisions are made with consideration of wider benefits for people and nature, in Wales and around the world. ARBED has shown how a programme can be designed to deliver real benefits to local economies. Evidence suggests that, without an explicit legal requirement, it is unlikely that good-practice procurement policy will be implemented and inconsistencies will continue. Community Housing Cymru’s member organisations (housing associations) spent an estimated £1,027m in 2013/14, and £823.6m (80%) of this spend was retained in Wales. Of the completed Community Benefits Measurement Tools returned to Welsh Government, 52% have come from the housing sector.

However, we propose that further work is done to develop the community benefits tool into a legal requirement that ensures public bodies consider the broader environmental, social and economic impact of their procurement activities. We should promote ethical, fair trade and sustainable procurement practices through the Bill which meet the social justice and equality needs of the citizens of Wales. This includes the impacts of supply chains in Wales and abroad and the ability to use local suppliers and installers, which is key to keeping money in the Welsh economy. For example, i2i’s Can Do Toolkit provides guidance to social landlords to help them achieve added value and wider social inclusion through their improvement and investment programmes, in the areas of targeted recruitment and training and SME-friendly procurement. Between September 2008 and December 2011, i2i calculated that this work led to the creation of 2,581 job and training opportunities. The CHC Group supports the continued development of the Can Do Toolkit and its extended application across the public sector in Wales.

Prevention and integration principles clearly need to be at the heart of the Wellbeing of FG Bill. For example, ‘Boiler prescription’ schemes exist in England whereby housing associations install boilers in households prescribed by GPs. One of these schemes has resulted in savings to the NHS with a 28% reduction in GP appointments and a 33% reduction in outpatient appointments. It is one of the first examples of the NHS supporting retrofit schemes in order to reduce the cost of health and social services but such schemes need to be valued more by the government and the health sector. CHC is working closely with organisations in Wales to develop similar approaches. Other schemes such as the ‘Warm homes healthy people fund’ show a clear example of the Department of Energy and Climate Change working with the Department of Health in the UK Government.

Legislation is needed to drive change at the necessary scale and pace. It should also be viewed as an opportunity to help create the future we want to see for Wales. With amendments to the Well-Being of Future Generations Bill, we can make it stronger together and transform the way we do things in Wales.

Shea Jones
Energy and Sustainability Officer

You can read Shea's original blog post here. 

Crowd Sourced Constitutional Convention

For those of you who were at CHC’s Annual Conference in November last year, you may recall both Matthew Taylor and Lee Waters challenging us as a sector to stop waiting for others to change things or stop waiting for others to do things and get on and do it ourselves...

This call came at a time when the constitutional promises that had been made to the people of Scotland following the referendum were generating a much broader debate about the powers we have and, more importantly, the powers we want here in Wales. Couple this with the challenges we as a sector and tenants are facing, and it seemed that the forthcoming General Election would be a lost opportunity if we didn’t make the right calls for change in those non devolved areas which have such an impact on our communities. So, for this reason, CHC made the decision to become a partner in the Institute of Welsh Affairs' Crowd Sourced Constitutional Convention.

This is a debate about the future of Wales. The direction of travel for this debate is not set in stone and we are inviting people to respond to the draft plan. CHC will be involved in all aspects but we will specifically be facilitating the discussion around ‘What makes Wales a fairer country?’. We anticipate certain parts of the welfare state being a key focus in this debate. At CHC, we want to translate the discussions around constitution, devolution and powers into the reality of delivery. As a sector, we have an in depth understanding of existing policies, processes and procedures surrounding key areas of welfare and crucially understand the direct impact they have on individuals and communities. Therefore, when we ask ‘What do we want our communities to look like?', we’ll also be asking, 'What’s stopping us from getting there?' and 'What needs to change?'.

So during the next eight weeks, we hope you will get involved and that you will encourage your colleagues, friends and family to share their views and join the debate to shape a fairer Wales.

Go on, what are you waiting for? ... Permission?!


Sioned Hughes
Director of Policy and Regeneration