NOT enough new homes are being built in Wales, the Welsh Conservatives have claimed.

Speaking in the Assembly on Tuesday, the group’s leader Paul Davies called the Welsh Government’s house-building policies “completely inadequate”.

Powers over housing have been devolved to Wales since 2006, and the Welsh Government has pledged to build 20,000 new affordable homes by the end of this Assembly term. The Right to Buy policy, through which council house residents are able to buy the homes they live in, will also be scrapped in Wales in January next year, which the Welsh Government has said is intended to stop the decrease in the availability of social housing.

But, speaking in the Senedd on Tuesday, Mr Davies said the Welsh Government was falling short of its own targets.

“What you have done so far is completely inadequate,” he said. “The new housing completion rate consistently falls short of the targets set by the Welsh Government with just 6,000 homes being built in the last 12 months – 19 per cent fewer than the year before, as opposed to the target of 8,700.”

He added: “It is quite clear that the Welsh Government is falling very, very far behind anything like an adequate rate of house building.

“As a matter of fact, the last time any government met the real demand for new homes in Wales was in the mid-1990s by a Conservative government.”

Mr Davies was speaking after the Welsh Conservatives earlier this week unveiled a series of proposed housing reforms, including building 100,000 new homes over the next 10 years.

But leader of the house Julie James, standing in for Carwyn Jones during First Minister’s Questions, said she did not agree with Mr Davies’ position.

“We recognise the potential of the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector to build more if they have access to the finance needed, and, therefore, the Development Bank of Wales provides £70 million for SMEs through our property development fund and stalled sites fund,” she said.

“I will say to him this – if you think that the solution to building more homes is to have a bonfire of development control regulations across Wales, then I could not disagree with you more, and it's very obvious, if you look at the evidence, that your Tory colleagues on local planning authorities also agree with me and not you.”

She added: “I do think, as I said, that maximising the number of homes that can be built through investment means access to decent finance, which your government, at UK level, has singularly failed to be able to deliver through any of the means that it's tried.”