Imagine being told that the home you need – not the home you want, but the home you need – might not be ready for another 35 years. Imagine being told as a singleparent of a six-year old that the home that would ensure stability for them to thrive in education won’t be available until they’ve already entered their 40s.
For around 170,000 people in Wales this isn’t something they have to imagine, it’s something they have to live with.
Shelter Cymru – like many people and organisations – believes that access to a safe, secure, suitable and genuinely affordable home is a universal right. And for many people across Wales that right would be best realised through access to a social home. The reason for that is simple: social homes are affordable and secure by design.
Sadly, for decades, governments in Wales and Westminster have failed to build the social homes we need, and as a result of this, the housing emergency we face is far worse than it might otherwise have been. We see this in the number of people trapped in temporary accommodation, we see it in private rents rising faster than inflation, and we see it in the latest figures on waiting lists for a social home.
In fact, in waiting lists we see clearly just how far we are from where we need to be. With Shelter Cymru’s new report ‘Waiting For A Home’ using FOI data to show that 94,000 households in Wales are now represented on waiting lists. That’s one in every 14 in the country.
Changing this is crucial to ending the housing emergency. And, while far from easy, the solution is not complex. What we need is more social homes, delivered through increased investment and increased political priority.
The Welsh Government knows this is the case, that’s why they have already committed to an ambitious 20,000 social home target (a target that will sadly be missed) and why they are committing record amounts of investment. We welcome these steps, but we cannot pretend they go far enough.
Last year, in Wales, 2,600 new social homes were delivered. With 94,000 households waiting that means it will take 35 years to build homes we needed yesterday. We know we can’t change this overnight, we know it won’t be 2026 when everyone who needs a social home can have one. But we absolutely cannot let it be 2060 – and we don’t have to.
Shelter Cymru, working with the Bevan Foundation, has already set out some of the changes Welsh Government could make now to begin turning the tide. Changes that are set out in our recent joint report ‘Getting people out of temporary accommodation by boosting access to social homes’.
To make these changes happen we need to increase the pressure on politicians across Wales. You can help us by sharing our posts on Facebook, Instagram, X or LinkedIn.
Together, we can make ending the housing emergency the priority we need it to be, and make sure that everyone in Wales has a home they can truly call their own. We won’t stop until they do.
