4. 3. Statement: Resilient Communities

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:11 pm on 11 October 2016.

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Photo of Carl Sargeant Carl Sargeant Labour 3:11, 11 October 2016

I thank the Member for her support and the comprehensive question she raises. As I said in my statement, the Communities First programme is one programme and we must rely on other aspects of what Government interventions do—what Government, local government, third sector organisations bring to our communities—and build resilience around that. We are challenged financially—all aspects of Government and Government tiers—and we have to make sure that when we make these interventions, we make clever interventions based on the evidence presented by many fields. One particular work that I know the Member is familiar with is around Public Health Wales, around ACEs. For people who haven’t seen that programme, I would urge them to do so and realise that that is why we’re taking this step to make early intervention and prevention one of our key planks for intervention for our young people. We’ve seen the devastation that can happen when you start stacking ACEs for the long term. We’ve done some work with the youth justice board and I was incredibly surprised—. Actually, the Member’s right: it is very difficult to tackle the end part of that—the issue of reoffending. When we did some modelling of the young person, actually we looked back at their lifestyle and they had four or five ACEs, which we knew, if we started to tackle those issues around alcohol or substance misuse or incarceration, then, actually, the end bit sorted itself out. So, that’s what we’re going to be doing with people and families, and that’s partly the issue around child zones, about how we get all of the ages—it is to wrap around the child and the family, to see if we can make these clever interventions. There is a great pilot of the 1,000-day programme, which is operating in Wales already. We can learn a lot from that. It’s about that, before the child is born, we know that those first two years are important, and what it is that we need to do at that stage.

The issue of childcare is something that we are working towards. I’m hoping that, towards the autumn of next year, we’ll start to introduce a very complex scheme of childcare and working, and how that fits in with the school setting as well, so that we have 30 hours of care for young people, which is appropriate and of quality. That’s a meeting that we held actually this morning, with a cross-ministerial discussion about how we start that programme. But this is about building a resilient community with all of our tools rather than one. That’s why I’m grateful for the ability to share with the Chamber today the vision and options for all of us to come together with all of these pieces of the jigsaw to make sure that we have a good future for our young people, driving forward.