2. Will the Minister outline the Welsh Government’s priorities for ensuring effective community engagement? OAQ(5)0026(CC)

I thank the Member for her question. I strongly believe in effective community engagement in designing and delivering local services. The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 requires public bodies to demonstrate collaboration and involvement in delivering the well-being goals. Communities must be engaged in local government and have their views heard and influence how local services are delivered.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. I agree with the comment about local communities being engaged, and of course, throughout Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire I’ve encountered a number of voluntary groups. I admire their community spirit and they produce an enormous amount of work on behalf of the communities they represent. However—and there’s always a ‘however’—I am becoming increasingly aware of groups that are set up purporting to represent local communities when in fact they’re merely representing a very narrow sector within a local community—a small group of people within a large town. This very often causes resentment and frustration by the wider community who don’t actually want to set up another group but feel that these smaller organisations are steering their towns and their villages in a way that they don’t want to see. Politicians are lobbied, funding is applied for, funding is received and I wondered what you might be able to do to ensure that there is better guidance for these small organisations. We don’t want to stifle their wonderful spirit, but we do want to make sure that, when they say they represent a village, a town or a group, they truly represent them and not just the narrow self-interest of a very, very small minority.

I’m grateful to the Member for the question and the non-partisan way that she raised it, too. I think many Members in this Chamber could be familiar with the examples the Member sets out. I think what we are very keen as a Government to do is ensure that our funding streams go to the maximum benefit of our larger communities, working with organisations such as the Wales Council for Voluntary Action and the 44 public sector bodies now under the WFG Act. That will be a new sign of the way that we develop policy for local communities and engagement and involvement is a key part of that—being able to demonstrate that to the future generations commissioner and the auditor general and to government is an important process for them.