Last year Welsh Government published a Green Paper calling for evidence on Securing a path towards Adequate Housing – including Fair Rents and Affordability. Alongside the Green Paper, Welsh Government simultaneously published commissioned research from Alma Economics, who had undertaken a data mapping exercise on the private rented sector in Wales, and a paper from CaCHE, looking at the issue of rent control in a Welsh context. Both pieces of research highlighted the lack of a robust evidence base to understand landlord and tenant behaviour, rents and incomes data and housing affordability in Wales.

Welsh Government have now (October 2024) published their White Paper (Consultation on the White Paper on securing a path towards Adequate Housing, including Fair Rents and Affordability). This was originally promised in the November 2021 Co-operation Agreement between Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru; an agreement which was ended by Plaid Cymru in May this year. The intention was to publish a White Paper to include “proposals for a right to adequate housing, the role a system of fair rents (rent control) could have in making the private rental affordable for local people on local incomes and new approaches to making homes affordable”.

In summary, the recent Welsh Government White Paper includes:

• A proposal to develop legislation in the next Senedd term (post 2026) to place a duty on Welsh Ministers to develop a housing strategy to address housing adequacy, including provisions for monitoring, reporting and review.
• Consideration of imposing a duty on defined public bodies to have regard for such a strategy in discharging their housing functions.
• Proposals to help understand that a property is habitable.
• Measures to improve the quality of rent data, including placing a duty on landlords/agents to provide rent data to Rent Smart Wales (RSW), which is the licensing authority established under the Housing (Wales) Act 2014.
• A proposal for the development of a spatial rent map using local area rent data to give an improved understanding of affordability.
• A proposal to explore the potential for Land Transaction Tax (LTT) higher residential rates relief on properties signed up to the Welsh Government’s Leasing Scheme Wales, which was first launched in January 2022.
• The removal of barriers to accessing the private rented sector.

The publication of the Welsh Government’s White Paper on Adequate Housing and Affordability provides a number of positive proposals, not least a more strategic approach to the issues and arguments in favour of enhancing the evidence base to inform policy development. However, it stops short of a commitment to the sorts of radical change that may be needed to address Wales’s housing challenges.

At the heart of the 2023 Green Paper consultation was how the objective of adequate housing might best be achieved in Wales. There have been arguments made that the most appropriate way to do this would be through introducing a legal right to housing in Welsh law. The “Back the Bill” Campaign (a coalition between Shelter Cymru, Tai Pawb and the Chartered Institute of Housing Cymru), has argued this for a number of years, supported by evidence of the potential benefits of such an approach. Earlier this month they published their own alternative white paper on the right to adequate housing (Alternative White paper).This argues that the scale of the housing crisis in Wales (record numbers living in temporary accommodation, levels of demand on social housing registers, evidence of continuing poor quality housing in some parts of the stock etc.) requires radical solutions. It suggests that a rights-based approach, underpinned by legislation, would provide a catalyst for change, helping to secure the resources to progress a right to housing in Wales over time.

The second part of the Welsh Government’s White Paper is concerned with fair rents and affordability in the private rented sector. It argues that in the absence of good quality data on market rents, and drawing on other recent published research, rent control measures are likely to be ineffective. Concern has also been expressed as to the potential negative impacts of rent control, in terms of reducing the supply of available accommodation, pushing up rents and increasing the risks of homelessness. In terms of addressing affordability the White Paper sets out how market rent data at a local level might be collected, and considers there is a need to begin such a process as soon as possible. One option which is explored is to require private landlords and/or agents to provide rental information to Rent Smart Wales, which could then be used to develop spatial maps of market rents at a small area scale. There will of course be significant challenges to developing an administrative database of private sector rents, in terms of not imposing undue demands on landlords/agents  as well as in terms of the resource implications of data collection, analysis and reporting. There will also be concerns around the confidentiality of some of this data and how it might be anonymised. However, improving the availability of comprehensive, detailed , up-to-date and localised data on rents in the private sector is a prerequisite for effective policy interventions.

The issues covered by the Wales White Paper (and there are others which I have not touched on here) need to be seen in the context of the wider housing system, the relationships between different tenures and broader issues of housing supply and demand. The recent report from Senedd Cymru’s Local Government and Housing Committee (Social housing supply) has argued for increasing investment in the provision of additional social housing across Wales, with a view to growing the sector to 20% of the Welsh housing stock (it currently represents 16% of Welsh housing) – and potentially more in the long-term. This would have significant implications for other tenures, for supply and demand and for affordability.

The White Paper consultation is open until the end of January 2025 and any subsequent legislative proposals will not be introduced until sometime in the next Senedd term. Any legislative proposals will need to be carefully thought through and underpinned by clear and robust evidence, so that they do not have unintended and potentially damaging consequences. It will be interesting to see how the debate in Wales evolves over the coming period, what steps are taken ahead of any legislative proposals to enhance the housing evidence base and how radical any changes might be. Given the array and scale of housing problems which Wales faces a bold, fresh approach might be timely. There have been signs of progress but sometimes it feels as though the gains have been piecemeal and that some of the problems seem to be pervasive and persistent. Additional resources will be necessary, but without a fundamental change in thinking this may not be sufficient to address Wales’s housing problems.