If the prosperity of communities across Wales is to be enhanced, regeneration schemes must, first and foremost, empower the people living in those communities. As I’ve emphasised since arriving in the Assembly in 2003, housing is key to sustainable community regeneration, not just in bricks and mortar terms, but adding value by unlocking the human potential in communities. However, although there was no affordable housing supply crisis when Labour came to Welsh Government in 1999, they then slashed new social and affordable housing by nearly three quarters, and even last year, Wales was the only UK nation to see new home completions go backwards. Contrast this with the UK Government’s announcement yesterday of a £2.3 billion housing infrastructure fund for England to accommodate growing communities and get homes built faster. Having failed to understand or ignored successive warnings and Wales Audit Office reports, Labour’s command-and-control approach towards community engagement has left Wales with the lowest prosperity, wages and employment, and the highest poverty, child poverty and unemployment amongst the British nations. As the 2015 Communities, Equality and Local Government Committee inquiry into poverty in Wales report, ‘Poverty and Inequality’, found:

Since the early 2000s, the level of poverty in Wales has been static…with 23% of the population living in poverty.’

In other areas of the UK with high poverty, the report said: like north-east England, the level of poverty has fallen more than in Wales over the same period.’

This relative poverty figure has continued, and absolute poverty is also higher than the other UK nations.

After spending £0.5 billion, in fact, on the Welsh Government’s lead tackling poverty programme Communities First, misapplying the findings of the 2009 Wales Audit Office report on Communities First, and dismissing the recommendations in the Wales Council for Voluntary Action report ‘Communities First—A Way Forward’, at the start of the fourth Assembly, this communities Secretary told the Equality, Local Government and Communities Committee last month that the programme would not be replaced, that the record of its work in Wales’s most deprived areas had been mixed, and that the figures aren’t moving.

In contrast, as the deep place study in Tredegar found, the community empowerment agenda has been increasingly framed within the co-production approach’.

Governance for resilient and sustainable places should seek to engage local citizens, they said, requiring a very different perspective from the normal approach to power and community level, and dependent on a willing and open ability to share power and work for common objectives.

Oxfam Cymru has specifically called on the Welsh Government to embed the sustainable livelihoods approach in all policy and service delivery in Wales, helping people identify their own strengths in order to tackle the root problem preventing them and their communities from reaching their potential. This is what we should have been doing 10 years ago. As the Bevan Foundation states, if people feel that policies are imposed on them, the policies don’t work, and a new programme should be produced with communities, not directed top-down. Local area co-ordination in Derby, referred to before, working to people’s strengths and aspirations, drove collaboration between local people, families, communities and organisations, building on the hugely successful model in Australia.