Thank you, Cabinet Secretary. I appreciate that you have to make this statement, because it’s a statutory requirement, but there isn’t much in what you’ve said today that we haven’t already heard in other statements. While I appreciate that you’re putting those measures in place, I think, sometimes, we need to, perhaps, think about, if you’re bringing statements to the National Assembly, how we can add value to the discussions that we have, here today as an Assembly, because we want to be as effective as we possibly can.

The figures out this morning in relation to child poverty show a welcome drop in child poverty from 31 per cent to 29 per cent, but this is still higher than Scotland and Northern Ireland put together. Given your statement also mentions that wages are stagnating, which, by itself, could bring more families above the 60 per cent of median income, should we be regarding this 2 per cent drop as evidence of significant progress or simply a combination of statistical quirks?

What we all really mean by child poverty, of course, is children living in households where the parents, or parent, or guardian are poor. Given the figures also show that rates of poverty overall have remained the same, and many childless households may wish to be households with children in the future, would you accept that without a wider effort to tackle poverty per se, the eradication of child poverty will never be met?

These figures, of course, today don’t measure expenditure and in particular what happens when inflation puts the price of essentials up. This is likely to happen in future years and, once again, emphasises the need for more financial inclusion and education in our schools. I can’t overestimate the emphasis that we need to put on this so that people have those life skills when they are leaving school. So, how are you now working with the Secretary for Education to strengthen financial education so families can become more resilient? We’ve seen from schemes like recycling and so forth, where children are bringing those learning skills back to their parents, that if we increase financial education at a younger age, those skills could be utilised at a younger age.

Last year, the former communities committee of the last Assembly published an extremely critical report on your strategy. One issue raised was that a lot of the advice services were, in fact, very generic—there was no investment in services for people with specific needs, such as disability. What changes have you made since the report to take account of these particular findings?

I’d also like to know what other changes you’ll be making in relation to that report, because I know that the new equalities committee, under the leadership of John Griffiths, plans to do some more work on poverty in Wales, notwithstanding looking at how you will be changing, potentially, if you are minded to, Communities First. So, I would urge you to look back at the legacy report to see how you can make changes before we provide you with even more recommendations for you to try to implement.

My other question is in relation to children’s zones. You put quite a lot of emphasis on these in your statement, but when you’ve come to us, as a committee, you’ve said that they are just a concept. I want to try and understand, if it is a concept, how that concept will actually change how things are going to work, because if no money is going to follow it, it’s going to take quite a lot of work for some of those organisations, potentially, then, to change how they are doing things.

I would also like to ask if we could have an update on the consultation in relation to Communities First. I’ve had quite a lot of people contact me in relation to trying to understand how they can actually input. I think what we need to do better generally as politicians is try and get people involved in what we are doing. How are you going to reach out to communities to ask them, if you are minded to change it, what that change will look like and how they can become part of the solution for change, as opposed to feeling that it’s always top-down and they’re told how those changes should happen?

We know from Brexit and from other discussions we’ve had in the last year that we have to make sure that people want to come alongside these changes, otherwise nothing ultimately will change. We’ve talked since I was elected in 2007 about child poverty and about the fact—. We hear time and time again that we don’t have all of the levers, but we have to utilise the levers that we do have much, much better, because do we not want our legacy to be that we’re coming up with solutions and not time and again struggling behind other nations in relation to child poverty?