Wales 60 member Mike Hughes with the Clwyd West candidates

The bus is spending the days up to polling on 3 May touring Wales.

In Colwyn Bay Clwyd West candidates met Mike Hughes, 56, a building services manager from Old Colwyn, one of the Wales 60, a voters' group drawn up by the BBC.

He asked them about affordable housing and the problems young people have starting on the property ladder.

Click on the links below for the candidates' responses, along with some of his questions - and for Mr Hughes' verdict on it all.

Simon Croft

If you look at the figures for the amount of social housing built in north Wales in the last nine months, it's a tiny number, but compared with the amount of other housing being built, which is of the order of 1,000 private houses, people who are looking for social housing are really struggling.

We're planning to invest another �150m in affordable housing. It's not as much as we need to spend. If you split that across the 22 local authorities that's about 50 new units in each constituency, but it will be a bit more than we've got at the moment.

We also want to extend these support schemes where you can part-buy houses. There's a good example down in Cardiff where the Lib Dems run the council.

They contribute 30% of the cost and they own 30% of the house, so it has to be sold back to them at the end of it. It's a great way to go but it's only scratching at the surface. Of course it's really dependent on money.

The other thing we want to do is take the reins off local authorities because local authorities, even after 10 years of the Labour government, haven't changed the rule that where they [councils] earn money by selling council houses they can't spend it and build any more.

We also want to give them the right to buy back houses where it's feasible and a reasonable price. And we also need to just suspend the right-to-buy because we can't go off selling any more.

I say give councils also the right to build houses because they're not allowed to do it with any money, at the moment, it all has to be done through housing associations.

Q. Would you give the new units to councils or housing associations?

Whoever applied for it. The most efficient people to build the houses, either housing associations or councils.

Phil Edwards

The issue of affordable housing is probably one of the most relevant in this area and what we've have been doing on Conwy County Council, for instance, is making sure that it will be on the top of our agenda in the planning round.

Currently, all new housing developments have to have 30% for local need on affordable housing. We want to move that near to 100% with a moratorium on half-million-pound houses, not being built, for say 10 years, because we need to catch up with affordable housing for local people.

That is a huge issue not only in areas like this, where people need housing to live but in rural areas it stops the whole community from growing. So we need to make sure that there's work for local people and that they have somewhere to live.

Q. Do you think half-million-pound housing takes place in certain areas, like marinas, to attract the clientele?

It does, but it ought not to. For instance, there's a huge development going up where the old 70 Degrees hotel [in Colwyn Bay] was and what some people are saying is that has to be kept as a select area.

Many young people find joining the property market difficult

I don't accept that argument for one minute. Why should people who can afford half-million-pound houses, why should the view be selected for them? What can't local people enjoy that view?

Local people who can afford a house but who can't afford these half-million-pound houses. I don't see that argument at all.

Personally, I think it's absolutely wrong that we should preserve nice areas just for people who can afford these huge houses. The basic argument, which I don't like and don't accept, is that prime sites like that should not be developed for people with local need. It just seems abhorrent to me.

Darren Millar

The growth in property prices in recent years has obviously made it increasingly difficult for young people to own their own home and I don't think that Labour policies have helped.

For example, young people who attend university now very often leave with average debts of about �14,000 and of course that limits their ability to save and raise the necessary finance to buy their first property.

Of course the Welsh social housing grant programme is much lower down than it was 10 years ago. But the fact of the matter is that there simply aren't enough homes for first-time buyers available in Wales.

We've got to build more and we've got to be enabling people who are already living in living in smaller properties which are not suitable for their needs - growing families for example - to move on so that the supply of smaller homes for first-time buyers can be increased.

Local authorities need to release more land as well for development and other public bodies - such as what was the Welsh Development Agency, who've got huge land banks - should make some of their land available for development too.

A view from a balcony in Old Colwyn looking east towards Rhyl

Of course it doesn't mean that we should be bulldozing our countryside. Now as part of our plans for affordable housing, we've pledged to inject an extra �64m over the term of the next assembly to increase the housing budget.

This would allow more people to access part-ownership schemes such as home-buy, and release resources for councils, social landlords and even community groups to build homes that meet the local housing need in their own areas.

Q. Do you think that local councils should be encouraged to start building houses again or do you think it should fall to the likes of housing associations to provide affordable housing?

I think that there's a place for both [councils and housing associations] to provide affordable housing.

Local authorities are going to have a duty to be able to assess what the market needs in each area, and there will be occasions where it makes sense for councils to be able to provide accommodation, particularly, for example where there's a social care need, that might be attached to encouraging older people to living independently, for example.

