Today’s statement marks the latest phase in the Labour Government’s winding down of Communities First, which was once described as its flagship anti-poverty programme. I would share the disappointment felt by many about the lack of progress in terms of reducing poverty in Wales, and I would like to add Plaid Cymru’s thanks to the existing workforce. Communities First has been a matter of some controversy. I have personally been very critical of the programme’s inability to meet its original objectives, or even to try to measure its success, or otherwise. But I wouldn’t want to see the good elements, or indeed the principle, of an anti-poverty programme disappear. Now, the Cabinet Secretary himself has accused Plaid Cymru of jeopardising this programme over several years. In April 2011, he stated that the scheme was, and I quote, only safe with Labour, and that under Plaid Cymru, I quote again,

‘we can kiss goodbye to the Communities First programme that has helped lift so many deprived areas out of poverty.’

Neither of those statements were true; they were pure spin, and now we see that it’s a Labour Government that is winding down Communities First. Unfortunately, the second part of the Minister’s statement in 2011 wasn’t correct either: the programme hasn’t lifted enough people out of poverty. It didn’t have enough resource or focus. It didn’t follow through on focusing on the communities’ priorities, and the scale and the scope of Communities First was never explained to those communities in an honest way.

Nearly a quarter of people in Wales live in poverty. That figure goes up to nearly a third when we talk about children. If this anti-poverty programme didn’t work, then the question has to be, ‘What do we do instead?’ The problems of poverty and disadvantage have not gone away. In today’s statement, no sufficient replacement scheme is set out, and frankly, that is absolutely scandalous.

The legacy fund for public service boards, at only £6 million, won’t make a dent into deep-rooted poverty issues in our communities. The extra money for community facilities is welcome, but it will be spread very thinly. What happened to your principle of targeting? An extra £12 million on skills from 2018 is simply not sufficient. It will reach too few people. None of this adds up to an anti-poverty programme to replace Communities First, and given that we’re talking about some of the most deprived communities in the whole of the European Union—communities that risk losing that extra funding that they currently get from the EU because they are so poor—now you want to take this money away from them as well.

Nothing, nothing at all, in this statement today shows the urgency with which we need to tackle poverty in this country. There is so little ambition here, and there is so little in the way of new investment or funding. Of course, we’ve got plenty of buzzwords—exactly the same buzzwords that people in our poorest communities have been sold for years. Well, let me tell you something, Cabinet Secretary: people have had enough of those buzzwords, and they have had enough of being let down by this Government. Will the Cabinet Secretary acknowledge that what he has done in this statement is to just list a number of schemes that are already happening, and will he clarify whether there will be a budgetary saving to phasing out Communities First, and if so, how much? Will he commit today to reinvesting the entire amount of money currently spent on the programme, and, finally, will he accept that what he is doing with his statement is pulling the rug out from underneath our poorest communities, giving us little, if any, assurances that there will be an alternative way of focusing on and tackling poverty? This is you walking away from our poorest communities. Isn’t that the case, Cabinet Secretary?