Bethan Sayed: Diolch. Child poverty is a scourge on our country. I'm not going to sugar-coat it for anyone here today, nor am I going to seek to mislead anyone surrounding its cause or effects. It gives me no joy, in fact, to open this debate today, discussing the same scandal of poverty that exists in Wales, which has only worsened in the last decade. Put simply, a child's in poverty when their household...
Bethan Sayed: I grew up in the 1980s in Merthyr Tydfil and I lived through Thatcherism and the devastation it caused to my community and others across Wales. We saw that a generation of children growing up in poverty during that period too often stayed in poverty as they entered adulthood and they fell into the criminal justice system. I was trying to think of an example of how I recognised poverty at an...
Bethan Sayed: Diolch. Thank you to everybody who has contributed here today. I'd just like to start on the point that was made with regard to the devolution of administration of welfare and the points that were made in interventions by Rebecca Evans and Huw Irranca-Davies. I don't understand the rationale, because it seems to suggest—. We're in the situation where these welfare reform cuts will be going...
Bethan Sayed: I've addressed the costs until I'm red in the face in this Chamber, and I don't want to go over the cost issue, quite frankly. We've explained quite clearly the fiscal framework and Scottish Labour seemed to support that. It's one tool; I'm not saying it's a panacea, but surely it is one tool in the box of wider issues that we can have control over here in Wales. With regard to some of the...
Bethan Sayed: Llyr, we see—
Bethan Sayed: What? Do we want to have a debate about that here now? I don't think that's appropriate.
Bethan Sayed: Llyr Huws Gruffydd talked of deficient communication skills that emerge in the education system if people don't get the same opportunities, with 60 per cent of young people in the justice system having communication problems. That's why we as a party say that we need the powers here in Wales, in order to deal with that situation. In the context of childcare, we've heard again on the...
Bethan Sayed: David Rowlands, you said that welfare reform was not the main cause of poverty and it was lame to blame welfare reform. I think it's lame not to want to do anything about it, quite frankly. So, I'd only agree with you up to a point, and I think that's where we've said, on numerous occasions, that we'd like to try and have some control over that system. But I do agree with you, although I...
Bethan Sayed: Siân Gwenllian stated there's no clear framework in terms of tackling poverty, that they can't reach targets, and that's perhaps why they don't want those targets in place any longer. I was speaking on child poverty when I was first elected, and those targets were in place for a reason so that we could track what the Welsh Government was doing. Without those targets, that simply isn't...
Bethan Sayed: I think I'll just finish with the document that we've talked about. Yes, you know, we may discuss how many times poverty is mentioned, but the fact is, there is no tangible way of tracking how we progress within this document. It reads well and it reads like a very good Government document, but we can't then see how we can use any targets to drive our scrutiny of this particular strategy here...
Bethan Sayed: Okay. Thank you very much. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you.
Bethan Sayed: I've got three requests for statements, if that's okay; I'll try and be brief. I've been told by residents and councillors in Bridgend that they've been unable to access the council's planning portal for a number of months now, and it's been on and offline in a very ad hoc fashion. I'm raising it here because the constituents are coming to me saying that they want to look at current planning...
Bethan Sayed: I would be interested in seeing the pilot that you mentioned—
Bethan Sayed: Okay. I'd be interested in—. Is it working?
Bethan Sayed: Is it working now? Is that okay?
Bethan Sayed: I would be interested in hearing about the pilot that you mentioned in answering Lee Waters, because I’ve been asking, over a number of years, about work in schools in the context of self-confidence, given the work that I’m doing on the cross-party group on eating disorders. On that basis, I’d like to ask you what work you have been doing with the health Minister on the eating disorders...
Bethan Sayed: Thank you for putting the question down today. I think we need to ask if the system is now fit for the future. It was clear at Grenfell that risks were not taken as seriously as they should have been and that safety was put on a secondary footing to cost in some key respects. I'd like to ask how the £400 million announced by the UK Government for cladding removal and building upgrades in...
Bethan Sayed: I’d like to welcome this statement today. When I was elected in 2007 as the then youngest Member—Jack and Steffan have taken that from me since then—I immediately started campaigning for a real youth parliament for Wales. I respected the fact that Funky Dragon was in operation, but I wanted something parliamentary in this Parliament, so that there was a separate structure and so that...
Bethan Sayed: It was on the power plant that I wanted to ask further because, of course, I met with Tata and they said that they've obviously completed phase 1, but they've got three other stages to complete with regard to the replacement of the power plant, and we're talking here about US steel tariffs. Surely investment now is critical in the power plant in Port Talbot to ensure that we mitigate against...
Bethan Sayed: Over recess, we saw the company Lush come out to support the Spy Cops campaign, which is a campaign to uncover the fact that many police officers, emanating from the 1980s to this day, were infiltrating campaign groups here in Wales and across the UK, impregnating women and having sexual relationships with women without them knowing that this was the case. Now, I wanted to understand what the...
