Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:16 pm on 11 October 2016.
I thank the Member for her questions. Can I say that the anti-poverty strategy and the children’s anti-poverty strategy are still alive and kicking? That document is still there and we still work towards that. I met with Ken Skates about how do we refresh that and start to think about the new interventions that we have. As I said earlier, Communities First is just one of a suite of tools and intervention programmes that we can deliver on. I am still committed to working with the fantastic workforce within the Communities First areas. That’s where the discussion will start about how do we start to frame what the future looks like in terms of delivery of the many programmes that the Member talked about. What we cannot do is turn our backs on communities, but we must help them grow out of poverty and not ensure that we sanction communities to poverty for life. We’ve got to do something different, and the intervention techniques that we are talking about here are about giving personal resilience to young people to grow. This is, I think, very brave politically, because a lot of this stuff is generational. We’ll probably not see some of the effects of our early interventions growing for 10 years or so. But we must start now, and we must make that change and be brave about this, because, if we don’t, this is about a short-term political win. The fact is it’s changing our communities for the better for the future, and that’s what this new programme, I believe, will do.