But I do think that the days of significant council properties being built, in terms of housing, are over.

Q. Do you think the right-to-buy should be scrapped?

I don't think so. I think the right-to-buy has been extremely successful in enabling people to access affordable housing, because they are able to buy it at a much cheaper rate and the fact of the matter is that very often, that might release properties elsewhere in the market for first time buyers to purchase.

Warwick Nicholson

Affordable housing has always been quite a serious problem in north Wales, particularly given the wide disparity in wages in Wales and the rest of the UK, aggravated considerably of late by the astronomical increase in property prices.

There are actions that can be taken to mitigate the problems. One of the things that I would press for is a change in taxation to allow second homes to be rather heavily taxed, to discourage the better-off members of society pushing up the prices beyond the reach of our local people who are effectively on local wages.

New build, I believe should be as a result of local demand, not demand from outside. There is another area we could look at very hard and that's the great increase in immigration. We've had 600,000 in the last 18 months.

Many of them have come to north Wales and they are placing strain on all of our infrastructure, including our demand for affordable housing. And the people that are coming are the lower end of the labour market, consequently making demand on the lower end of the property market. And this is having a serious effect.

We would control that problem by controlling our own borders by coming out of the European Union. Until such times as we can do that, then we're stuck. In the event of Turkey coming into the European Union, that's potentially another 73m people, that could potentially, come to live in Britain.

I'm presuming they won't do that but it will surely aggravate our situation. We need to support the housing associations and I'm concerned at the low level of council house building. In fact it's virtually stopped.

We need to get housing association and council housing. I'm also concerned in some areas, where councils are intent on turning over the management and the ownership of the council houses to private organisations, against the wishes of the tenants. Tenants' wishes should be paramount.

Q. Do you have any suggestions on how finances could be generated?

We waste a tremendous amount of money both on the Welsh assembly and �39m a day goes out to the EU.

We are a very wealthy country, the fourth largest economy in the world and yet we're sending most of our resources overseas via the EU and wasting a lot of what we've got via the Welsh assembly also.

Alun Pugh

There are some real concerns about the availability of social and affordable housing across north Wales.

If you've got a house, the last few years have been pretty good because mortgage interest rates by historical standards have been pretty low, the economy has been very stable, and unemployment in this area was about 6% 10 years ago: it's 3% now.

So if you combine a successful economy together with low interest rates for mortgages, that tends to fuel house price inflation, and we've had considerable house price inflation here on the north Wales coast. There isn't an unlimited amount of land, of course, and the shortage of supply, and demand being stoked up by the successful economy has meant that many house now are, alas, outside the range of first time buyers.

I know that only two well because I've got two young kids of my own, in their 20s. One of them works behind a bar in Betws-y-coed, the other one is doing a professional scientific job, and both of those are looking to move into the housing market in the not-too-distant future, and they find it difficult.

And it hasn't been helped by some of the planning decisions that have taken place in the local area. As a government, of course, we are encouraging the local planning authorities to plan for more mixed developments.

I don't think it's helpful to have developments solely of detached four-, five-bedroom houses, which typically change hands for nearly half-a-million pounds.

I think it's important we have a variety of housing available, to all sorts of price points, that allow movement within the housing market. I've talked about my own kids, but at the other end of the market again there will be pensioners sometimes living in houses that are very difficult to maintain, and sometimes a little bit too big.

Q. How do you propose to restart the housing market?

I think it's very important candidates and political parties don't pluck figures out of the air. I have in my hand a copy of the Labour manifesto, Building a Better Wales for 2007, and there are some very clear figures: they have been properly costed.

It all fits together with the budget, and our budget for this is an additional �450m in social and affordable housing and that will build an additional 6,500 new and affordable homes.

Q. Who would you like to see build them: housing associations or local councils?

It would to go a variety of sources. Certainly, not-for-profit housing associations are very important, and I think we need to do a bit more with them in terms of government land as well and that's not always a question of selling the land the market price.

I think we can do a lot with not-for-profit organisations to make more land available, and land prices are obviously a crucial determinant of house prices.

Mike Hughes

I've heard various figures: only Alun Pugh from Labour said his was properly costed from amongst all their calculations.

I still remain cynical about the thing overall, about how they [the candidates] would kick-start the market.

I don't know whether I accept Plaid totally because it gets rid of all sort of housing in the higher echelons. Okay, it doesn't address affordable housing but then stops all development and I don't think necessarily that's a good thing.

I think councils need to do something so that there's a bank of housing that's kept in reserve for young couples and isn't eaten away, so that it's ring-fenced by the assembly so that they [councils] can't use it to back up their failing finances.