Julie James: ..., local community organisations, town and community councils and so on. There's a range of very creative ways forward. The youth work strategy is in fact in the portfolio of the Minister for Education. I'm very pleased that the youth work strategy for Wales was launched in June of this year, and what we're looking to do with that strategy is to develop a greater understanding of the...
Julie James: ...the plan, so that, at the point that the local authority comes forward and earmarks sites for various sorts of development, people can come forward and say, 'But that will have this effect on this school or this infrastructure' and so on. That is the purpose of a planning system, not to have a random system where each planning application, on its own, is looked at. The whole purpose of the...
Julie James: ...be unnecessary hurdles. The whole purpose of this working group has to be to remove those unnecessary hurdles. It's clear that authorities across Wales have an economic impact, one on the other. In education terms, for example, the boundary of the local authority would appear to be an impenetrable forcefield for some schools' catchment areas, and that makes absolutely no sense at all in...
Julie James: ...relations at the University of Warwick; Sharanne Basham-Pyke, the consultant director of Shad Consultancy Ltd; Professor Edmund Heery, Professor of employment relations at Cardiff Business School; and Sarah Veale CBE, who was head of the equality and employments rights department of the TUC until she retired in 2015. I think they've done a tremendous piece of work in a very short period of...
Julie James: ...be and is our top priority. It provides not only quality homes but the support needed to ensure people can sustain their tenancies and thrive. It positively impacts on health, mental health and education, which is why Wales never moved away from support for social housing, not since the Assembly came into existence. We recognise that social housing requires a greater level of Government...
Julie James: ...the debate on that point. I sat and listened carefully to what you had to say, and that's what you said, by and large. Local government services have an impact on all of our lives. They provide the schools for our children and the care for our vulnerable neighbours. They create the civilised spaces where we can live and work and be sociable. Of course, we recognise the challenge that local...
Julie James: .... Since April 2015, Digital Communities Wales supported an estimated 140,000 individuals to engage with their technology, and we've also trained 2,600 young digital heroes, where young people from schools, colleges and youth organisations volunteer to support older people to engage with digital technology. If the Member hasn't seen one of those programmes in action, I'm sure we could find...
Julie James: Yes. I absolutely welcome the prioritisation that Torfaen and, indeed, many other authorities are giving to education and social services in what is indeed a very difficult settlement for most local authorities. We recognise the challenges for authorities and the difficult choices they're making, as I said earlier, on the savings and changing services, and the decisions they're having to make...
Julie James: ...right. Social housing can provide not only quality homes but the support needed to ensure people can sustain a tenancy and thrive in it. It can positively impact on health, mental health and education, which is why, in Wales, we've never moved away from support for social housing, ever since the Assembly was in existence and, indeed, before that. This is why we've set a target for the...
Julie James: ...mental health, substance abuse and medicines management. These services are key to ensuring inmates are suitably prepared for returning to life outside the prison walls. Access to good-quality education and links into work are a vital part of the Welsh Government's approach to reducing reoffending. Working with the prison service, we have developed our employability plan, which supports...
Julie James: ...that. I will be looking to work across the Government with ministerial colleagues who have big-spending local government portfolios—they're all really obvious: the health and social services and education colleagues and so on are big spending portfolios in terms of local government—to make sure that we present as clear and open a picture to local government as is possible, given the...
Julie James: ...in place in order to protect councils that are particularly affected by sudden changes in the way that the distribution works—so, by population change, for example, or by big differences in free-school-meals provision, or whatever it is. But we had a very good discussion this morning, and, as I said in earlier remarks, I'm not aware of what the disagreement is. There certainly wasn't any...
Julie James: ...but for the infrastructure needs associated with the housing need. Clearly, that is a range of services, you know, from prosaic highway infrastructure, to digital connectivity, to access to GPs and schools, local bus services, sustainable transport, and so on. It’s a very complex picture. Each place should be planning to have its place properly served by its plan, and I do think councils...
Julie James: ...a 'no deal' Brexit, this issue was very much a topic on the agenda, to ensure that, as I said in response to Leanne Wood, the supply chain is looked at in detail for the preparation of things like school meals or meals on wheels and those kinds of provisions—care homes, residential homes and so on—that they have their supply chain sorted out and look at their menus, frankly, to just...
Julie James: ...we might be. That includes the supply chain issues. I would just like to reassure people that there's no need to stockpile food, but we are looking to make sure that supply chains for things like school meals or elderly persons facilities or whatever are still able to get all of the ingredients they would normally have, or they're able to do menu planning to ensure that, where the supply...
Julie James: ...government in Wales will receive nearly £5 billion in revenue for 2019-20, a cash increase of around £70 million on 2018-19. This additional funding reflects our priorities of social services and education, in particular. Aside from the funding announced through and alongside the settlement, we have made other commitments to support authorities in the coming financial year. We will...
Julie James: ...been expecting. In the draft settlement announced on 9 October, we set out further funding of £43 million. This recognised in particular the priority we and councils give to social services and education and the specific pressures and costs these services face from increased demand and pay costs. Compared with the provisional settlement, the final settlement for 2019-20 includes an...
Julie James: ...ap Iorwerth already knows that all HE institutions are autonomous institutions and responsibility for staffing matters rests entirely with the university's governing body. The Cabinet Secretary for Education allocated the sector an additional £10 million to mitigate the impact of keeping tuition fees at £9,000, and that has been included in the budget. We know that there are significant...
Julie James: Yes, I'm very, very well aware of the school there; it's in a very beautiful part of Pembrokeshire, and it has a very interesting little pub with a bar in its front room just around the corner. But it is very isolated, I think it's fair to say, and part of its beauty is its isolation. We are very well aware of it; we are working very closely with the school to see what can be developed in...
Julie James: ..., sets out priority actions under way across Welsh Government to tackle key barriers to equality of opportunity identified by disabled people themselves. This includes transport, employment, education, health, housing and accessibility.
